Sixty Students Clean Roxbury Walls

About 60 Harvard and Radcliffe students scrubbed walls and mopped floors in Roxbury yesterday as their contribution to the Vietnam Moratorium.

Jeff Rosen '70, a spokesman for the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, said the purpose of the community action was to emphasize urban priorities that are being overlooked because of the war.

Enthusiasm at Orchard Park

A group of 35 volunteers from Harvard, Radcliffe. Wellesley, M. I. T., and Newton Junior College received enthusiastic response from the tenants of the Orchard Park Housing Project in Roxbury.

Another group helped to rehabilitate three homes belonging to the South End Tenants Council, a predominantly black group that controls 30 housing units formerly owned by a slum landlord.

Other students did general maintenance work at the newly-founded Elma Lewis Playhouse in Roxbury.

"We're washing walls while the world is going to hell," said Peter Walsh '64, director of Boston's Division of Urban Volunteers.

Most Orchard Park tenants were amazed by the influx of volunteers, and expressed gratitude to them. Many youngsters living in the project-armed with scrubbrushes and ammonia-joined the student workers.

By 4 p.m., one woman tenant claimed that "this looks like a different place altogether. You kids are just great."

Carl Willis, manager of Orchard Park, said he had been convinced by the students of the relationship between community action and the Vietnam War.

"It was a beautiful, wonderful, wonderful job." he said. "Here we are scratching for pennies trying to give Americans a decent place to live in, and we're spend a billion dollars a week in Vietnam. That's what the protest is involved with. Not just students, but everybody's upset."