Goldfish Swallowing
It began with a brag that led to a dare and a bet in the spring of 1939. Harvard Freshman Lothrop Withington, Jr., who had seen somebody swallowing a goldfish when he was a child, bragged to his friends that he had done it himself. His friends called bullshit, he swore he had, and things escalated and got heated. Eventually one of Lothrop’s friends decided to call his bluff by betting him ten dollars that he couldn’t do it again. Backed into a corner by his big mouth, Lothrop, like most young men in similar situations, wasn’t about to back down, so he accepted the wager. The rest was stupid fad history.
In reality, Lothrop had never actually swallowed a goldfish before. Still, he wasn’t about to expose himself to the ridicule of his peers, so adhering to the motto “death before dishonor“, he manfully set about preparing himself. In the days leading up to the bet’s settlement, Lothrop started off small, swallowing tadpoles. He then gradually worked his way up from baby goldfish, to midsized ones, and finally to full grown goldfish.
The spring of 1939 was probably a slow news stretch in Boston, because the local media ended up extensively covering what was, after all, just a silly bet between college kids. On the appointed day, March 3rd, 1939, a crowd of eager college kids, peppered with townies and some reporters, gathered to see if Lothrop would put his mouth where the money was. He did. He plucked an unlucky 3 inch long live goldfish from a glass beaker, crammed the wriggling creature into his mouth, gave a couple chews, and swallowed. As he put it later: “the scales caught a bit on my throat as it went down“.
Something about the event resonated, and the story quickly spread from the local news to the national media. Soon, even the era’s biggest magazine, Life, had a feature about the Harvard goldfish swallowing. Before anybody knew it, a goldfish swallowing craze had swept the country’s colleges. Lothrop’s pioneering feat was soon eclipsed: a student at the University of Pennsylvania swallowed 25 goldfish. His days in the spotlight were brief, however: his record was soon shattered and his title of “Intercollegiate Goldfish Swallowing Champion” was snatched by somebody from MIT, who gulped down 42. The MIT kid’s accomplishment was soon eclipsed in turn by Joseph Deliberato of Clark University, who swallowed 89 goldfish in a single sitting in April of 1939.
The fad was intense, but short lived. Pressure from The Animal Rescue League – the PETA of its day – began changing public perceptions, and state legislators began introducing bills that sought “to preserve the fish from cruel and wanton consumption“. The pastime’s popularity waned, and it was not long before goldfish swallowing stopped being cool on college campuses, and the trend faded into oblivion. That is, until recently, when it was revived as “The Goldfish Challenge”, with plenty of gross videos of people swallowing goldfish littering YouTube.
