No Friendless Freshman He, Rinehart Left Legend Behind

Early one of these mornings, when the last few lights are going out in the windows of the Yard dorms, a parting, unenthusiastic "Rinehart" will break the deep quiet of the hour, calling up a thin, tragic figure who in 1900 reportedly stood below his window and shouted up to an empty room.

John Bryce Gordon Rinehart passed into legend last Saturday morning in Waynesburg, Pa., at the age of 77. Five decades of Harvard men, when they heard the news, muttered a parting tribute to a man who lived 52 years with a terrible myth clouding his life. The myth is untrue. Rinehart did have friends.

The earliest record of J. B. G. Rinehart in the University comes from 1899. He registered then in the Law School after having graduated from Waynesburg College the proceeding spring. Nothing more is known until one night in June of 1900, when the cry 'Rinehart' first reverberated through the Yard.

According to the myth, familiar throughout the world, Rinehart was the true incarnation of pathos. He had no friends. Rinehart suffered, quite reasonably, from his unpopularity, so, to bolster his social status, he called up to his room, "Rinehart, oh Rinehart," then ran back up, flung open the window, and answered himself with a cheery "Yes?"

That is the myth of Rinehart. For 36 years the man John Rinehart did nothing to clear his name. Then finally, in 1936, he returned to the University as guest speaker at the tercentenary to present his own defense.

The True Story

Rinehart told his audience that one evening, when he had remained deaf to the cries of his friends on the path below his room, in Grays, another friend of his, Frank Simmonds, took up the cry from Matthews.

"Almost immediately," Rinehart said, "the Yard became a bedlam as the shouts rose into a chant, and the cry caught the fancy of the undergraduates who had been wearied by examinations and were wanting some way to relieve the precommencement tension." But John Rinehart spoke too late. He only added his version, which was officially recorded as truth in Samuel Eliot Morison's "Three Centuries of Harvard," to the original and more dramatic story.

If John Rinehart was embittered by the apparent immortality of the 'Rinehart myth,' or grieved by the number of riots and impounded bursars, cards which his name inspired, perhaps he might have felt happier when the account of a certain graduate reached this country from Cairo, Egypt. The graduate reported that he was set upon by beggars near Sheapard's Hotel, in the center of the city, and in his predicament shouted out "Rinehart." Five Harvard men ran from the hotel and drove off his attackers.

"Paging Mr. R"

Save for that incident and the innocuous story of a group of Harvard men in Singapore who habitually greeted each other with the cries of "Rinehart," the legacy of John Rinehart revolves around the breaking of the general peace and quiet in many varied places.

Apart from the Yard, which has mothered a majority of the Rinehart disturbances, Grand Central Station was at one time affiliated with the cry, and one Yale-game day a riot broke out in the Taft Hotel in New Haven when a certain Mr. Rinehart was paged by a bellboy.

During the thirties the Yard riots, nursed along with a liberal use of the cry, reached a new level of comic violence, and the police were often pinpointed with an assortment of water bombs, eggs, and soft fruit.

The most severe of recent Rinehart riots was in 1950, in the first day, of the spring exam period, when a freshman called up to a room in Stoughton Hall occupied by Nicholas Reinhardt, '53. The call was audible enough to produce a chorus of response, and the riot was on.

Panty Riot

After first congregating in front of John Harvard's statue, (see cut) the crowd moved towards President Conant's house. One solitary proctor, standing on the steps of Widener, made a heroic and successful effort to stop the march. After further miling around, the cry of "on to Radcliffe" was sung out, and the mob moved to the Annex. One hour later, after the police had driven around the Radcliffe quad collecting bursar's cards, the riot finally broke up.

Last spring, as in the past, University Hall decreed the death of further rioting at the University. Perhaps the requiem to John B. G. Rinehart will be a quiet one, as is fitting, but the myth of the pathetic student calling to himself, incorrect as it is, will probably endure as long as the University itself.