Can’t “get a room,” even at the Waverly? The intrepid Varsity staff had the solution for you 75 years ago, though perhaps giving away more than they intended to in this erudite editorial, first published on Friday, October 17th, 1930.
A petter’s paradise?
Anyone who has ever tried to find a legal place to park a car in Toronto streets by day knows full well that there is not a more hopeless task extant. Police regulations conspire with the blue, honking hazes of the traffic jams to render it impossible to park even a Bantam Austin unless you have a spare vest pocket.
But anyone who has ever tried to find a secluded spot in which to park by night for the purpose of tender whisperings and amorous masteries must know that all the hounds of hell could not bay more hotly on the scent than the city police in their anxiety to stop the furtive embrace.
The sound has gone out, however, from mouth to mouth of those who have long been chased from high street to bystreet, that there is a haven provided by the merciful Venus for nocturnal petters.
“Park on the university grounds!” runs the whisper. “Nobody will bother you there!”
So, night after night, parked cars are to be observed distributed about the campus-quite beyond the ken and jurisdiction of the City constabulary. Special investigation by representatives of The Varsity has elicited the fact that it is neither engine trouble nor desire to watch the rising of the harvest moon that prompts the parking. It is the sex urge.
While the sex urge is not a thing to be lewdly relegated to the limbo of eye-brow raisers or prudes, we cannot resist the conclusion that nocturnal petting in parked and darkened cars is a thing both ethically and aesthetically unsound. It is not only a source of stumbling to the young and a source of regret to the old, but it places the participator in the position of one who reduces the fine art of love-making to the level of street-brawls and dirty jokes.
Yet, parked petting by night on the campus appears to be a matter which is being completely ignored by the university police. Whether they are influenced by an “Oh-well-they’re-only-young-once” attitude or whether they are merely following the example of others higher up who hold that rules were made to be discussed and not enforced, the fact remains that the university police are making no move to emulate the diligence of their confreres of the city police force in trying to check a practice which has been widely stamped as vicious and immoral.
It is scarcely an inspiring example to the outside world when the University of Toronto campus becomes the last stronghold of the parked petter.
