Events & Discoveries

Restrained Cheers

A new trend in college football cheering has appeared this season, a change in yelling comparable to the change in poetry from Longfellow's inspirational verse to T. S. Eliot's limp, anticlimactic lines. At the first Southern Cal game the rooters, instead of making the Los Angeles night air ring with skyrocket and locomotive yells, siss-boom-ahs and rah-rah-rahs, chorused such casual and extemporaneous observations as "It's fantastic," or, "What a game." The Trojans massed their defenses and stopped Oregon State for three downs near the goal. Fourth down, inches to go. Did the stands break out in massed rhythmic bellowings urging, "Hold that line"? No, they murmured in chorus: "One more time."

Next afternoon, Pitt walloped UCLA in the Coliseum to the especial discomfort of a local sportscaster and prognosticator, Sam Baiter, renowned for his UCLA partisanship. So the UCLA cheering section produced a spur-of-the-moment commentary in chorus, practically a Henry James sentence converted into a college yell: "How do you feel, Sam Baiter? We know how you feel."

Cheers, come to think of it, usually reflect changes in social life, new moods, contemporary phenomena. When education was classical, Yale produced its "Brekekekéx, ko-áx, ko-áx," borrowed from the Frogs of Aristophanes. After the Civil War, Princeton took over the siss, boom, ah from the song of the 7th Regiment of the Army of the Potomac. Innumerable locomotive yells derived from the wonderful sound of a wood-burning locomotive picking up speed. In the Rough Rider era of history it seemed only natural to hail a touchdown with "osky-wow-wow." So now, in the era of the cocktail party and the restrained hello, when moderns tend to murmur "wonderful" or "terrific" to express approval, or "oh, great" to express the opposite, we are getting a sort of conversational plain chant at football games.

We guess it's a natural development, and welcome enough, but trust it won't be carried too far. If not watched, the cheering section could become a sort of mass television commentator, saying (all together now, and put some life in it), "An interesting play." Or the roar of the crowd could sink to something like an organized murmur of cocktail party small talk, everyone saying at the same time, "What utter nonsense," or "Well, that does it,"

Advice to the Airborne

A trim, superbly designed young lady with close-cropped ash-blond curls and gray-blue eyes flecked with worry turned up in our offices the other day. Her name, she said, was Nancy Boeseke and she needed help: what, if anything, could we tell her about a group of young men known collectively as the New York Yankees?

Well, as luck would have it, we did happen to have a fact or two on hand about that very group, and we were more than pleased to turn them over to a lady in distress. But why, we wondered, did she need such information? The answer was simplicity itself and supplied with a long, level look from those gray-blue eyes. "Baseball players," said Nancy, "get their feelings hurt very easily if you don't know who they are. I'm going to be flying the Yankees to Milwaukee and back and I wouldn't want to make a mistake like asking Mr. Stengel if he was the first baseman or anything like that."

By now, providing she has done her homework, we hope that Nancy knows all about Mr. Stengel and his friends, and we think it only fair that they should know a little something about her. So—if we're all settled comfortably in the United Airlines DC-7 that will serve as private air taxi for the Yankees during the series—please allow us to perform an introduction. Ladies, may we present Mr. Casey Stengel and his boys, all baseball players of note? Gentlemen, these are your airline hostesses for the duration of the series. The tall brunette just over there is Phyllis Baker, who knows all there is to know about baseball because she has flown the Cubs to the West Coast several times. The Blonde just over here is her roommate Nancy.

Nancy was born in Santa Barbara, Calif. where the national game plays second fiddle to a rougher pastime known as football. As a matter of fact, she was born on New Year's Day, which was probably lucky since a victory for his alma mater (Stanford 7 Southern Methodist 0) at the Rose Bowl that afternoon served to mollify in some measure her sportsman father's indignation at siring a mere girl.