The Rites of Spring

With the raucous wail of an air-raid siren, spring came all of a sudden last week to Princeton, NJ. Lights flickered off in dormitory windows, and students poured outdoors into the practice blackout. Tentatively, someone touched off a few firecrackers. "We want Joe Sugar!" chanted a few campus politicians as they tried to turn the excitement into a rally for Joseph A. Sugar of Bexley, Ohio, Ivy Club member and candidate for president of the senior class.

Shoes & Glass. Studious Joe Sugar, busy at his homework chores in the quiet of the library basement, did not show up. But the crowd grew, moved on to Blair Arch, a traditional rallying point, and spilled into the streets of the town. More than 1,000 strong, it yelled its way down Nassau Street, exploded a few more firecrackers, sent a task force to storm the Garden Theatre and broke up the show. By the time the mob reached Hulit's shoe-store, it had been joined by Tad D. Hammond, who is as prominent in his own way as the studious Joe Sugar.

Ex-Freshman Hammond, 20, had been suspended in February for flying his Piper Super Cruiser without school authorization to a Mount Holyoke College dance. (After a bit of careless navigation, he overshot the dance and crashed in a New Hampshire cornfield.) More misadventures with an unauthorized car, including a trip to Florida, led to his expulsion. Only a few days before the riot, he had buzzed the campus in his plane and sprinkled it with empty beer cans.

Now Hammond and William Wright Jr., another freshman, got into a scuffle with some proctors and town cops. Wright and one of the cops crashed through

Hulit's window. While the mob moved on to new adventures, the battlers untangled themselves from shoes and glass and retired to Princeton Hospital for repairs.

Girls & Fines. Split into small groups, the students burst in on another movie and disrupted the show. Some marched on the railroad station, shoved lustily at a car or two and managed to toot a train whistle before they moved on. Others made loud threats to spring Hammond and Wright, who had been locked up at Borough Hall. Toward midnight, the storm center of the riot swirled through town, blew over every garbage can in sight, then settled on Westminster Choir College a mile away.

"We want girls!" some of the boys yowled, "we want sex!" "We want panties!" screamed the rest. Not quite in the spirit of things, the girls threw shower curtains and pillows from the windows.

At 12:30 a.m. Princeton's Dean Francis R. B. Godolphin caught up with the crowd and read the riot act. Any man not back in his dormitory in two minutes, said the dean, would get a week's suspension. In two minutes flat the riot was over.

While the town added up the damage and prepared its bill (even for the cost of garbage removal), Princeton undergraduates got a good spring cleaning. Hammond got a $200 fine and a two-month suspended jail sentence. Wright, despite his protested innocence, drew a $100 fine. The university suspended nine students, expelled one, threatened to call others to trial.

Other colleges also suffered a rowdy touch of spring:

P:Despite a timely warning from President Gilbert F. White, who told them to stay out of trouble or "rot in jail," Haverford students invaded the neighboring Bryn Mawr campus. Failing to tear down decorated poles set up for Bryn Mawr's May Day celebration, the Haverfordmen poured gasoline on the lawn and ignited it to form a pretty, blazing H. After a night of rotting in jail, they were set free. "It was just spring fever," said the tolerant Merion, Pa. justice of the peace.

P:Nearby, at Swarthmore College, 75 freshman coeds serenaded a boys' dormitory. The lads responded by dousing the girls with water. A few of the girls even managed to get pulled into the boys' shower, from which late bathers were forced to beat a hasty retreat. Other girls "were dragged across the campus, given long and generous "mudpack" treatments at convenient puddles. Swarthmore police were interested but inactive spectators.

P:At Dartmouth, nine students stood by, watching with idle curiosity, while a couple of freshmen fed an eight-year-old boy playing around their dormitory enough applejack and rye whisky to get him drunk. Editorialized the Dartmouth paper: "It is the job of every man on the campus to give battle to that fatuous stereotype of the hard-drinking, hard-fighting, hard-cursing Dartmouth man."

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