Goldfish Swallowing

Ever since 1939, those folks down in Cambridge have been claiming that America's greatest goldfish-swallowing fad started at Harvard. Not true. A full 27 years earlier, one Frank Farnham Greenleaf '16 swallowed a live goldfish in his room in Richardson Hall. Greenleaf did this, according to an eyewitness, in order to win a 25-cent bet. (Life especially goldfish life was cheap in those days.) This dramatic event was immediately eclipsed when a classmate of Greenleaf's, Philip Gardiner Nordell became the first to swallow not one but two live goldfish once the wagers from his classmates had reached a grand total of $4.50.

Greenleaf left Dartmouth a few months after this episode (we assume the two events were unrelated). Nordell, always one to capture the public's imagination, went on to invent the precursor of the instant cake mix. As for the historymaking goldfish—not even their names have survived in the record books.

Apparently those three fish were the extent of the 1912 craze at Dartmouth, and the world was safe for carp until 1939, when Harvard's Lothrop Withington Jr. became the third college student to swallow a live goldfish.

Harvardian swell lothrop Withington the Younger caused a national craze by downing a goldfish, but Dartmouth had him beat by a quarter-century.