Egg in your Beer

Another Charles River social season closed last Saturday evening, as seventy or so hardy regulars watched the finish of the Cornell-Harvard lightweight crew race in front of Dunster house.

It might have been expected that they would feel out of place nearly a mile upstream from their usual habitat, the M.I.T. basin, but, after all, the only thing necessary to make crew tolerable is a six-pack, and it probably passed unnoticed.

As always, there were class distinctions among the followers of the sport. They fell into the three customary divisions; aristocracy, bourgeoisie, and proletariat.

The aristocracy viewed the events from the Charles River equivalent of a royal yacht. Passing from deck to deck amidst the ruins of a decayed knight-errantry, they exhorted and condemned at socially acceptable occasions.

Of course, the nobility occasionally gets a better angle on the proceedings by watching from the river itself, punishment inflicted upon unruly squares or mistresses for inadequate or extreme enthusiasm.

The bourgeois leads a somewhat more rugged existence. Huddied against the bank, grittily withstanding the force of a cold wind of near-gale proportions, they seek entertainment after a week's labor in Lamont or Widener.

For twenty-seven minutes they imbibe and renew acquaintances, and then stand out shout for three minutes: "Go, Crimson," or some other suitably other-directed remark. Then they all sit down and start asking each other who won,. for the angle of the finish line makes surveying tools and a slide rule necessary for these spectators to guess the winter.

The next twenty-seven minutes proceed much like the first, except that remarks like "Whadja think they were rowin 'at?" replace discussions of Crane Brinton and similar workaday topics among the shopkeepers.

The proletariat, meanwhile, are they who fancy that without themselves the show could not go on. They are the coaches, managers, camp-followers, and newspaper writers. Perhaps of all these the manager has the most useful task, for he drives the launch, while the coach looks at an odd stop-watch and mutters, and the camp-followers just giggle or shriek, according to their personality.

To the newspaperman is reserved, of course, the important assignment of this mass-media age, to tell the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy what passed before their alcoholically befogged eyes. It practically goes without saying that to this end, the ultimate of his art, the scribe must remain cold sober.

The viewpoint of the proletariat is, surprisingly, the best of the three, as far as angle of sight and proximately to both shells and spray are concerned. The one ground rule covering where the launch may go is that it must stay fat enough back so as not to slosh up the river for any eight. Of course, the rate at which some trailing shells went this year put the proletariat pretty well out of sight of the race.

All things considered, the proletariat have the best of it. Nothing can really top lurching about in a motorboat while some M.I.T. freshman at the helm tries to disprove all manufacturer's claims and show that the boat will tip, with the clear spray of the Charles in the face, and a faulty stopwatch in the hand.