Youth: Those lazy, Hazy Days

Summer vacation! All through the school years these words once shone with dreams of long and lazy days —fish-jumping, hammock-reading, fun-filled days of time to do everything, and no need to do anything at all. But to contemporary boys and girls, summer means something else again. Even for the gold coast types with sports cars to burn, loafing is Out and working is In.

“Once it was three wonderful months of clambakes and necking,” a matron remembers wistfully. “The boys just had a good time and the girls helped them have it. Now they’ve all got to be off somewhere doing something.” “Everybody has a summer job here at U.C.L.A.,” says Recent Grad John Wilkinson. “Anybody can just go to school,” explains his friend Jeff Donfeld. “Now the prestigious thing to say is I go to school and I work in summer.’ ” Williams College Chaplain John Eusden describes the phenomenon as “a new, near-missionary zeal — very contagious. The students are extremely conscious of shortened distances, and the whole world is on their minds. They have a great sense of being a drop in the bucket, but they have a tremendous desire to use their talents, however meager. This is recklessness in the best sense.”

On the Streets of Paris. The trend has been growing ever since World WarII. At Princeton, for instance, 56% of the junior class had summer jobs in 1949; last year it was 75.5% . Of the rest, 7.9% spent the summer studying, 8.1% traveling, 6.6% in the armed forces, and only 1.9% doing nothing at all. At Williams, the percentage of summer workers rose from 58.7% in 1949 to 82.6% last year, and their combined earnings have jumped from $307,000 in 1952 to $490,000 in 1962.

The girls are not just manicuring their nails either. A recent study of the students at the Seven Sisters (Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar and Wellesley) shows that last year six out of every ten were gainfully employed during the summer. This year some 300 will work in scientific research laboratories without pay as part of their training, about 75 will serve in Government internship programs in Washington. Many more will join traveling seminars in art, language and international affairs. Others like Vassar’s future geologist, Diana Chapman will devote their summer to their specialty, and still others will be engaged in such mundane activities as hawking the Herald Tribune on the streets of Paris and being a charwoman in London.

Caterers & Couriers. U.S. students, in short, rack up a range of summertime experience that is a far cry from the old-fashioned lifeguard and learn-the-business jobs. Much of the student activity is being channeled into good works such as the Experiment in International Living, Operation Crossroads, the American Friends Service Committee, the International Association for the Exchange of Student Technical Experience and the Northern Students Movement. University of Chicago Students Jack Fanselow and Tom Burdick will spend their summer flying balloons in Manitoba to measure cosmic rays, and Harvard Senior David Crane has organized a mobile catering-bartending outfit staffed by fellow undergraduates. Last summer the relatively small student body of Williams (1,121) boasted a clambake caterer in Maine, a salmon fisherman in Alaska, a supermarket meatcutter in Maine, a mosquito inspector in New Jersey, a Pinkerton detective in Indiana, a labor union organizer in New York City, a toll collector in Buffalo, a CIA courier in Washington, and a groom for a string of race horses traveling between Maine and Delaware.