Rally on Widener Steps Ends Pre-Game Hoopla

By noon yesterday Harvard had stopped looking like Harvard and began to look like any other college on the Big Game weekend. Pretty girls in red dresses appeared in the Yard and the Houses, and bottles replaced notebooks.

A couple of hours later the Square was quiet again, except for a few apple-checked young men arriving from Yale, but Soldier's Field was having its biggest afternoon of the season. The pretty girls and the undergraduates (with and without bottles) mingled with players, players' families, and Yalies along the sidelines of the dozen-odd football and soccer games. When the Crimson started piling up victories, football fever began to take hold.

Varsity Practice

But inside the stadium itself the varsity worked out doggedly and quietly before 57,000 empty seats, oblivious of the cheers and yells outside. It was the same routine the squad had run through every Friday afternoon all season, and only the presence of a few more newsmen and a few more workers on the roof denoted the biggest of all days ahead.

Practice ended just as the black clouds started spitting the first few drops of rain, but that didn't deter most of the crowd from moving back across the river to the rally, which followed its traditional path in reverse, starting at Eliot House, winding up on the steps of Widener, and picking up about 1,500 undergraduates on the way.

Valpey Speech

The steps of the greatest college library in the world proved to be a perfect sounding-board for the music of the band and the cheers of the crowd, and, thanks to a temporary microphone system, even the speeches were audible. Head Coach Art Valpey spoke first, and while he "felt it would be inhospitable to say much about tomorrow's game," he assured the crowd that "they could be proud of the team."

Two ex-captains followed Valpey. Vince Moravee, captain of last year's team and part-time coach this season, pointed to the Freshman and Jayvee games as an indication of things to come, while Cleo O'Donnell addressed his remarks to a small but extroverted group of Elis who were singing bravely but unnoticed at the edge of the crowd. "I think they should come out of the cover of darkness," O'Donnell said, "because they certainly won't have much to cheer about tomorrow."

An occasional volley of fire-crackers punctuated the rally, but otherwise the event was entirely peaceful as far as the keepers of law and order were concerned. It was impossible to determine whether Harvard or Yale students threw the firecrackers.

The rally ended with the singing of Fair Harvard and the crowds disappeared into the rainy darkness to dry their feet and wet their whistles.