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Football’s Death Harvest of 1905, or How Teddy Roosevelt Saved the Grid Game

Teddy Roosevelt loved the rough-and-tumble of football the way college athletes played it back in 1895. He even wrote a letter saying he had no use for critics who objected to the violent game. But a decade later, newspapers made much of the injuries and fatalities caused by football – the death harvest of 1905. College presidents threatened to ban football from their campuses.

Teddy Roosevelt in one of his manly pursuits

Roosevelt changed his tune.

And that is why he saved the game of football, with help from the forward pass.

Death Harvest of 1905

Colleges had already banned football once, back before the Civil War because of rough play. But it returned to campus in 1873. Walter Camp played a key role in nurturing the game’s growth since entering Yale in 1876 and then coaching and boosting the Bulldogs for decades. Football got more and more popular.

Then in 1905, the Chicago Tribune reported, 19 people died playing football that season. The Cincinnati Commercial Tribune counted even more — 25 killed and 168 seriously injured playing football that year.

On the last day of the 1905 college football season, a Yale player punched Harvard’s Francis Burr in the face, breaking his nose, and another kicked him unconscious. The assault fell within the rules of the day.

Three other college players died playing the game that season, including Harold Moore of Union College. He got a blow to his head in a game against New York University and died six hours later.

A 13-year-old Salem, Mass., boy died of internal injuries sustained in a game that year. And a game in Bridgeport, Conn., broke a man’s back and killed him.

Roosevelt, then president, knew he had to do something.

Yale vs. Harvard

Walter Camp vigorously disagreed with critics of the game like Harvard President Charles Eliot, who tried to kick it off campus.

Walter Camp as a football star at Yale.

It was Camp who had received Roosevelt’s letter in 1895 praising the “athleticism” of the game. Roosevelt, then Civil Service commissioner, wrote that all Americans owed Camp a debt for his championship of athletics. ,

“We were tending steadily in America to produce in our leisure and sedentary classes a type of man not much above the Bengalee baboo, and from this the athletic spirit has saved us,” he wrote. “No fellow worth his salt if he minds an occasional bruise or cut…”

Then Roosevelt described his own injuries from sport.

I was knocked senseless at polo once, and it was a couple of hours before I came to. I broke an arm once riding to hounds, and I broke my nose another time; and out on the roundup in the west I once broke a rib, and at another time the point of my shoulder. I got these injuries when I was father of a family, and while of course they caused more or less inconvenience, and my left arm is not as strong as it might be now, nothing would persuade me to surrender the fun and the health which I could not have had save at the risk.

Eliot thought little of Roosevelt’s attitude, which he described as “doctrine of Jingoism, this chip-on-the-shoulder attitude of a ruffian and a bully.”

Summit

In 1905, the year of the death harvest, President Theodore Roosevelt summoned delegates from the football programs at Harvard, Yale and Princeton to the White House, along with Secretary of State Elihu Root. It was five weeks before the Harvard-Yale game that would so injure Francis Burr.

“Football is on trial,” Roosevelt said. “Because I believe in the game, I want to do all I can to save it. And so I have called you all down here to see whether you won’t all agree to abide by both the letter and spirit of the rules, for that will help.”

But how?

A Violent Game

The game back then was largely played without helmets, pads or other protective gear. Then, players only needed to advance only five yards for a first down. They had no neutral zone between the offensive and defensive lines. Players also stayed on the field for most or all of the game’s 70 minutes. Offensive players wedged themselves together and bashed their bodies against the huddled defenses. Mass pileups allowed punching, kicking and gouging.

Some reformers thought opening up the game by widening the field or allowing the forward pass would make it safer. That way, there’d be fewer pileups and less use of the human body as a battering ram.

Camp, who dominated football’s rulemaking committee, opposed the forward pass. He thought it would take the roughhouse excitement out of the game.

What Happened After the Death Harvest Year

A few weeks after the summit with Yale, Princeton and Harvard, Roosevelt asked Harvard’s coach, Bill Reid, for an update. Reid felt pressured by President Eliot to reform the game. Otherwise Eliot would ban it.

