December 6, 1937

After six weeks of cross-campus banter and sudden national notoriety, students at Princeton responsible for the “Lonely Hearts Club” announced its demise. In October an advertisement in The Miscellany News, declaring that hundreds of Princeton men were lonely, encouraged Vassar students to “Find your post-box lover by writing to the Lonely Hearts Club, 121 Little Hall, Princeton, N. J,” adding, “Everything confidential.” Some Vassar students responded satirically and The Misc. printed an editorial, “Exposé,” which revealed the club to be “a vicious attempt of a thwarted Yale man to discredit the name of Princeton before the world.” The editorial went on to proclaim every Princeton man “a combination Adonis, Tarzan and Socrates.”

The club’s founders were soon invited to appear on radio programs and a song-writer offered a lyric to the “Lonely Hearts.” After receiving 500 letters from as far away as London, Paris and Havana and from 35 colleges including Notre Dame and Harvard, they wrote to the Vassar newspaper, “Yes, girls, the club is dead, but only because the best of jokes must come to an end.” In declaring the club’s end, the Princeton men still wanted “to correct a few details. Yale boys are too absorbed in the Shirley Temple Club at present to be connected with anything as mature as Vassar. Your appraisal of Princeton men, slightly reserved…is fairly accurate.”

The New York Times