Hemisphere High Jinks

In Chapel Hill, on the comely campus of University of North Carolina, dashing young South American caballeros last week politely lifted their hats to passing coeds and saluted them with the words: "Let's pitch a little woo." The coeds responded: "Hey" (North Carolinian for Hello). All in fun, the South Americans were busy practicing the promotion of hemisphere solidarity.

In the first organized visit of its kind to a U. S. university, 109 men & women of seven South American countries (Chile, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Colombia, Uruguay) had arrived to spend their summer in a special six-week "summer school" at North Carolina. Their trip was arranged by the Institute of International Education and Grace Line (which cut rates in half) and was aided by the U. S. State Department and South American governments (which paid some of the students' expenses). The students--undergraduates, teachers, doctors, lawyers, social workers, newspapermen, an army officer--had come to study chiefly the English language and the U. S. way of life.

First they went sightseeing in Manhattan, Philadelphia, Washington. Said a senorita: "I never dreamed I would walk into heaven and be greeted by so many angels." Said an Ecuadorian engineer: "The burlesque! They are very good in Washington, but Philadelphia ees the best . . . what you say--plenty hot. ... A keese here is just a keese. Een Ecuador the keese is most wonderful thing. Here the girl, she keese the boy--that ees wrong. Een Ecuador the girl, she get keesed--ah, that ees good."

Lodged in the university-operated Carolina Inn, the visitors quickly made themselves at home. They went shopping for U. S. clothes and cars, mobbed Chapel Hill's three leading undergraduate "juke joints"--Aggie's, Harry's, The Pines. Most popular class was one in Basic English (850 words), taught by Harvard's Semanticist Ivor Armstrong Richards, who was lent to North Carolina especially for the occasion. Although the visitors learned rapidly, the campus had some chuckles. At the movies, a South American asked his date whether she had yet been afflicted with "the constipation" (flu). Another visitor, invited to a freshman party, told his colleagues that he had a date with "the fresh people." Asked in class to name something that could be seen and touched, Senor Luis Samiento replied: "My wife, but only by me."

By last week the South Americans were full-fledged U. S. collegians. Some were on the staff of the Daily Tar Heel, some in the chorus of an undergraduate musical comedy. Crowning gesture of good will: Chilean Senorita Sylvia Goich, running against five campus beauties, was elected queen of North Carolina's annual student-faculty day.

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