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ON THE SHELF

HARVARD NAVAL R.O.T.C. BULLETIN, March 1941.

FROM its last year's form of a few mimeographed sheets of official information loosely stapled together, the Harvard Naval Reserve Bulletin has developed into an attractively bound, well-written monthly magazine which has a wider undergraduate circulation than the Guardian or the Advocate. The contents are mostly of an esoteric nature, but several of the articles are of general interest.

P. R. Gazeeki's "The Secret Weapon" is a quite intriguing historical vignette concerning Uncle Sam's Spanish War cruiser which fired sky torpedoes by compressed air and had greater speed in reverse than ahead. R. H. Mansfield surveys "What's Going On" along Harvard's waterfront and reports that only five men out of the-thirty-seven Seniors in the N.R.O.T.C. are contemplating a civilian postgraduate career. Most interesting to landlubbers, though, is the Gallup poll which E. W. Garrison has made of the Harvard sailors. The local gobs prefer destroyers to battleships, ships to planes, and blondes or brunettes to redheads. More than half the men don't smoke, and only a few go through a pack per day. Freshmen and Seniors are ardent Wellesley fans, with Smith winning the Sophomoric hearts and Vassar neck and neck with Bennington for the Juniors. Personality is first and beauty a close second in the qualities Harvard gobs seek when they get in port--except for the Junior class which puts a strong emphasis on so-called "miscellaneous qualities."

Worthy of special note are the clear-cut photographs by W. H. Taylor, the line cartoons of Editor A. E. Schell, and Grover C. Hanser's report on the fleet of fishing boats and yachts being organized as a mine patrol for the New England coast. The Bulletin, strangely enough in a liberal arts college, is the fastest developing Harvard periodical.

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