"Oh, Rinehart!"

For more than 50 years, usually on a warm spring night, Harvard Yard has echoed with the familiar cry. "Oh, Rinehart!" It is the summons which brings students tumbling out of their rooms, whips them up to water fights, raids, and occasionally riots. It is Harvard's great rebel yell, but just how it first got started, few Harvardmen ever knew.

Then, in 1936, a quiet, 61-year-old alumnus turned up at the university's tercentenary celebration to set the record straight. His name: John Bryce Gordon Rinehart. His story:

"It was in the spring of 1900. Examinations were over, and the atmosphere was tense . . . My classmates always looked upon me as a grind. They were continually calling for me to go out on a spree, but I have never touched a drop in my life.

"That spring evening in 1900, they came and called up to my room . . . The late Frank Simonds [the future historian and war correspondent] . . . heard the call, and just for a joke stuck his head out of his window and repeated the call. The cry was taken up ... Within a few minutes the Yard was a bedlam."

Since then, the Yard has often been a bedlam. Studious John Rinehart himself graduated from the Harvard Law School in 1903, went into practice in Manhattan, finally retired to his home in Waynesburg, Pa. There he lived a life of quiet respectability, buying and selling farmlands, and there last week, at 77, he died. To the end, old John Rinehart, whose name started so many riots in Harvard Yard, never touched a drop.

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