College Strike

One day this week for the first time in the 241-year history of Yale, union pickets marched up & down outside the Yale campus, where townies used to riot. Between 400 and 450 of Yale's 690 chambermaids, janitors, porters and power-plant workers, organized by C.I.O., had struck for a union shop.

Chambermaids, leaving beds unmade, marched out of the dormitories at 9 o'clock one morning, were joined by most of the university's handymen. A small crew stayed at work in the power plants, keeping Yale lights and heat going, and campus police, who are supernumeraries of the New Haven Police Department, also stood their posts. Said President Charles Seymour, urging students to keep calm: "I don't believe students will object to making their beds. I used to do it when I was a student in the Latin Quarter of Paris. ..." That hardship lasted only one day. Then the State Mediation Board induced the strikers to go back to work pending negotiations.

Chambermaids at Yale's sister college, Smith, also threatened to strike last week over a story in Tatler, the campus funny magazine, about "Maids We Have Known And Loved"--including "one who was four feet wide ... a high-grade moron," another with "monstrous buck teeth." Smith's maids read, bridled, sent a committee to Warden Laura Woolsey Lord Scales demanding an immediate apology. The faculty suspended the Tatler and its editors wrote the maids a penitent letter. "We hope that [the maids] will accept our apologies and that they will be lenient with a sheer creation, unfortunate and ill-advised." Appeased, the maids resumed their mopping.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.