THE GOLD-ROLLED SPADE

Skip the Shoveller is a personage who has forced himself on campus attention by breaking fitfully into print in The Dartmouth during recent months, as the author of an anomalous column called The Gilded Shovel. He has maintained a certain imperfect but adequate anonymity. A little research on the writer's part revealed the interesting if slightly incompatible facts that Skip is a "fat boy who lives over in Hitch and drinks all the time" and a "big tall guy, slightly cock-eyed." If either of these is true, we know someone who is being called lots of names for someone else's aberrations.

Skip went amateurishly about filling what has been felt as a need of The Dartmouth for some time. He could hardly be called a pseudo-humorist, because he has never actually claimed to be funny. His one avowed aim is to be a Moral Force. The creed of the column is: "Nobody admires a tapeworm," a proposition which has been expounded and defended with some warmth. The ensuing controversy has brought forth a series of communications from Andy the Tapeworm, who has adopted the medium of Archy, the Free-Verse Cockroach of Don Marquis, for expressing his soul.

The Carnegie Foundation report on the commercialization of athletes brought forth in The Gilded Shovel an inside story on the Big Green gridiron wage slaves, which W. O. McGeehan, astute columnist of the New York Herald-Tribune reprinted, apologizing for it by labelling it "Some Unseemly Levity." The most recent crusade of The Gilded Shovel has been against the pigeon menace at Webster Hall.

The Shoveller's "public" has watched him through an experimental novitiate in which he has tried out various ways of filling columns. When he hears only a few people say it is lousy, he figures that it is pretty good. When the loudly articulate nays are more numerous, he tries something else. He has apparently discovered that personalities are generally to be eschewed and that the border-line of smut is dangerous and usually unfruitful. When he finally gets a fairly adequate idea of what this columning business is all about, he will probably graduate, and his "public" will have to watch a new Shoveller stumble through his apprenticeship. Thus will The Gilded Shovel be another victim of that tragedy of undergraduate activities, discontinuity.

But tut-tut, we grow gloomy. Let us be off to cultivate our garden.

W A WON A POW WOW OF CALIFORNIA ALUMNI, AUGUST 31—SEPTEMBER 2