HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

February 1896 - On Spy Pond (Arlington, Mass.), the Harvard Ice Polo Association plays its first game, against Brown, launching the nation's oldest college hockey rivalry. Harvard wins, 5-4. Players use a rubber ball instead of a puck.

February 1970 - The first Faculty Council is elected to serve as a faculty steering committee and as the FAS Dean's cabinet. The 18-member group supplants the Committee on Educational Policy.

Feb. 28, 1970 - Calling itself SLOP (Students for Less Overpricing), a graduate-student group stages a one-day boycott protesting food quality and costs at the Harkness Commons Dining Hall.

February 1971 - Harvard University Press announces plans to publish its first paperback editions, a group of 10 titles slated for release in May.

Feb. 8, 1971 - The Indoor Athletic Building (now the Malkin Athletic Center) begins a 30-day trial of mixed-gender swimming.

Feb. 22, 1971 - Thousands attend a Harvard teach-in sparked by the U.S. invasion of Laos.

February 1972 - Harvard purchases the 180-room Hotel Continental (Garden St. and Concord Ave., Cambridge) for $1.2 million, with a long-term goal of converting it into graduate-student housing and a possible short-term goal of using it for the College's first coresidential freshman dormitory (starting in fall 1972).

Feb. 7, 1972 - The Monroe C. Gutman Library opens at the Graduate School of Education.

Feb. 6, 1973 - Ise Frank Gropius, widow of late architect and former Design School Dean Walter Gropius, gives the Busch-Reisinger Museum 48 original prints (in five portfolios) by artists of the 1920s (including Klee, Kandinsky, Feininger, Schlemmer, Marcks, Marcoussis, Survage, Chagall, De Chirico, and Jawlensky).

- From the Harvard Historical Calendar, a database compiled by Marvin Hightower