Newsboy

This is a brave true story of life in the city of Cambridge.

One fine spring afternoon last spring three Harvard students were walking from William James Hall to Harvard Square. There was a tall thin student with brown hair and a shorter thinner student with black hair and fiery eyes. And there was somebody else, too. These three Harvard students were discussing social science, the upper, middle and lower classes, and the equation of spunk with virtue.

As they were crossing the Memorial crossroads in front of the Gulf station, they spied a short man with a rubber face walking from the direction of Central Square and whistling very quickly. He had on a grey newsboy's cap and a Harvard sweatshirt. Under his arm he carried an armful of newspapers. The path of the newsboy (who was no boy at all but at least 46) and the path of the three students intersected near Lewando's.

"McNamara resigns! New Secretary of Defense names!" cried the man with the cap and the Harvard sweatshirt. Now one of the three students, the one who was somebody else, went to buy a paper.

"Fifteen cents, son." The man tucked one of the papers from under his arm under the arm of the student, and whistled down the street. When somebody else unfolded the paper the headline did not relate to Secretary McNamara, nor did any story on the front page. The headlines were not even clear. It occurred to the three students, almost at once, that the man with the grey cap and the Harvard sweatshirt was in some way illegal.

Now you must realize that the four central characters in this story were all moving very quickly as it happened. So the next time the man was seen he stepped out of Leavitt and Peirce and had fewer papers under his arm. He was about to sell another to a skinny man with a pinched nose and a brown fedora when the fiery-eyed student with black hair said, "Don't. There's nothing in that newspaper."

"Nothing at all," agreed the tall student.

As his sale walked away the short man with the rubber face told the boys to "work your side of the street and let me work mine." Somebody else was not at all willing to take this and threatened to tell the policeman only smiled back at the group which was now in front of Holyoke Center. He seemed to be having so much fun in his toy house that no one wanted to bother him.

So the students and the grey-capped, rubber-faced, Harvard-sweatshirted newsboy man went their separate ways. The students went home and the whistling man went over to the Out of Town newsstand and bought a whole pile of fresh crisp papers to hide under his arm and disappear down the subway with. They cost ten cents each. One should always be suspicious of people wearing Harvard sweatshirts.