Five girls, several of them pretty enough to be Deans' secretaries, are immured in a little basement room of Lehman Hall behind a door stencilled no admittance. They are the official hello girls of Harvard University--the telephone operators of KIR 7600, which since 1934 has been Harvard's number. Forty main truck lines lead into their switchboard and over six hundred local phones are in the system, ranging from Miss Abbott through a multitude of organizations and professors to Zoology Museum. Direct wires tie in the various graduate schools, Western Union, Postal Telegraph, and Radcliffe.

Over ten thousand calls are completed daily including a large number of long distance connections to New York and Washington. Though Canadian numbers are frequently requested, it's nearly a year since the last message for London. In addition to tolls on these calls, rent must be paid on the electrical equipment, so Mrs. Morell, Business Manager Durant's girl Friday, each month writes out a $3,500 check for the New England Telephone and Telegraph Co. But the war, spawning numerous University committees and requiring more rapid dispatch of some professorial confabulation, has already overtaxed the present facilities of the central switchboard. Soon a sixth operator will have to be added.

Many an odd task has been performed and much queer data has been excavated with the cooperation of the Lehman switchboard manipulators. The General University Information Office (located in University Hall basement and on the KIR 7600 exchange) has a complete file of professors' home addresses, open hours of dining halls, location of class meetings, and other minutiae of a modern educational community. Non-University questions are often answered by Widener. During the Penn Game weekend, operators managed to put through an emergency call from New Hampshire to a Sophomore in Philly--finally locating him after two hours of assiduous message leaving at fraternities, hotels, and bars. But the really interesting Harvard Information Please program takes place at night.

At supper time two male operators replace the girls. Since Widener and the Information Office are closed, this pair of basement Hermes are duty-bound only to make connections and to provide such facts as are available in the University Guide and Crimson phone book. But, anxious to maintain John Harvard's reputation for omniscience, they often go beyond required performance. It's a dull night when at least one girl doesn't phone for the number of "Bill--I didn't catch his last name, but he had a crew cut and one front tooth missing. He was a divine dancer, and I thought you might be able. . . ." Most of these Daisy Mae's are doomed to disappointment; though once one recognized her acquaintance after the obliging operator had read the last names of all the Yardlings up to the T's. Occasionally at an early hour of the morning--sometimes by long distance and once from Oklahoma City--some old grad, determined to clinch an argument with a doubting Eli, demands the score of some such contest as the 1893 Harvard-Yale game. An urgent plea from a local caterer last year routed a Classics professor out of bed to spell "Merry Christmas" in Greek. And a worried aunt checked up on the way the stripes in a crew tie run so as to make no mistake in her knitting. Quiz programs and the discovery by Greater Boston school kids that the phone is easier to use than the almanac have made less lonely the early evening hours of the two phonemen.

Their favorites, however, are the fantastic characters who have dialed the University number in the bleak stretch between two and seven in the morning. An elderly anti-vivisectionist, convinced that Harvard Medical School had stolen his Angora, tried to wheedle a confession of catnapping out of the switchboard workers. Weirder yet was the husky-voiced chap who, informed that no Biology professors were available at four-thirty A.M., startled a sleepy operator by inquiring, "Do you know of any one else, then, who would like to buy my body? I must get $10,000 at once."