Reid told Roosevelt that Camp ran the rules committee with a member of the U.S. Naval Academy faculty, Paul Dashiell. Reid suggested he draft rule changes that Harvard could support. Then Roosevelt could pressure Dashiell into accepting them. The Naval Academy, after all, belonged to the executive branch of government. And if Dashiell caved to Roosevelt, then Camp would have to cave, too.

The rules passed. They would change over time, but they essentially included the forward pass, the 10-yard first down and the neutral zone between the offense and defense.

“Except for this chain of events there might now be no such thing as American football as we know it,” Bill Reid later said. “You asked me whether President Theodore Roosevelt helped save the game. I can tell you that he did.”

With thanks to Score One for Roosevelt by Karen Abbott in the Sept. 20, 2011 Smithsonian Magazine. This story updated in 2023.

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Old Town Canoe, Inspired by the Penobscot People

The Old Town Canoe Company couldn’t have started in a better place when it built its first canoe more than a hundred years ago. Old Town, Maine, is a small city located on the fringe of the Great North Woods and next to the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation. The Penobscot River runs right through Old Town.

The Penobscot people had been making birch bark canoes for hundreds of years. They provided the inspiration – and many employees – for the Old Town Canoe Company’s original wood-and-canvas canoes.

Old Town, Maine, in 1907

For centuries, natives and non-natives in Northern Maine had used canoes as workboats. But then canoes evolved into recreational craft — wildly popular recreational craft. Decades later the canoe-like kayak became all the rage.

The Old Town Canoe Company has ridden those waves ever since 1898. Today it makes more kayaks than canoes. But it has, remarkably, survived as an American company that still makes something. Here’s how they did it.

Penobscot

The Penobscot people built their community on and near the Penobscot River and Bay. For centuries they have lived and worked on the river as hunters, fishermen, log drivers, craftsmen, trappers, guides and stewards.

Penobscot Bay

Their birchbark canoes are sometimes called “one of the greatest inventions in human history.” It takes 500 hours to make one.

A Wabanaki birchbark canoe from the 19th century on display at the Pejebscot Historical Society in Brunswick, Maine.

To do it, the Penobscot used one piece of birchbark from stem to stern. They used ash and cedar for the gunwales, spruce root and sap to plug the cracks and cedar strips for the thwarts. Then they’d sink the canoe in the fall and raise it in the spring to keep the bark pliable.

In 1857, Henry David Thoreau took a canoe trip with his Penobscot guide, Joseph Polis, from Bangor to the Allagash Lakes and back.

He recounted a discussion between Polis and a St. Francis native about the kind of spruce root to use in a birch bark canoe.

Our Indian said that he used black spruce roots to sew canoes with, obtaining it from high lands or mountains. The St. Francis Indians thought that white spruce roots might be best. But the former said, “No good, break, can’t split ’em.”

I told him I thought that I could make a canoe, but he expressed great doubt of it; at any rate he thought that my work would not be “neat” the first time.

Industrial Highway

Going without a boat in 19^th century Maine would be like not having a car or a truck today.

The Penobscot River near Bucksport, Maine.

When Thoreau took his canoe trip, the Penobscot River functioned as an industrial highway. Schooners hauled wood products from Bangor, the world’s largest lumber port, to international destinations. River drivers used bateaux to maneuver along the logs they drove.

With strong demand for schooners, bateaux and canoes, boatbuilding thrived in the Bangor region.

Rivermen on the Mooselookmeguntic Lake in Maine during the spring 1943 pulpwood drive. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Sometime after the Civil War, the birchbark canoe inspired canoe makers in and near Old Town. They began making wood and canvas canoes. Evan H. Gerrish may have been the first, selling them from his shop in Bangor, 12 miles from Old Town. Edwin M. White saw one of Gerrish’s canoes and started making his own in Old Town. Alfred E. Wickett worked for him, and later for the Old Town Canoe Company. C.B. Thatcher of Bangor, B.N. Morris of Veazie and G.E. Carleton in Old Town also made canoes.

Old Town Canoe

By 1898, 15 factories reportedly made canoes in the Old Town area. That year, George Gray hired A.E. Wickett to build a wood-and-canvas canoe behind his hardware store. George and his brother Herbert didn’t build boats, but they hired people who did. In 1901 they bought a former shoe factory on Middle Street and began making canoes out of it. Some of those survived for a hundred years.

