Crimson Will Open Competitions This Week

Southwest of Cambridge, candidates for student organization are called "heelers." The Crimson, like other local undergraduate groups, has traditionally viewed its prospective members in a considerably different light.

When the doors are opened to candidates at 14 Plympton Street tomorrow and Friday nights, eager (or just thirsty) freshmen and sophomores will be introduced both to an institution which has intruded daily into their undergraduate lives, and hopefully, to a rewarding phase of their College careers.

Even those who have maintained membership on a CRIMSON board throughout their undergraduate years agree that their six to eight weeks as candidates were among the most valuable they spent in Cambridge. After-dinner pool upstairs in the Union or demi-taste in the House common room may have to be dropped for the duration of this intensive training period, but academic work need not suffer.

CRIMSON competitions require many hours each week: pounding the sidewalk looking for news stories or advertising sales or picture possibilities, and more hours translating their materials into print. But the end result, when viewed in print the next morning, is a concrete and universally satisfying one.

No candidate was ever accused of describing his competition, as "leisurely," especially in its later stages; but the CRIMSON, like all under-graduate activities, has been forced to meet the competition posed by Lamont, and the rigorous activity of the "Good Old Days" no longer necessitates satisfaction with a "Gentleman's C."

Franklin D. Roosevelt '04 went out for the CRIMSON in 1900, in the days when "The task was heavy, the drain on the candidate's thought and time exhausting. The candidates was everywhere; he was 'the arrow that flieth by day, and pestilence that walketh in darkness,'" according to W. R. Bowie, the managing editor at the time. F.D.R.'s competition opened in October, and he was finally elected in June after reporting that his uncle, Vice-President Theodore Roosevelt, would lecture in Lowell's Gov. 1 course.

Only five years ago, candidates spent most of every evening at 14 Plympton writing the news they had spent their afternoons gathering. The proportion of candidates finally elected was astonishingly small. A glance at today's masthead will show, however, that the number of editors has shrunk; and as a result opportunities for election are now greater than ever before.

The candidate who shows sufficient interest in the early stages of the competitions, to pass necessary tests on from is assigned a tutor--a veteran editor who assists with analysis of work compiled and guides the prospect through his competition. Each board appoints a chairman to oversee the work of the tutor, confer regularly with candidates on their progress, and pass judgement at intervals.

Before election, candidates perform every function that might conceivablyably by expected of them after election as editors. Working under careful and continual guidance, they attain the proficiency necessary to produce what one rival has called "the best college newspaper in the United States.