CRIMSON EXTRA ACCORDING TO PRECEDENT WILL MEET RETURNING HORDES AT BRIDGE

When this afternoon old University graduates returning from Soldiers Field are met by newsboys selling the "Dartmouth extra" of the CRIMSON, they may be reminded of the time when the first extra edition of a Harvard paper appeared.

It was not the CRIMSON that got out this extra, but its forerunner in the daily field, the Harvard Daily Herald. At that time, 1882, the CRIMSON, which had started ten years before, under the name of the Harvard Magenta, was a weekly. A year later it was to combine with the Herald and become a daily.

The Echo Preceded the Herald

The Daily Herald, founded in 1882, was the second daily newspaper in the University. A small sheet called the Echo had started three years before, but failed quickly, when the Herald was brought into the field. In the first year of its existence the Herald did many things that advertised it all over the country. The city dailies gave it credit for getting out "extras" in the quickest time ever known in the newspaper world.

The Herald broke all records by having an eight-page extra, containing a full report of the winter athletic games, running off the press in one-half minute after the games were over.

Copy Sent from Gymnasium

"The copy," writes one of the Herald editors in a history of the CRIMSON, "was written in the gymnasium as the games progressed, and sent to the office by half a dozen messenger boys. It was put in type as fast as received. The last event was the tug-of-war, lasting several minutes. Before this was finished, a full report of all preceding events was set up.

"The line: 'The tug-of-war was won by '8 was already in type. The winning class was signalled across the Yard, the one piece of type was dropped into the form, and the press was started. The extras were in the hands of the students as they came across the yard."

Herald Becomes Herald-Crimson

After this enterprising journal merged with the CRIMSON, Harvard was represented by a daily entitled first. The Herald-Crimson and then the Daily Crimson. When, in 1891, the name was changed to its present form, the editors followed their predecessors' example, and the CRIMSON'S first extra was soon published.

The occasion was the baseball game with Princeton, played at Holmes Field on May 30, 1892. An editor of that day writes:

"E. L. Hunt '93, our business manager, was at the bottom of it. He arranged with Wheeler, who then ran a printing press at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Linden Street, for the use of his press. Mac and Ed (McCarter and Kneeland, for 33 years in charge of printing the CRIMSON) were there on the job to set type.

"The game was on Holmes Field, and perched up on the top row of the bleachers were Frederick Winsor '93, and Maynard Ladd '94, to write up the game. But new to connect Winsor and Ladd with Mac and Ed? Again Hunt, overcomer of obstacles, came through with one of his schemes. He corralled a lot of boys with bicycles, and as fast as Winsor and Ladd would get a bunch of copy written, they would wrap it around a stone and drop it over the bleachers to one of the young bicyclists waiting below, and away it would go across the Yard and into the waiting hands of Mac and Ed at Wheeler's.

Extras Met Crowd in Yard

"The last bit of copy was carried by a plucky little beggar, who rode as he had never ridden before, and was quite done out when he fell off his wheel as he delivered his copy. But he had done his bit well, and the crowd, coming from the game, was met in the Yard with cries of 'Full account of the game! CRIMSON extra!'"

The bicycle system was essential as there were no telephones, and it worked. Over 1400 copies were sold by the newsboys who reached the Square just four minutes and 54 seconds after the game ended.

Extras Become Features

The next year "sport extras" became a regular feature of the CRIMSON. After the Yale game at Springfield, a football "extra" appeared in Cambridge 20 seconds after the last dispatch was received.

When in 1897 the CRIMSON faced hot competition from the News, a lively daily which for two years gave the editors of the older paper many an anxious moment, the importance of the "extras" was doubled. On one occasion, when the University eleven was away from home playing Pennsylvania, the CRIMSON arranged, at a considerable expense, for a private telephone wire direct from the field. The enterprising and unscrupulous News editors tapped the wire, and great was the consternation of the CRIMSON to find their "extra" almost immediately followed by an identical issue of the News.

Crimson Beats Boston Papers

However, the CRIMSON soon was too much for its energetic competitor, and had the field of "extras" to itself in Cambridge. But competition from the Boston papers is ever present, and after the big games the CRIMSON "extra" is rushed off the press as quickly as possible, so that the copies reach the returning spectators as they cross the Larz Anderson bridge. Today's "extra" will be the first full account of the game to be on sale.

Last year when the CRIMSON published its "extra" on the day of the Princeton game, it was only "the fault of that Princeton guy (Beattle, who ran for a touchdown a minute before the game ended) that we didn't start to run the copies off one second after the game ended," as one of the compositors declared. As it was, only 34 seconds were needed.

Perhaps the most famous of the CRIMSON'S "extras" was published in 1909, when President Eliot resigned. This was a gigantic "scoop" engineered entirely by the President of the CRIMSON, A. G. Cable '09, and the Managing Editor. The news was put into the hands of the public at noon when newsboys ran through the Square proclaiming that President Eliot's 40-year term had ended. The CRIMSON had scooped the world: