What Was America’s Strangest College Fad?

After bragging that he had once eaten a live fish, fellow Harvard students called Lothrop Withington Jr.’s bluff, and bet him $10 USD that he couldn’t swallow a live goldfish. The gullible freshman reportedly practiced, gulping down baby goldfish and tadpoles in advance of the big event. Someone even convinced a Boston reporter to attend, and on 3 March 1939, Withington popped a 3-inch (7.6-cm) long goldfish into his mouth, chewed a couple of times, and swallowed -- marking the beginning of a crazy college fad that was all the rage throughout 1939.

Fish out of water:

• Competitions sprang up all over the country. At the University of Pennsylvania, a student downed 35 goldfish, only to be eclipsed by a guy at MIT who ate 42.
• The big winner -- or loser, depending on your perspective -- may have been Clark University’s Joseph Deliberato, who reportedly swallowed 89 goldfish in one sitting.
• Eventually, universities and municipalities put a stop to the practice, passing ordinances and updating school bylaws to ban the popular stunt.