Salute to Times Past: The Lampoon lbis

WHAT tales of sleuth and intrigue, crime and espionage once lurked the quiet streets of Cambridge. Now forgotten, vestigially commemmorated by half-hearted panty-raids and defiant cross-walk-ins, the grand days of Harvard pranks seem relegated to history along with the Gold Coast.

And as the Gold Coast is to the Gold Coast Valeteria, so the Harvard prank of yesterday is to the prank of today. The finely wrought practical joke of the past had the excitement of a shaving cream fight, the sophisticated delicacy of a neurosurgical operation, the cold reality of J. Edgar Hoover breathing down its neck, and usually a large dose of University Hall. The only remaining tradition in the hoax-and-dagger line is the stealing of the Lampoon lbis from its perch atop the Lampoon building.

Yet at least once this year, the lbis was treated as ignominiously as a common pigeon, stolen from the 'Poonies only to be casually reclaimed in broad daylight, without a single shot being fired, as it sat, unguarded, in the bourgeois sedan in a Plympton Street parking lot. Though amazingly few remember it, there was a time, not long ago, when lives hung on such events and kidnappings, international politics, and bloody threats would be in the air when the lbis flapped its wings.

The lbis, formally known as Threskiornis aethiopica, was aprocryphally donated to the Lampoon by William Randolph Hearst in 1901, when the new Lampoon building was completed. Since its first happy years with the 'Poonies, the lbis, sometimes known as Threskie, has had several leaves of absence, many of them accountable to a century-long feud between the Harvard Crimson and the Harvard Lampoon. It has been stolen twice this year already, and has just returned to its perch. Now Lampoon members are threatening a 125-volt battery to fry anyone who gets playful with their pet in the future.

It will not stop then, I am sure, for frying is only one of the penalties that have been risked for the lbis. In 1953, for example, during the tense negotiations between Americans and Korean Communists over the return of American war prisoners, the lbis flew into the national Cold War and the Lampoon rescued it only after high-level embarrassment. When the bird disappeared the Crimson was immediately suspect. The same day, April 26, Managing Editor George S. Abrams '54 and President Michael Maccoby '54 diappeared, and the Crimson was informed by anonymous phone call that they would not be returned until the lbis flew back to Freedom Square. A full board of the Crimson editors convened that evening and unanimously elected the lbis as president of the newspaper in the absence of the not notably popular Maccoby. John H. Updike '54, president of the Lampoon, set Cambridge on its ear by announcing shortly there after that 'No Crimson editor can rest safe in his bed. We promise in a week to depopulate Cambridge totally of this unfortunate element."

THE LAMPOON was ultimately forced to release the two Crimson editors in the face of serious Federal charges, involving kidnapping invividuals and then transporting them across state lines. The lbis however was not yet returned.

Maccoby and Abrams, released from their place of imprisonment in upstate New York, did not return directly to Cambridge. Instead they went to the headquarters of the Russian delegation to the U.N. at 680 Park Ave. in New York. They presented the lbis to the Russians on behalf of the Lampoon in hopes that the bird would be able to reside on top of one of the spires of Moscow University in the Kremlin. In a rare press conference, Semyon K. Tsarapkin, Deputy Representative of the U.S.S.R. to the U.N., accepted the lbis as a symbol of good-will between the students of Russia and the United States.

By April 22, despite a college-wide petition urging the Lampoon to let the Russians keep the bird, and nation-wide press-coverage, the Lampoon announced that arrangements were almost completed to reclaim the bird. According to United Press International, John Goetlet, "handsome heir to one of New York's greatest real estate fortunes and treasurer of the Harvard Lampoon, spent a half hour explaining the subtleties of American college humour to Tsarapkin in his Park Avenue Headquarters. Asked by reporters to smile he replied, 'I am unsmiling.'"

The Lampoon has long been master of kidnapping, though the ransom is not always so high. In what may have been the first instance of lbis stealing, in 1941, five Crimson editors were bound, gagged, and buried in copies of their own newspaper. Coles Phinizy, president of the Lampoon, displayed Mafia-like toughness declaring, "The lbis is worth 150 dollars, and those guys aren't worth 20 dollars apiece. They'll get nothing but dried toast and an occasional drink of water until we do get it back." They got it back.

It was solen again in 1946, and again received national press coverage as it turned up on the stage of the Colonial Theater with Blackstone the magician, and again the same night with Orson Welles in a performance of magic at the Opera House.

From 1953 to 1956 the lbis had no such hair-raising ordeals but was periodically stolen by a Crimson cartoonist, David Royce, known to his contemporaries as "the human fly.' Later it was also presented to Caroline Kennedy whose family seemed to understand the nature of the gift more readily than had the Russian delegates on Park Avenue.

