P.B.H. PLAYS A VITAL PART IN CIVILIAN AND MILITARY LIFE

Indifference has long been coupled with the name of Harvard, but paradoxically there is in a corner of the Yard a building whose reputation for community service is nation wide. Starting as a religious memorial for a famous Boston bishop, it has in peacetime taught old men cribbage and young men wrestling; now in wartime, it is providing ping-pong tables for service men, lounges for their wives, and a nursery for their children.

For Phillips Brooks House has the reputation around Cambridge of realizing any bright idea which nobody else will take the trouble to try. Upstairs there is a housing office that will find a room for any service man stationed at Harvard, to say nothing of his wife.

There is a symphony orchestra which rehearses downstairs, a jazz band that makes life miserable one flight up. The undergraduate Student Council has its offices there; so does the local draft board. Service may not yet be cradle to grave, but it is well on its way.

And all this is only supplementary to the main purpose of P.B.H., which has been the direction of undergraduate social service work in the community. As many as 425 students have been working in settlement houses all over Boston under its direction, engaged in such activities as tutoring the Jamaica Negro Mothers' Club in Music, conducting hikes into the country, and showing school boys how to dissect frogs.

But all these activities have now become overshadowed by the war. P.B.H.'s War Service Committee is the center of blood and bond drives around the college; it sponsors police forces, fire fighters, and ARP wardens. And in line with its traditional policy of experimentation, Brooks House is now hard at work at its newest project, "contacting" all undergraduates who leave college for the Armed Services, keeping track of their location, readdressing mail, procuring them invitations from families of Harvard men, and keeping them in touch with what is going on in Cambridge.