"Hook 'Em Cow"

Today's a holiday!

Let's go out and play!

We'll go out and have some fun,

Kick in the door and away we'll run.

South Saint Paul has the prettiest queen

That this old carnival ever has seen.

You'll know our queen by the hair on her head;

Like Louie Hill's whiskers it's a beautiful red!

Torra lorra lorra lay. . . .

Horses ran away. The King was crowded out of the parade. Red flares, torches, giant sparklers in the hands of hilarious, milling, cheering celebrants ushered in an eight-day revival of St. Paul's historic wintersports carnival, last Saturday night. Not since most of them were youngsters, 20 years ago, had the members of South St. Paul's* old "Hook 'Em Cow Club" had such a night to sing their song. Not since the national American Legion convention of 1924 had downtown St. Paul swarmed with such noisy, enthusiastic thousands.

St. Paul's businessmen had done themselves proud. Lacking the $100,000 munificence of red-whiskered Louis W. Hill,/- who endowed the second and third St. Paul winter carnivals in 1916 and 1917, they had raised the expenses of this year's show by contributions and public sale of $1 carnival buttons. Citizens had saved their Christmas trees, donated them for street decorations. The WPA had furnished men to build a five-story ice palace, 191 ft. long, 70 ft. wide, 60 ft. high. Business and civic groups selected beauteous stenographers, secretaries, sales girls as their "queens.'' Rudy Vallee, playing a week's orchestra engagement at St. Paul, was on hand to select from among them a consort for Carnival King Frank Madden, columnist on the St. Paul Dispatch.

A three-quarter-mile toboggan slide led down into South St. Paul's Main Street where "Hook 'Em Cows" prepared to serve 15,000 quarts of stew cooked in a huge kettle outdoors. From the Ice Palace a four-block slide sluiced down Cedar Street. Parks and public rinks were crowded and daily parades of gaudy costumed carnivalists marched and countermarched to watch hockey games, dogsled races, ski jumping, snowshoeing. Inside the State Fair Hippodrome, Ralph Hachenbach of Chicago witj| his long-bladed racing skates sliced almost four seconds off the U. S. two-mile indoor record (time 5:54.8).

Not se ancient as St. Paul's (first held in 1886) is the winter carnival of the Dartmouth Outing Club scheduled this week-end at Hanover, N. H. for the syth year, but Dartmouth's party is the foremost U. S. wintersports meeting. Last week Dartmouth was worried, for still holding was the balmy weather which had ruined half the winter for more than 70,000 ski addicts on the Eastern seaboard, forced cancellation of snow trains, hit the purses of hundreds of winter inn-owners throughout the White, Green, and Adirondack Mountains. Even the world snowshoe championships at Ottawa Jan. 30 had to be run on snowless ground. Dartmouth feared it would have to import snow for its ski-jumping. But oldsters could remember no year in which snow did not finally fall in time for the Dartmouth Carnival and sure enough, on January's last day, their faith was rewarded. Snow which for weeks has blanked the Pacific Northwest, the Dakotas and Minnesota, came to New England.

* Stockyards district. /-Son of the late great Railroader James J Hill who built the Great Northern and whom Lewis Hill succeeded as G. N. president in 1907

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