Columbia Sophomores’ Curious Idea of Sport.
Two hundred heroic figures, the sophomores of Columbia, swept into the One Hundred and Sixteenth Street station of the Broadway subway, in New York, recently, so full of college spirit that they didn’t stop to pay their fares. They took possession of the first two cars of the first uptown express and removed all the lights from the ceiling. It was lots of fun after that to throw bulbs out at each passing station and see the various patrons of the road skip nervously to one side with the resultant crashes.
All this was a spiritual preparation for the annual sophomore smoker at Columbia Oval, on Gun Hill Road. They reached the appointed place by shifting at One Hundred and Eighty-first Street to Jerome Avenue. Some took a surface car on the avenue and did as much damage to it as they conveniently could on the way uptown. Others walked and contented themselves by stealing all the red lanterns marking paving danger points on the thoroughfares. These an unappreciative and insolent policeman, who probably wouldn’t known an Alma Mater from a blackjack, forced the amazed and indignant collegians to return.
The sophomores had brought with them for the smoker some twenty docile freshmen, whom they shampooed with molasses and old eggs and subjected to other convulsingly amusing indignities. But, after all, the evening was spoiled. Tradition says that about 9:30 the freshman class should rush the smoker and do its best to rescue the captive classmates. This is tremendously fine sport, but the sophisticated members of 1916 just yawned and stayed down at the university.