Events & Discoveries

"What was it?" we asked.

"Well," said Nancy, "they're mostly all married."

Barbecue Battle (cont.)

The first round in the battle of the backyards reported here last week, which joined Anthony Vasco, the barbecuer of Marlow Heights, Md., and his smoke-stifled neighbor, Mrs. Walter Johnson, was won by Mr. Vasco. Police Court Judge Grover Lee Small dismissed the warrant against Vasco on a technicality.

The second round: Mrs. Johnson announced that she would ask the Health Department to bring charges against Mr. Vasco, the Health Department announced that it had no regulations covering barbecue grills, Mr. Vasco announced that he would stage a smokeless—well, practically smokeless—cookout for the Health Department.

Service Academies & Football

The Widest point spread in sport, sometimes, is between the fullback and the Phi Beta Kappa. Passing marks for athletes is an old coaching problem, and nobody faces a sterner version of it than the coaches at Annapolis and West Point. Army and Navy athletes may not take credit courses in fly casting or social dancing. They may not even major in physical education. They study what everyone else does, and that includes a skull-cracking load of mathematics, science and English. The service academies are hard to get into and hard to remain in once you get there, and the athletic staffs of these institutions have had to devise ways to meet their special problem.

For Army, the solution is a six-week cram course. High school graduates of athletic promise are collected in a Cornwall, N.Y. prep school and stuffed with math and other oddities. Then, glassy-eyed with knowledge, they are led off to their college entrance board exams. Partly as a result of this system, Army met and defeated Notre Dame last Saturday 14-2.

Annapolis does it differently. The Navy allots $25,000 of its athletic receipts annually to help 30-odd high school athletes through a whole year of prep school. "We have found," says Captain Slade Cutter, Navy's Director of Athletics, "that short-term cramming for the entrance exams doesn't help. The boys will just flunk out later." But a year of prep school helps quite a lot. In the opening lineup for last Saturday's game (Navy 20, Michigan 14), six players were products of the Navy's prep-school scholarship program, and the 44-man football squad includes 25 of them altogether. On this arrangement Navy has built its recent football power.

But a power failure seems to lie ahead. The Eastern College Athletic Conference, to which both Army and Navy belong, amended its Statement of Principles and Policies recently. The effect of the amendment is to ban Navy's year-long prep school program and to validate Army's six-week cram session. Navy will not feel the effect until 1960, for the ECAC will allow the 31 boys now prepping under Navy sponsorship to enter the Academy next year—if they can pass the entrance exams.