Entrance requirements at that time were a great deal more exacting than at the present day. One had to pass with a grade of fifty in at least three major studies. I selected spelling, arithmetic, and English literature. I can still recall the five words we were asked to spell, namely Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Fitzgerald, Scotty Fitzgerald (their daughter), Rube Goldberg (one of their friends), and St. Paul (where Mr. Fitzgerald came from). I spelled two and a half of the words right, giving me the required mark of fifty.
The arithmetic test consisted of two questions, the first of which was, If four sailors go into a corner grocery and buy three cakes of soap at five cents a cake, what is it? The answer was tar soap. The other question was, Give the telephone numbers, residence and business, of five successful stevedores. In this test I scored one hundred, or as the examiners called it, a sweep.
In English literature we were required to name the criminal in the three following stories from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes—“The Speckled Band,” “The Engineer’s Thumb,” and “The Copper Beeches.” I got the first two all right, but by the time I came to the third, the gin which was then passed around between every two questions, began to make me sleepy and I wrote down “Never mind.” However, I had won low medal score and the next thing on the programme was football.
I shall never forget the first day I reported for football practice. Now, at New Haven, they have a field so big that they call it the Bowl. Our field at Lancaster was so small that they called it the Ash Tray. The Yale team was then being coached by John Paul Jones, a grandfather of Tad Jones. Ted Coy was the captain, but there was a rule that if, on the first day of practice, any candidate appeared who was more beautiful than the captain, he supplanted the last named. Thus it was that I captained Yale in my freshman year.
I will omit the details of the first week’s practice, which embraced the usual fundamentals, such as pumping up the ball, mending holes in the bladder, lacing and unlacing, and throwing your hat over the cross bar of the goal. We were scheduled to play Harvard the first Saturday, as it was then figured, and correctly, that if the hardest game came first, there was much less of a strain on the players through the balance of the season. In fact, as soon as the Harvard game was over, the squad used to let up gradually week by week until by the time of the final game of the season, usually with Maine or Harrisburg High School, the majority of the athletes were so stewed that they came to the field in their pajamas or went to the wrong field entirely.
On the Friday before the Harvard game, I overcame my natural diffidence and began to inspire the men with such expressions as “Come on, men!” “Keep at them, men!” etc., and when one of our players made a particularly good stroke, I never failed to say “Bravo!” or, if it was a girl, “Brava!”
All the chairs were taken half an hour before the big game started. There must have been a hundred and twelve people in the Ash Tray. First the Harvard partisans would give their cry—“Mind over matter, men! Mind over matter!”—and from across the Tray the Yalensians would shout back: “Fight for Old Eli and Root for Elihu, Root!” The rival bands played their battle hymns, Harvard’s melodious “Break the News to Mother” vying with the Yale classic, “Ridi, Pagliacci.” The two teams, each shy one man, who was drunk, tiptoed on the field so as not to let the crowd know they were there, and thus avoid the danger of rioting.
I hardly tried in the first half and we failed to score. Harvard was also held scoreless. In our dressing room, between the halves, Coach Jones lit into some of the men mercilessly, telling them their faults. “Heffelfinger,” he shouted at a big guard, “you didn’t clean your nails this morning. As for you, Coy, you quit tickling Thorne in the back of the neck from now on.” And so forth. He criticised everybody but me.
Most of the second half went by and still there was no score. The crowd had gone home stiff.16
Finally the field judge stopped the game to find out what time it was. He was a painter and could not work after four thirty. The players’ watches all disagreed and the official ruled that it was four twenty-nine, which was what his cousin, Charley Brickley’s, watch said. With a minute to play, I uncorked the trick I had been holding in reserve all through the game. I neglected to mention that two days prior to the battle, we had sent Harvard a set of our signals and they, knowing every play as it was called, were able to stop it. But now I called a signal that was not in the set we had sent them. It was for Jim Braden to deflate the ball, pack it up and send it back to the manufacturers with a complaint that it was defective. The mail box was back of Harvard’s goal line and the Harvard team stood aside and allowed him to make the touchdown, never suspecting that the ball was in that neatly wrapped bundle. That is the true story of my first big victory over Harvard, 5 to 1.
IX
Yale, Beaten by Blind Boys
After the Harvard game I tendered my resignation as Yale captain because my incumbency was making some of the men so miserable. Every night when they were put to bed, Thorne and Coy and Butterworth cried with such plaintiveness that none of the other athletes
