Goldfish swallowing 1694883 222352885 2008-06-28T22:05:07Z Icarus3 282222 rm non-notable church youth group instance '''Goldfish swallowing''' was a college [[fad]] of the late 1930s, consisting of exactly what its name implies. A 1963 letter to the ''New York Times'' claimed that the fad began in late 1938 when Lothrop Withington Jr., a [[Harvard]] freshman with "[class] presidential aspirations," was encouraged by his "campaign managers" to do so as a publicity stunt: "Reporters and photographers were inadvertently present in the Harvard Freshman Union when Withington swallowed his live [[goldfish]] (with a mashed potato chaser) and started a nationwide fad in the spring of 1939." The editor replied that "unless the Editor's memory is deceiving him, the goldfish-swallowing craze among school and college boys had begun at least as early as 1930."<ref>Newman, Harry, Jr. "The Goldfish Swallowers." Letter to ''New York Times'', February 27, 1963, p. 6</ref> Apparently his memory ''was'' deceiving him, as ''[[Time (magazine)|Time]]'' magazine noted in a 1939 article, "Harvard Freshman Lothrop Withington Jr., son of a onetime (1910) Harvard football captain, started the fad sweeping U. S. campuses...".<ref>{{cite web |url= http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,760999-1,00.html|title= Goldfish Derby|accessdate=2007-10-04 |format= |work= [[Time (magazine)|Time]]}}</ref> ==See also== *[[Panty raid]] *[[Phonebooth stuffing]] ==References== {{reflist}} ==External links== *[http://www.badfads.com/pages/events/goldfish.html Swallowing Goldfish] at Bad Fads Museum *[http://library.thinkquest.org/3205/SwalG.html Swallowing Goldfish] at [[ThinkQuest]] *[http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_g1epc/is_tov/ai_2419100268 College Fads] from ''The St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture'' {{culture-stub}} [[ko:금붕어 삼키기]] [[Category:1930s fads]] [[Category:Goldfish]] [[Category:Practical jokes]] [[Category:Student culture]]