Scorecard

Ben Schwartzwalder, Syracuse University volatile football coach, waxed truculent last week when it appeared that the winner of Saturday's Ivy League showdown between undefeated Princeton and undefeated Dartmouth (won by Dartmouth 28-14) might be awarded the Lambert Trophy, symbol of eastern college football superiority. Ben felt that Syracuse was a far more obvious choice. "We're not having a good year," he said, referring to Syracuse's 7-3 record, "but we'd be having a great one with those fellows. The Ivies won't play us, and they won't play Penn State, Pitt, Navy, Army or Boston College. They have a little wall around themselves. Their coaches keep saying how great their football is, and people start to believe it. Maybe if I coached in the Ivy League a few years I'd start lying, too.

"They recruit just as hard as we do, and they get just as many good ones. But their kids don't develop, because they don't have any opposition. I get to coach their best kids in all-star games. They're sad compared to other players, because they haven't toughened up. They haven't been hit. Our kids are no better than theirs are as freshmen, but they become real football players by tougher competition.

"I just wish we played in the Ivy League."

HI-YO, SILVER

The Clay-Patterson fight wasn't enough for Las Vegas to worry about—there was money trouble, too. Well, sort of. Because of the nationwide craze for coin collecting, the silver dollar, like the buffalo and the Indian before it, has all but vanished as a symbol of the Old West. Its last stand was in Las Vegas and other gambling towns, where it was, in effect, the monetary unit. Now the cartwheels have been replaced by decorative slugs that can be used only for gambling in the casinos whose imprint they bear.

Although the slugs cost the gambling houses about 17� apiece, they have proved an unexpected bonanza. Souvenir hunters buy them and keep them, which gives the casinos—as if they were starving—almost a 500% profit per slug. Of course, this is no solace to Las Vegas cocktail waitresses, who in the good old days used to get a silver dollar as a tip for each round of drinks.

Now that silver dollars have disappeared, the coin hoarders have turned to the lesser coins, thus alarming the slot-machine operators. They immediately hurried off to hire Jerry Scott, who owns a plating shop. Scott artificially ages newly minted coins by an oxidation process. This makes them unacceptable to the collectors—they like BUs, meaning brilliant and unused. Scott charges�� to make half dollars ugly and�� for 25� pieces.

To think it was only a few years ago that the casinos hired scrubbers to make the silver dollars look brand-new!

BIG FRY
As the proliferation of big dams increasingly threatened the normal life cycle of the Pacific salmon, conservationists feverishly sought methods of keeping spawning beds, where fry could develop, accessible to the fish. (Fish ladders and hatcheries were expensive and not really satisfactory in maintaining the salmon population.) Artificial spawning beds now appear to be the answer. These are 14- to 20-foot-wide channels through which the flow of water is controlled to duplicate conditions in natural spawning beds. The survival rate is about seven to 10 times that of fry in natural beds, and the fish, unlike hatchery-produced young, are as resilient as wild fry. Channels such as the 3,000 feet of gravel beds along Seton Creek in British Columbia are producing salmon in numbers equal to those spawned in miles of the lost streams.

EXHAUST IN THE AFTERNOON