Arriving at Harvard, Updike did comp the Lampoon, contributing a steady stream of cartoons, comic poems, and sketches and rising quickly through the ranks of editorship. By the beginning of 1953, after bearing the titles “Narthex” and “Ibis,” Updike was elected the publication’s president.

The publication didn’t garner too favorable a response from other undergraduates under Updike’s aegis—“the magazine did not appeal as highly as in the past to the students,” the class yearbook reported—but every page reflected Updike’s exacting standards.

“As an editor, John was very demanding,” remembers G. Wesley Johnson Jr. ’55-57. “Sometimes the social organization got in the way of actually getting the magazine out.”

From the time Updike joined the editorial board, scarcely an issue went to press that was not introduced by a “JHU”-signed rhyme. His skills, Limpert said, coincided perfectly with the humor magazine’s needs.

“John wrote wonderful prose, wonderful poetry, and he also was a wonderful cartoonist,” he says. “He did them all with equal facility.”

He says Updike’s Lampoon colleagues assumed he was destined for great things.

“There was never even any question that he would achieve the success that he has achieved,” he said. “Everybody who worked with him knew.”

According to Johnson, the respect Updike won through his work compensated for what might otherwise have been social awkwardness.

“John was slightly ill at ease with some of the people at the Lampoon who, let’s face it, were from more privileged backgrounds,” he explains.

Updike ruled over the Lampoon Castle during an eventful period, thanks to a series of pranks originating both inside and outside the building. In one case, the president and his colleagues succeeded in “kidnapping” the Mass.

governor by leading him to the Lampoon instead of to the Young Democrats reception where he was supposed to speak.

“Updike did a wonderful job in hosing this thing and asking he governor questions,” Johnson says. The politico spent half an hour speaking to the Lampoon editors before he realized that he had been fooled.

Updike also contended with a series of exploits by waggish Crimson editors that culminated in the nighttime theft of the Lampoon’s prized ibis statue from atop the building [See full story, p. 3].

Updike’s staff retaliated by kidnapping The Crimson’s president and managing editor and demanding back the copper bird as ransom. Eventually he released the newspaper leaders, who, instead of returning the ibis, presented it to the USSR’s deputy representative to the United Nations as a peace offering.

Updike didn’t only take on The Crimson, though. One 1953 rhyme he penned for the magazine begins, “Old Advocate, once you were famous and staid, / But Now, both obscene and sub-standard; / For thus you are called by printers appalled, / Who never should bother to read what they’re paid / To print: we say you are slandered.”