University Police Chief Alvin G. Randall brought his 30 officers out in full force. Six city police wagons stood by and hauled off riot participants as they were arrested.

Some students cheered when arrests were made but many jeered at the police. One officer later said he had nearly been pushed in front of a bus.

City Councillor Edward A. Sullivan was slapped in the face by one of the rioters, whom he promptly arrested with the help of a Cambridge police officer.

"We don't mind the boys having their fun," Sullivan said later, "but when they get malicious, it's going too far."

The students "would be clubbed if they tried it in New Haven," he said, demanding that the University pay for damage to Cambridge property.

The riot made huge headlines in Boston-area newspapers and the news spread across New England on the Associated Press wires.

College administrators saw little humor in the two riots within a week's time. The Ad Board met the following weekend to dole out punishments. They expelled two, put 13 on probation and threatened an even more drastic response to future disruptions.

"One of the most regrettable aspects of the affair before the Yale game," the board said in a statement, "was the completely unjustified jeering of the police. It doesn't take much courage to jeer a policeman from the relative safety of a mob."

Gradually, during the years the Class of 1951 spent at the College, a carefree atmosphere returned, along with a school spirit that one local newspaper had considered "dead as the pig in a pigskin."

In 1947, Boston University students had painted a crimson mustache on the statue of John Harvard and burned the letters "BU" into the Harvard Stadium gridiron. Harvard students had returned the favor with H's drawn all over the BU stadium.

Two years later, a battle of the Square had been fought before a Harvard-Princeton game between police and a mob, which stopped traffic and deflated a patrol car's tires.

But not since the 1930s, noted approving commentators, had the College seen such a rollicking good football riot as the one that Friday night in November 1950.

From World War to World Mobilization

The post-war transformation of Harvard affected the College in many small ways. Food was now served mess-style in round, tin trays. In the fall of 1947, the College observed meatless Tuesdays and egg- and poultry-less Thursdays in response to President Harry Truman's nation-wide call to conserve food for European aid.

More serious educational consequences followed from the war, notably packed lecture halls and residences so crowded and insufficient that as late as 1947 some students who lived nearby the College were required to commute rather than live in dorms or Houses.