Girls! Girls! Girls!

Who's that knocking at my door? Cried the fair young maiden.

Within three days last week, both Boston and New Haven were treated to a revival of a U.S. college phenomenon which used to occur with seasonal regularity back before World War II cast a sobering influence upon campus life: the spring riot.

The uproar at Yale began when a Good Humor man and an ice-cream vendor known as a Humpty-Dumpty man began squabbling over a choice parking place. A cop intervened, and students by the hundreds streamed into the street, where they spent two hours shooting firecrackers, waving banners, letting the air out of tires, and jeering at the cops.

The Harvard brawl took place after 1,500 students, gathered in Harvard Square to nominate Pogo, the comic-strip opossum, for President of the U.S., stayed on to battle the unsympathetic Cambridge cops for four hours. Both riots served chiefly to dramatize a newer and more outlandish form of campus disturbance which took form March 20, when a mob of University of Michigan males suddenly headed for the women's dormitories to steal and brandish girls' underwear.

Since the "pantie riot" at Ann Arbor, no U.S. coed has been sure that she would not be victimized by one. So far, pantie riots have broken out on at least 16 U.S. campuses. Most of them followed a set pattern. First came the rumble of the approaching male mob, a signal which sent every red-blooded girl running to a window. Then came an exchange of hoots, jeers, cries and threats between street and dormitory, the indignant protests of a faculty member, the struggle with hastily summoned cops. Then came the invasion, the slamming of doors, the thump of feet, the snatching of panties and brassieres (usually laid out handily in advance).

Last week "pantie riots" seemed to be bursting out faster than ever. Three thousand students at the University of Miami battered down a heavy wire fence, threw tomatoes and oranges at the cops, invaded ten women's dormitories and got away with armloads of lingerie. Shrieked the girls: "Come on up!" In upper Manhattan, a mob of Columbia University students filled the street below Barnard College dormitories, milled about for hours while the girls waved panties from their windows.

At week's end authorities at hundreds of U.S. colleges had begun to react almost like early settlers anticipating an Indian attack. The director of women's residence halls at Indiana University hopefully set out a barrelful of female undergarments in the hope that males would help themselves and go home quietly. Psychiatrists had a field day attempting to explain the phenomenon. But Zoologist Alfred (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male) Kinsey remained calm: "All animals," said he, "play around."

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