The Yale University community was in shock.

For weeks and weeks, rooms for copy had been issued from the national press on the benefits of co-education at Yale. And for weeks, the Yale football team and Yale's football aficionados had been psyching themselves up for the game which they hoped would avenge Harvard's 29-29 victory the year before.

All these hopes were dashed on Saturday morning. November 22. Sixteen players including the entire defensive backfield and most of the defensive line, had contracted gonorrhea from three cheerleaders at a party in Providence six weeks before THE game reported an Extra edition of the Yale Daily News, had been canceled. Yale had forfeited.

THE game of course was not canceled. The extra edition of the Yalie Daily had been produced not by energetic Eli newsmen, but by a nefarious group of Crimson editors intent on disrupting the Yale community and unnerving an already edgy Yale football squad.

The take extra inaugurated a series of pranks which the University dailies have been playing on each other for a long time. (Indeed, if you're not reading this story on Saturday afternoon, it's probably because revengeful Yale editors managed to black the real Crimson in order to replace it with their own.)

The next year the Yale editors put out their own Crimson announcing that Daniel P. Movnthan then President Nixon's duel domestic adviser had been rafted President of Harvard.

And the year after. The Crimson produced another Daily which told readers the news that the Yale administration had decided to build a new formal stadium and was turning Yale Bowl into loss cost housing.

The 1969 prank was probably the most elegant both in execution and in breadth of effect.

The idea was born in the mind of Tom Southwick. "I Wanting to insure that the Yaleman not emerge unscathed in their economies with Harvard in the event of an Elis football victory, he suggested that The Crimson play the role of the defender of Harvard's honor.

We'll put out a take Yale Daily News," Southwick said revealing that the entire Yale football team came down with hepatitis and had to forfeit the football game. It might be amusing.

Make it syphilis," replied sports editor John I. Powers '70 remembering that New Haven was in the first throes of co-education.

The idea lay dominant until the Monday, before the game. The prankster engraved their own copy of the Daily News banner and sold an ad to Crimson Copy, a New Haven, Xerox establishment which was have to open a Harvard Square.

Crimson pressman Pal Sorrento and his colleagues ran off 5000 copies, and a determined team of editors barreled down the Mass Pike to New Haven to distribute the bogus-papers at all Yale dorms early Saturday morning.

But the best was yet to come.

Powers and sports editor Ben Beach '71 managed to find an open window at the News located a telephone and a-la Martha Mitchell telephones anyone who might be interested in the "story."