Where the Bores Are

By Good Friday, Fort Lauderdale was treading water in a wave of 50,000 college students from all over the East, Midwest and South. For 15 seasons, the youngsters have swarmed to the Florida resort to while away their spring vacations in pursuit of sunshine, beer and coeds. This year there was the added stimulus of a sexy film, Where the Boys Are, to bring them running, and the annual invasion was the biggest ever. But, the students discovered, Lauderdale in the spring was dismayingly tame in comparison with the M-G-M script. It was, in fact, just one big. frustrating bore, and the problem was to find something to do.

Fort Lauderdale's surf was infested with sharp-stinging Portuguese men-of-war. For two nights running, the Elbo Room and other favorite undergraduate hangouts were closed early on police orders. On top of that, Jade Beach, traditionally the scene of wholesale woo after dark, was declared off limits. Worst of all, the girls were in dismayingly short supply, outnumbered 10 to 1 by the boys. Any small diversion--someone playing a bongo drum, a girl dancing the limbo--attracted hundreds of listless onlookers. Joseph Penar, a bearded student from Illinois State Normal University, shinnied up a coconut palm one day, for lack of something better to do. "When I got to the top," he reported, "I looked down and saw 300 kids standing around the tree, staring up at me. Anything that moves around here will attract a crowd."

What Will Mother Think? In such a situation, trouble was inevitable. It came one night when 8,000 disgruntled students milled together at Atlantic Avenue and East Las Olas Street--Lauderdale Beach's main intersection--and created a monumental traffic jam. The harried, police, beefed up with reinforcements from nearby towns and the Florida Highway Patrol, treated them gently at first, until someone smashed a beer bottle over a police lieutenant's helmet. Then the cops got rough. They cleared the intersection in one violent rush, and appeared to be in control until George T. Dalluge, a 22-year-old senior from Minnesota's Mankato State Teachers College, climbed up an arched traffic light and rallied the crowd. He chinned himself, hung by his knees, and led the transfixed students in The Star-Spangled Banner.

"I thought he was kind of funny there at first." said a patrolman. "But then he started acting like Napoleon, saying he demanded Jade Beach, he demanded the right to drink beer in the street, he demanded this and that." With the aid of a utility-truck ladder, Dalluge was pulled from the traffic light and off to pokey, given a 70-day sentence for inciting a riot and resisting arrest. Next morning he was thinking of home and mother. "What'll she think?" he asked nervously. "Do you suppose she's heard?"

After three riotous nights, the police had arrested 500 youngsters, and the local jail was as tightly packed as the motels and automobiles. When 72 of the ringleaders received jail terms and a dozen others were awaiting arraignment, the students became calmer and more cautious, and order returned to the streets. Telephone and telegraph facilities were strained to the limit, with messages from students to parents, and parents to city officials. Most were angry, but one father told the police: "Keep the damn fool in jail. I'll be down in three days to get him."

Lemmingsville, Farewell. As the student invasion crested over the Easter weekend, Fort Lauderdale began to take a more tolerant, youth-will-be-served view of the invasion. Under pressure from the Chamber of Commerce and wrathful parents, the city's officials hastily organized block dances, a splash party in the municipal pool and a beach cookout, to placate and amuse the restless youngsters. In a conciliatory gesture, Judge Raymond A. Doumar released 84 of the 85 imprisoned students for "at least one more day in the sunshine." (Only the athletic Dalluge, who will not graduate if he serves out his sentence, was kept behind bars.) Police looked the other way when blanket-bearing couples drifted out to Jade Beach at dusk. Bar cash registers busily jangled to the tune of beer at 50-c- a bottle, and motelkeepers cheerfully put up with as many as ten men in a room at $10 a day apiece.

But most of the students were resentful and disappointed. Fort Lauderdale was unanimously renamed "Lemmingsville," and thousands of the collegians vowed never to return. Fort Lauderdale hoped the vow would be kept.

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