A postcard highlights one of the benefits of owning a canoe.

Their wood-and-canvas canoe sold quickly, bolstered by a craze for canoeing. Young people especially liked courting canoes. The young man would paddle from the back thwart. The young lady would face him, sitting on a pillow on the bottom and enjoying the ride.

The video below, by Thomas Edison, gives you an idea of just how popular canoeing had gotten by 1904.

By 1910, Old Town Canoe had 60 employees, many of whom were local Penobscot. The Grays bought one of the other Old Town canoe companies, Carleton, and began making bateaux as well. A Canadian canoe maker tried to lure the Old Town boat builders away, and the Old Town Canoe Company brought suit against its northern competitor.

Old Town Canoe Rebounds

In 1917 they introduced the motorized canoe with a square stern to which an outboard motor could be attached. In 1940, Old Town Canoe made its first kayak – a wood-and-canvas model. It was then the biggest canoe maker in the world. By the mid-1940s, the company ran five logging operations to get enough wood to meet demand.

But after the war, Old Town Canoe faced increasing competition from aluminum and fiberglass canoes. The Grays’ descendants, who still owned the company, thought aluminum kayaks were ugly and refused to make them. And Deane Gray, George’s grandson, had a sign on his desk that said, ““If God wanted fiberglass boats, he would have made fiberglass trees!”

By the early 1960s, the company’s sales dwindled to 200 canoes a year.

By then, the company also made motorboats and sailboats. In 1965, a Cleveland Plain Dealer copyeditor named Robert Manry sailed alone from Falmouth, Mass., to Falmouth, England. He did it in Tinkerbelle, a 13.5-foot Whitecap sailboat made by Old Town Canoe.

A Change of Heart

By then Old Town had finally begun experimenting with new materials, and in 1965 it built its first fiberglass canoe. Other innovations – especially the Discovery canoe – allowed it to return to profitability and regain its title as the world’s largest canoe maker.

The 1972 film Deliverance used seven Old Town canoes.

Corporate cash also helped the company rebound. In late 1974, Johnson Diversified, a Racine, Wisc.-based conglomerate, bought Old Town Canoes in December 1974.

Old Town Canoe ad for a war canoe

By 2000 it made more kayaks than canoes, and more of both than anybody. It still makes wood-and-canvas canoes, along with tens of thousands of kayaks, and it employs about 150 people.

In 2002, Steve Cayard, a non-native, self-taught birchbark canoe builder, led a canoe-building workshop on Indian Island. Passamaquoddy, Maliseet and Penobscot attended. Barry Dana, then chief of the Penobscot Nation, had invited him in order to revive the craft of birchbark canoe building.

In 2016, Harvard’s Peabody Museum staged an exhibition called “The Legacy of Penobscot Canoes: A View From the River.”

Images: Group in canoe By Virginia State Parks staff – YR- Waiting for the rest of the groupUploaded by AlbertHerring, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29217331

1934 Old Town kayak By Squirrelwhisperer – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43483254.

Birchbark canoe By Paul VanDerWerf from Brunswick, Maine, USA – Wabanaki Canoe, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70766856.

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The Four Women Who Cooked the First Thanksgiving

The four women who cooked that first Thanksgiving probably didn’t feel all that thankful when their husbands invited 90 guests, all Wampanoag men, to eat with them.

They were the only women left after the first deadly winter that killed half of Plymouth Colony. They died of exhaustion, starvation, pneumonia, scurvy and cold. By springtime, 14 women had perished. Remarkably, the four women left managed to feed 143 people without kitchens, ovens, wheat, spices or butter.

This 1899 painting, The First Thanksgiving 1621 by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris has a number of inaccuracies. It shows the four women who cooked the first Thanksgiving with smiling faces.

Their dinner guests may have shown up unexpectedly, as the Native people had a tendency to appear when food was served. Or perhaps their menfolk had invited them to seal a peace deal. The meal itself – or rather meals, because they stayed for three days – served as more of a harvest celebration than a Thanksgiving.

