"Combat the Menace!"

The placard on the counter of the Manhattan music store of Carl Fischer, Inc. was modest enough in size, but the slogan it bore was a call to arms. "COMBAT THE MENACE!" it read. "GET YOUR LUDWIG BUTTON.'' The menace: none other than Rock 'n' Roller Elvis Presley. The Ludwig: a composer with the last name of Beethoven. Last week Ludwig van Beethoven was the center of one of the fastest-growing fan clubs in the nation.

The National I Like Ludwig Club began only four weeks ago when two Yale-men, Edmund Leites, 17, of Manhattan, and Howard Richards, 18, of Redlands, Calif., became alarmed at the number of "I Like Elvis" buttons they saw while in Manhattan on holiday. The boys went into a huddle with one of Leites' former classmates at the New York High School of Music and Art, decided to start a counterrevolution in the musical taste of U.S. teenagers. Leites scraped together $45, got i.ooo "I Like Ludwig" buttons made up within two days. At first the boys thought their little scheme might never get off the ground, but when they put their buttons up for sale (15-c- each) at the High School of Music and Art, all 1,000 were gone in a matter of hours.

Back at Yale, Leites and Richards started sending out the word to other colleges and universities. Soon they had a national headquarters in Manhattan with a staff of four, and they themselves had to hire three fellow students to help with their mail. By last week the club had 20,000 members on 100 different campuses across the U.S.

Just what the members do, aside from sporting their buttons, Leites and Richards do not know. But the boys are now planning to set up a West Coast headquarters, hope to make enough money from button sales to finance a few music scholarships. Though some Elvis fans have protested ("You'll have to put sideburns on Ludwig before I'll like him"), the movement seems to be gaining every day. Dozens of Yale professors wear Ludwig buttons. Violinist Isaac Stern bought 200, used two of them in Philadelphia to decorate Conductor Eugene Ormandy and Violinist Zino Francescatti. And last week a TIME reporter who interviewed famed Cellist Pablo Casals (see Music) wired from Puerto Rico: "[He] came out in a white sports shirt open at the throat, brown slacks and brown shoes. On the front of his shirt he had a campaign-type black-and-white button with a picture of Beethoven on it and the words, 'I Like Ludwig.'"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.