Beer & the Beach

In Fort Lauderdale, Fla., spring is greeted with an extra force of cops. This year, to do the welcome up properly, the lawmen set up a satellite police station squarely on the ocean beach. The fortification did not do much good: the 20,000 spring-vacationing collegians who began taking over the town two weekends ago behaved in the same sunstruck, beer-propelled way as have their predecessors for the last 20 years. That is, they grilled themselves medium-rare all day, beach-boozed all night, and blew the foam off the early hours by decanting sand sharks and alligators into local swimming pools.

Dangerous Dry Spell. No one is quite sure why the unleashed scholars establish their beachhead each year at Fort Lauderdale--an East Coast resort town of 63,000 with a perceptible percentage of retired oldsters. But ever since the town invited students to something called a "swimming forum" in 1938, they have swarmed back each year. Some motel owners are leary of the students; a room rented to two of them at sundown will be sardined with a dozen by dawn. At least one dine-and-dance-oasis proprietor has declared her roadhouse off-limits to the college crowd.

But the students who roll into town boasting of new driving endurance records --26 hours from Ohio State, 27 from Carlisle, Pa.'s Dickinson College--are too buoyant and too broke to worry about being shut out of hotspots. They require only beer and the beach. "It's not that we drink so much," one Notre Dame senior explained sudsily. "It's just that we drink all the time." Cops check identification as carefully as they can, but there were few students in the last fortnight who did not have some sort of paper asserting that they were 21. The owner of a joint called Porky's rashly advertised a bargain rate--$1.50 for all the beer a student could surround in three hours. His taps ran dry, and before a refill truck could rescue him, the offended scholars had pitched his furniture overboard. The owner kept his temper, next day hired a plane to patrol the beach with a banner advising that the dry spell would not recur.

Rite of Spring. Costumes for the revels run neither to elegance nor imagination: when they are not in bathing trunks, the boys wear deck pants, and the girls put on Bermuda shorts, usually one size too small. Not too surprisingly, little that is really calamitous happens to Fort Lauderdale or its student invaders. During his coffee break, one defender of the law was able, without looking very hard, to arrest five students for sousing in public. But last weekend, as police prepared to abandon their beach outpost until next season, their blotter listed few cases of more serious wrongdoing. The townspeople regard the invasion with edgy amusement; student-watching has become a local sport.

Probably nothing can head off an eventual sociological study of the Fort Lauderdale rite of spring. But one girl's comment should help. Asked why she made the migration, she answered with a simplicity that needs no analysis: "This is where the boys are."

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