Yesterday's News

From the pages of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin and Harvard Magazine

1912

Larz Anderson ’88 proposes to build a new bridge across the Charles River to replace the inadequate wooden structure connecting Cambridge and Brighton. Meanwhile, Mass. Ave. is being paved with wooden blocks from Quincy Square to Harvard Square to reduce the noise of traffic.

1927

Play-by-play accounts of all Harvard football games will be transmitted by the Westinghouse station of New England (WBZ-WBZA), thanks to a special line running from the press stands on the field to the transmitter in Boston.

1937

The University announces that it will begin providing pensions and group life insurance for regular members of its nonteaching staff, as it does already for its teaching staff.

1942

The first class of U.S. Army chaplains—“Sky Pilots”—to be housed at Harvard graduates. The program aims to turn out 450 chaplains a month.

1957

Harvard Student Agencies is founded “to assist financially needy students… by…helping to organize student-conducted business enterprises….”

The admissions committee’s newsletter notes the continuing decline in the proportion of public-school boys entering the College: they will make up exactly 50 percent of the incoming freshman class.

1962

As Harvard’s football and soccer teams go down to defeat across the Charles, members of GUTS, the College’s Gargoyle Undergraduate Tiddlywinks Society, squidge and squop their way to a 23-12 victory over Holy Cross to win first place in NUTS, the National Undergraduate Tiddlywinks Society. (The victors later appear on I’ve Got a Secret and stump the panel.)

1972

As an economy measure, the University is considering leasing space in Holyoke Center to professional firms.

1987

“Ambitious plans are afoot to wire the University for the information age.” The Corporation has been asked to authorize a new Harvard network that will introduce, among other things, “state-of-the-art telephone service.”

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