Harvard Hoax

Last March a Harvard undergraduate who signed himself "R. P. L., Secretary of the Lowell House Committee" sat down and wrote a letter to President Roosevelt. He wanted to know if the President would allow him to name the bells in Lowell House tower the "Roosevelt Carillon." The President dictated a letter of acceptance to the house master of Lowell House, his old friend and former teacher Dr. Julian Lowell Coolidge, to which Professor Coolidge replied: "Dear Franklin: "Your nice letter of March twentieth perturbed me greatly, the one clear point being that I must write you a letter of humble apology. The fact is, you have been made a victim of what the French call 'a mystification,' in other words a piece of undergraduate pleasantry. "There is no R. P. L. in Harvard University. . . . ". . . I have naturally attributed your present success to the mathematics you learned from me 35 years back. . . ." The President replied: "I am not in the least perturbed about the chime of bells because strictly between ourselves, I should much prefer to have a puppy dog or a baby named after me than one of those carillon effects that is never quite in tune and which goes off at all hours of the day and night! At least one can give paregoric to a puppy or a baby. "Referring to the mathematics days, do you remember your first day's class at Groton? You stood up at the blackboard--announced to the class that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points--and then tried to draw one. All I can say is that I, too, have never been able to draw a straight line. I am sure you shared my joy when Einstein proved that there ain't no such thing as a straight line."

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