LOST, FOUND BUREAU MOVES COLLECTION TO GRAYS OFFICE

Digging itself out from the recesses of Lehman Hall, the Lost and Found Bureau of the Department of Caretakers recently moved to its new office in Grays Hall with a record-breaking summer collection of books, coats, and notebooks.

Receiving only articles found in the Yard since all the laboratories and lecture halls across Cambridge Street maintain their own lost and found deposits, the Grays Hall bureau handles about 300 articles each year.

Lecture notes, textbooks, fountain pens and other implements of learning make up the bulk of the daily collections together with the usual quota of raincoat's and jackets.

PBH Gets Residue

"One of the biggest troubles," said the attendant," is that a lot of the books we get don't have any names in them at all. When they do have an owner's name in them, it often turns out to be a student long past removed from the University."

Found articles which give no clue to the identity of the owner are kept until the end of the school year, when if still unclaimed, they are donated to Phillips Brooks House. When books turn up which are labeled with the owner's name, they are returned through House janitors, but when coats are found, the possessors receive a notice in the mail to call for their property. The attendants are continually surprised by the number of thus-notified owners who fall to claim their possessions.

Pens, pencils, straw hats, and rubbers are more difficult to identify and usually wind up in P.B.B. The staff of the office is also kept busy by a steady stream of keys, most of which are University property. These are promptly returned to their proper locks by means of the code marking system which the Caretaking Department uses.

Seventy-five per cent of all the lost articles find their way back to their owners, even after the possessors in some cases had not seen their belongings in years. Last June, an Eliot House Senior was called into the office to reclaim an overcoat. At first protesting that no coat of his was missing, he turned to an expression of surprise as he identified a black coat that he had lost in the Union in his Freshman years, and which had just found its way into the Lost and Found office.