Yardling Newspaper Will Undergo 5th Annual Spring Death Tomorrow

Tomorrow night a College newspaper will fold up, as it has every spring since 1951, and as it did in the only year of its existence before that, 1940. Early or late Sunday morning, depending on when he sets up, every freshman living in the Yard will find the seventeenth issue of the mimeographed Yardling has been tossed at his door the night before. But for the rest of the year '58 will have to depend on extra-Yard sources for news, because the freshman newspaper's five-man board of editors, bowing to final exams, lack of personnel, and tradition, will publish no more.

Covering freshman sports and news, and distributed weekly free of charge, the Yardling is produced by a staff of not less than a dozen which must change its complexion completely every year. Friday night and Saturday afternoon staff members dummy the paper and type their stencils in a dingy office on the third floor of the Union. These quarters are practically unknown; only a few weeks ago the board coaxed a promise from J. Vernon Patrick '52, Secretary of the Union, "to have the wastebasket emptied twice a month."

Hike to P.B.H.

After the staff members have prepared the stencils, they tramp across the Yard to the Student Council office in Phillips Brooks House and run off about 500 copies, which they than deliver to freshman dorms.

The small staff has always been a major problem for the Yardling. The whimsical editorial of its first issue (February 21, 1940) concluded with a request to John Harvard to ask anyone else interested" to join the staff, and that theme has frequently recurred. For a paper whose aim has been to serve the freshman by supplying him with news and features on his class, the Yardling has often suffered from lack of interest on the part of the group it serves and has always needed a larger staff.

That first issue and the four which followed in 1940 were by far the most impressive Yardlings ever turned out, at least in the respect of appearance and writing clarity. They were printed issues and showed signs of ample early-morning work. The gulf between them and postwar Yardlings inadvertently appears in the volume number of current editions. The pre-war year is forgotten; the dateline slugs Volume 5, not Volume 6.

In a sense, this discontinuity is proper. As Adam Yarmolinsky '43, first chairman of the Yardling and now a Washington attorney, explained, "The Yardling was the kind of thing you could do in the relaxed atmosphere of the late thirties."

Mimeographed Rise and Fall

Since the war, the paper has been un-relaxed, and mimeographed with but three exceptions--printed issues for two football weekends and a Freshman Jubilee. The quality of impression and writing has varied from issue to issue and year to year, although this year's mimeography has been generally crisp.

The problem of inconsistency is inherent in the Yardling, and the paper itself realized this in an editorial of October 11, 1954: "The Yardling rises and falls with each successive Freshman class; it has no standards to live up to and none to pass on." Without style books or tradition, its grammar, spelling, headline styles, makeup, and writing approach vary in comprehensible fashion, e.g., two of this year's headlines:

"ONE 1; ONE LOST" (over a sports article describing two freshman games) and "skiddy makes with the 'word'" (an interview with the Dean of Freshmen, F. Skiddy von Stade, Jr. '38).

But seemingly more surprising than the headlines which may at times greet the Yardling reader is the fact that the Yardling resurrected itself on March 25, 1951, after lying dormant for almost eleven years to the day since the first Yardling silently bowed out on March 27, 1940. Actually the freshman class, living united in the Yard, has a strong, if often dormant, class spirit, and frequently feels that it isn't being adequately covered in the CRIMSON. This attitude, coupled with the fact that the class of 1954 as freshmen included 189 former high school editors, led to the Yardling's rebirth. The paper's renaissance was "inherent in the situation," according to Dean of Students Delmar Leighton '19, then Dean of Freshman. on May 12, and the editorial, explaining that exams caused the paper's demise, said wistfully, "Perhaps we have started a tradition . . ." Indeed they had, although the next issue did not come out until February 17, 1952. That winter a group of freshmen went to Dean Leighton with6Two Yardling executives, Peter A. Evans '58 and Malone, puzzle layout in the paper's Union office.