Education: The Old Bean Pot

In more leisurely days it took three years to turn out a sound Cheddar, 17 years to produce a worthy draft of bourbon, a generation or more to establish an enduring interscholastic tradition. Then the technicians and pressagents turned on the speedup. Last week, having lighted a fire under a pan of tradition, Boston University, with some help from Syracuse University, was preparing to prove that it could be cooked to a turn in no more than the time a mountain distiller would take to turn out a batch of Old Popskull.

What the annual Boston-Syracuse football game needed for greater class, a special B.U. committee had decided, was a nice trophy—something like the Michigan-Minnesota little brown jug or the Indiana-Purdue old oaken bucket. The committee considered and discarded the notion of a totem pole or a big bass drum. Finally someone suggested an oldtime Boston bean pot. Bright B.U. Publicity-man George Wood took over from there.

His first step was to find a bean pot with great potential aura. After a search through local potteries, he found a dandy: a 200-qt., 100-lb., 50-year-old affair. Then one day last week he loaded his bean pot into a Yellow Cab, had himself driven to a deserted highway excavation, eased the pot down into the mud (“to dirty it up a bit”), and hauled it back to his office. Next day, Boston papers received a special B.U. release: “A gigantic bean pot . . . was unearthed on the banks of the Charles River yesterday . . . Prof. Albert Morris . . . expert on anthropology . . . declared that the bean pot was definitely authentic and ‘at least 50 years old . . .’ ” Following the sound rule of never trying to make a chump of a city editor, Wood also candidly tipped the city desks that it was just a polite hoax.

Except for the Boston Record, which went along to the extent of running a picture of the pot, the Boston press pretty much ignored the big find. But Publicityman Wood was not through. Later, he mailed out another release: the president of the Syracuse University Alumni Club of Boston had claimed the pot on the grounds that it was “very likely” made in Syracuse. Final announcement (due some time before the B.U.-Syracuse game next week): the two schools have agreed to play for the bean pot from here on out.

Publicityman Wood didn’t seem to mind that a lot of people knew about his stunt. He was confident that, within a few years, nobody would care very much how the old Bean Pot Tradition did start.