Old Home Week

A big-game hunter in pith helmet, khaki shorts and orange jacket stalked along the railroad platform. His prey: Princeton men, Class of 1925. His quarry was expressed by jeep or taxi to class headquarters--in a vacant lot on University Place, decked out now like a carnival site.

It was Princeton's first reunion since 1942, and the largest in her 200 years; 10,000 alumni from 52 classes were singing Going Back to Nassau Hall. Tired businessmen, bankers, lawyers and bond salesmen joyfully shucked off their Brooks Brothers' pinstripes and climbed into silly Mardi Gras costumes for a lost weekend. For four days Mayor Minot Morgan Jr., '35 and the police of little Princeton borough (pop. 7,719) were as busy as if the Legion had come to town.

Most class-reunion outfits were boisterous refinements of the Princeton seniors' "beer suits" (painters' white overalls and white jackets). The solid citizens of the Class of 1922 crashed through with the loudest and fanciest variation: black-&-orange plaid overalls, and blue-grey jackets with matching plaid pockets.

Fresh Beer, Stale Gags. There were bull sessions everywhere and at all hours, and 75 kegs of beer to keep them afloat. There were a few more formal meetings of minds: in Baker Rink, Physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth, who wrote the War Department's Smyth Report, ran a forum on atomic energy. But most of the talk was the chitchat of old grads--who was doing what, and where, and to whom; what had happened to so-and-so; the off-color jokes, the old, corny gags. The commonest initial emotion was embarrassment--the desperate stab at a classmate's name, the awkward groping for something to talk about.

At a banquet in Baker Rink, the Class of '26 gave the University $150,000. And world-weary Princetonians of the Class of 1921 wistfully toasted the memory of the finest escapist of them all, Classmate Richard Halliburton, lost at sea seven years ago as he followed his Royal Road to Romance. Old grads glowing too gloriously were put to bed by 500 helpful undergrads--some in sheetless cots lent by Red Cross Disaster Relief.

In between dinners and smokers, alumni meandered down Princeton's pavements, felt sentimental amidst the stately elms and maples, wandered into buildings they had not known for years, got lost in new ones, gaped at the excavation for the new library. On the ivied walls of Nassau Hall they hunted their class tablets, and in Memorial Hall a solemn few paused to wonder where the university would find room for the names of Princeton's 338 World War II dead.

The P-rade. All the solemnity, the boisterousness, the pride and the sentimentality were wrapped up together in the weekend's grand "P-rade." Two miles of sign-swinging Princeton men, paced by 32 military bands, wound in & out of the campus to University Field. At their head was orange-bereted Marshal Melville Dickenson, portlier now than when he captained Princeton's undefeated 1922 football team. Round University Field the alumni marched in review--past President Harold Dodds and a handful of pre-1896 Tigers (their joints no longer limber enough for P-rading.) Then everybody sang Old Nassau, and settled down to watch the ballgame. As usual, Yale won; this time it was 7-4.

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