Boys Will Be Boys

Stealing the bell clapper from the tower of old Nassau Hall is so persistent a custom at Princeton that the university does a profitable business: keeps a barrel of spare clappers in reserve and fines students $30 a steal. One dark night two months ago Freshman John C. Seed, 19, of Oak Park, Ill., eluded the bored watchman, shinnied up a drain pipe. Part way up, he lost his hold, fell 35 feet to the ground. Freshman Seed went to a Chicago hospital, where his father is a physician, with two broken vertebrae.

Like the boy in British Cartoonist Henry Bateman's cartoon, who went to prison for breathing hard on a glass case in the British Museum and returned, a decrepit old man, to breathe his defiant, dying breath on the same forbidden glass, John Seed did not give up his high resolve. Last fortnight he returned to college, strapped in a plaster cast from waist to shoulders. He spurned the university's offer to end the contest by giving him a clapper.

One stormy night last week John Seed, still strapped in his cast, tried again. This time he went in by a door, climbed a ladder to the belfry, there pried open a locked door with a four-foot crowbar. With two companions he tugged at the clapper for half an hour, at length pulled it loose. Next day he proudly confessed his theft. Crushed, the university waived its $30 fine.

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