In 1961 the lbis disappeared again suddenly. After giving up on the Crimson, the Lampoon kidnapped the president of the Gargoyle, a rival publication, and then the president of the Mountaineering Club, whose ability to scale great heights was admired, feared, and suspected. Yet neither could give them any satisfaction and the lbis perch was left looking like a tack no one had gotten around to sitting on.

When two years went by without a peep from the lbis, a classified ad appeared in the Crimson on October 5, 1963: "IBIS. Local Bird lover seeks large metal one last seen stop building on Bow Street. Send information to Crimson Box 3447. Confidential. No questions aked."

Figuring that someone had stolen it and gotten stuck with it, the Harvard senior who placed this ad hoped that the captors of the lbis would be glad to get rid of it. He was apparently correct, for shortly thereafter a large white package, tied with heavy string was left for him at the Crimson. Yup.

Rather than hand the bird over to the Lampoon, the senior created an intricate and powerful corporation known as Find-a-Bird Inc., promising to hunt down the lbis, around the world, if the Lampoon would agree to a lavish public ceremony upon receiving it back. The senior indicated that if the Lampoon didn't comply, Find-a-Bird might be dissolved to become Melt-a-Bird. When the lbis finally was ready to be returned to the Lampoon, the required celebration was arranged, before the Dartmouth Game at Freedom Square.

Imagine it: Cahaly was fitted for a top hat and morning coat and Elsie was decked out in peasant costume. The Sheriff of Cambridge County was to open the ceremonies, and the Harvard band was to play. But at 2 a.m. the night before the Big Day, the bird disappeared from the off-campus apartment in which it was residing. No festival. Two graduate students, probably Swarthmore graduates and bitter, who lived upstairs, had casually stolen the bird. Not knowing what to do with it, they handed it over to Alfred E. Vellucci, Cambridge City Councilman, who nabbed prize television time by announcing to the Boston press that it would be presented back to the Lampoon in the Crimson offices on election eve.

The lbis, however, has far from dominated the hoaxes and scandals centering around the Lampoon building in Freedom Square, including a long history of hassles with courts and police due to charges of obscenity in their magazine, with such articles as "Desire Below the Mason-Dixon Line," a 1935 parody of Faulkner.

Among the most famous was the stealing of the Massachusetts State symbol, Boston's Sacred Cod, a large wooden fish, on April 26, 1933. According to the Boston Post of April 27, 1933, "Since 1798 until some time between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. the sacred, silent emblem of Massachusetts had held a place of honor in the state House."

THE whereabouts of the cod remained unknown for over a week while evidence piled up against Harvard culprits and eventually pointed to the Lampoon. Guards told newsmen elaborate stories of a "curly haired boy" standing near the cod, holding a large, long florist's box. 'But," one guard said, "from him came the breath of something other than lilies. It was a sort of alcoholic fragrance." The alcoholic fragrance turned to a drunken stench as the city of Boston got increasingly enraged. The Post reported angrily that "the thief was intoxicated...badly in need of a shave...wore brown clothing...had curly hair." Barber shops were combed for a sign of a curly haired boy. A long car chase in Newton finally gave the cod over to Harvard police, and no charges were pressed.

Then in 1936, another great symbol of state was threatened by the Lampoon, this time the Supreme Court. On May 8, 1936 the nation awoke to find the official flag of the U.S.S.R. flying over the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., with a copy of "Down With Capitalism," a recent issue of the Lampoon, at the base of the flagpole. Representative Tomas Blanton (D.-Tex.) literally rushed to the rostrum of the House "to warn his colleagues and the country," "suspecting that the flag might mean the signal for social revolution," according to the Boston Post

In their haste to get the insidious banner down, Washington firemen resorted to burning it off with a blow torch, before the Party could gather its forces, leaving pieces of red ash to settle around the steps of the Supreme Court.

It is somewhat ironical to note that in almost no incident were the Harvard lads penalized for their pranks. Despite the grossest of local, state, and federal misdemeanors piling up against them, the Harvard name and the sanctity of its privilege would seem to show its mark in most cases. Yet, despite recent atmosphere of flippancy towards laws and rules, it would seem that a major prohibitive factor in the pranks market lies in fear of trespassing or lawbreaking. A perfect example of this was in the elaborate 900th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings plotted by the Lampoon last year. Rich and jubilant after a tremendously successful Play boy parody, the Poonies hired elephants and specially designed bows and arrows to re-enact the great battle right here at Cambridge-on-the-Charles. All the arrangements were made amidst great excitement and relative secrecy. What stopped the warriors from their brave encounter? They were refused permission from University Hall. The apocryphal answer they were given, the word from on high, stopping them, not to speak of their elephants dead in their tracks:

"Undergraduates are not allowed to rent elephants."

Times have changed.