Character

Almost every college has its campus character--a decrepit newsboy, perhaps, or a blowzy charlady, an eccentric professor. Cornell University's character is Romeyn (pronounced Roe-mine) Berry, graduate manager of athletics. Usually taken for granted, he made news at Ithaca last week by losing his most famed possession, a brown tweed hat with a grouse feather in the band. He put a notice in the Cornell Daily Sun: "I value the hat highly and will pay for its return a reward of $10--just twice the cost of the thing. ... No questions asked. ... If the finder is in any doubt, he will find my full name printed three times in the lining."

The Daily Sun editorialized in the next day's issue: "Rym Berry . . . deserves, and should get without further ado, a resounding cheer from the undergraduates, a pat on the back from the faculty, and at least a Gideon bible from the graduate students. . . . What would the campus be without the spectacle of Mr. Berry making a weekly pilgrimage to his laundress? . . . What would the Sun's advertising columns be without Mr. Berry's frequent full-page contributions? . . . Mr. Berry belongs to Cornell. Mr. Berry's hat is just as much a part of its owner as his glasses with the heavy black band, or his full dress suit, or his tweed knickers. . . ."

Rym Berry is as vast and impressive as a Wagnerian tenor, especially when, of a winter day, he puts on his dirty-whitish, reputedly polar-bear coat. Floppy, capacious tweed knickerbockers are his usual gear and sometimes (in his official capacity at a track meet) he achieves a novel effect by adding to the ensemble a tailcoat & white tie, twirling in his hand a big gold-knobbed baton. Appearances of this sort, however (say Cornellians) reveal only one-third of his personality. In his office he is irascible, sometimes making helpless undergraduates wonder why they have put up with him so long. And perhaps he sometimes wonders why he gave up a profitable law practice some 15 years ago to become the fixture he is at Cornell. When he meets with Book & Bowl, Cornell's carousing literary society, he reads verses, funny monologs. Once a year the literary society meets as his guest, drinks a barrel of Scranton's best beer, eats Rym Berry's famed imported Bavarian pretzels.

Mr. Berry got back his hat, from a friend of the person who took it. He did not have to pay the $10 reward. He had written in the Ithaca Journal-News: "I love my hat as a little girl loves her doll. Please return my hat." He explained how he had acquired it: At Oxford last summer he saw an old man with a long white beard wearing just such a hat. He wanted one like it, hunted a long time, bought one at last in Edinburgh for 16 shillings ($4).

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