"Very Interesting"

Outside the Paramount Theatre in Manhattan's Times Square one cold day last week, a crowd of high-school students began to gather at dawn. When the doors opened several hours later, 3,000 rushed in and thousands more stood shivering on the sidewalks, waiting to hear the current musical idols of U. S. Youth--Benny Goodman and his swing band. The audience was jumping and shouting when New York University's Psychology Professor George Benjamin Vetter and the New York World-Telegram's crack Reporter Joseph Mitchell arrived to study the phenomenon. Reporter Mitchell:

" 'Well, I declare,' said the startled, enthusiastic professor. 'A beautiful example of crowd behavior. . . .'

"'Get hot!' yelled a girl, jumping up. 'Feed it out!'

" 'Let me try to explain it,' said the professor. 'In the first place, they're all packed in. They communicate their impulses to one another. They are high-school adolescents and they have been released from school after the midyear examinations, and they are all single and unattached, and they are all maturing sexually, and they have no regular biological outlets for their drives. . . " The darkened theatre shuts out inhibitory reality, and all their minds are focused on one thing. . . . They do sound like goats, don't they?'

" 'This Goodman is an interesting musician, isn't he?' said the professor, who was keeping time by stamping his feet on the floor. . . . 'Feed it out!' someone screamed as Gene Krupa, the drummer, began to knock the hell out of a set of cymbals. . . . 'Very interesting!' said the professor. 'The whole thing is explained in Allport's Social Psychology, chapters ten, eleven and twelve.' "

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