"First Blood"

Tumbling out of their classrooms and onto their campus ashiver with excitement one day last week went all the 500 boys and girls of Los Angeles Junior College. The college faculty gathered to watch from a porch. Facing each other on the grass stood sturdy, curly-headed Student Robert Cousineau and wiry Student Harold Bauer, each stripped to the waist and each armed with a sword. As the excited audience chattered and peered, cameramen recorded the scene and newshawks watched intently. With full faculty approval, a duel was about to be fought. When Students Cousineau and Bauer finished posing, they put on fencing masks, but left the tips of their weapons exposed. Captain Fred Schwankovsky of the college fencing team, stepping up to referee, grimly explained that they would use not fencing foils but regulation French epees. As cameras whirred and co-eds squealed, the two boys went into earnest action, lunging, slashing, parrying, feinting, with danger flashing at the needle-points of their weapons. After many lively passages, Student Cousineau made a long, savage thrust and from Student Bauer's arm spurted a red jet of real blood. "Touche!" cried the referee and the duel was over.

Moving spirit of this extraordinary performance, which was claimed to have drawn "the first blood ever intentionally shed by U. S. college fencers," was Los Angeles Junior's lively Fencing Coach John Tatum, who exulted: "We have been trying to arrange an affair like this for three years to popularize fencing." The college publicity department had timed it to coincide with a campus dance. Nothing was at stake except Student Bauer's desire for the No. 2 rating on the fencing team, which Student Cousineau enjoyed by virtue of his showing in the Pacific Coast fencing tournament last month. Nursing a three-inch cut, Fencer Bauer had to content himself with the No. 3 rating.

At Coach Tatum's implication that fencing is not a sufficiently exciting sport without bloodshed, other college fencing instructors were quick to protest. Snapped Yale's veteran Robert Grasson: "Very foolish." Echoed Harvard's Rene Peroy: "Foolish and unsafe." More impassive was George Santelli, saber coach of the 1936 U. S. Olympic team. Shrugged he: "To approve . . . would be to approve the possibility that someone might be killed, so I do not approve."

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