The Four Women Who Cooked the First Thanksgiving

The women faced another challenge: getting along with each other. Cooking for so m any people required cooperation among the four, who had different backgrounds and aspirations. They included a Saint, a Goodwife, a Traveler and a Troublemaker.

The colonists referred to themselves as “Saints” and “Strangers” or “Travelers.” The devout Saints wanted to separate from the Church of England and crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom. Strangers came for adventure and opportunity. That both Saints and Strangers signed the Mayflower Compact shows the inclusiveness of the colonists.

Signing the Mayflower Companct 1620 by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris.

That first Thanksgiving was cooked by two Saints, Mary Brewster and Susanna Winslow, and two Strangers, Elizabeth Hopkins and Eleanor Billington.

But they probably all deserved sainthood for cooking all that food. The men just “feasted and entertained,” according to one of their husbands.

Goodwife Susanna Winslow

That husband, Edward Winslow, had married Susanna White in May, about five months earlier. He would serve as Plymouth’s governor and diplomat, and together they would prosper.

Edward Winslow, husband of one of the four women who cooked the first Thanksgiving

So at 29, Susanna Winslow was a rising figure in the little colony, a goodwife who would grow into a mistress.

Historians can’t tell for sure whether Susanna arrived as a Saint or a Stranger. Her first husband had a common name, and women didn’t leave much of a record. So no one seems to really know which Englishman named William White boarded the Mayflower.

Susanna and William brought their young son, Resolved, about five years old. Susanna was pregnant, and gave birth to their second son, Peregrine, below decks on the Mayflower as it lay at anchor in Massachusetts Bay. Odd as “Resolved” and “Peregrine” may seem, their names were typical of the Puritans. They suggest Susanna was a Saint.

William died in February and Elizabeth Winslow in March. Forty-eight days after Elizabeth died, Edward married Susanna. He brought to the union a daughter, Margaret, about three years old.

Edward and Susanna had practical and emotional reasons for marrying so soon after their spouses died. As Martyn Whittock points out in Mayflower Lives, “Shared faith, shared history, mutual respect, and, no doubt, physical as well as emotional attraction drew them together. And there is plenty of evidence for loving physical union enhancing partnership in the godly marriages.”

A portrait of Edward Winslow suggests a happy marriage. In his hand he holds a letter. The last three lines read, “From your loving wife, Susanna.” The portrait was painted in 1651, 30 years after their wedding.

Mary Brewster, Saint

Puritans believed in social hierarchy, so one can easily guess who took charge of the cooking operation:

52-year-old Mary Brewster, wife of the Saints’ spiritual leader, William Brewster.

William Brewster

Mary probably wished she had the help of her two daughters, Patience, 21, and Fear, 15, to cook for all those people. But the Brewsters left their daughters behind. They believed, like many of the colonists, that the weaker sex might not survive the journey. That explains why so few women cooked the first Thanksgiving.

That Mary joined her husband tells us something about her grit, her courage and her deep religious faith.

The Brewsters did bring their two boys with them, Love and Wrestling, about 11 and 7 at the first Thanksgiving. They would have helped prepare the meal, along with little Resolved White and Margaret Winslow. Richard More, their seven-year-old servant, would have helped, too.

Richard had come with three siblings, all dead by the time of the first Thanksgiving. Known as one of the Mayflower Love Children, Richard’s legal father had sent the children to America when he discovered he was not their biological father.

Patience and Fear arrived in Plymouth a few years later, along with older brother Jonathan.

Fear married another saint, Isaac Allerton. Her great-great-great-grandson, Zachary Taylor, served as the 12th president of the United States.

Elizabeth Hopkins, Traveler

Two years before boarding the Mayflower, Elizabeth Hopkins, married one of the most interesting Plymouth colonists, Stephen Hopkins. She was 33, he a 36-year-old widower with three children. He had already survived a shipwreck in the Caribbean and taken part in the settlement of Jamestown before returning to England. His adventure as a castaway on a Caribbean island probably inspired Shakespeare to create the character Stephano in The Tempest.

stephen-hopkins-caliban-stephano-trinculo

Calilban, Stephano and Trinculo from the painting The Tempest by Johann Heinrich Ramberg

Stephen, a rough-and-ready sort, planned to return to Virginia with his family. His family included Constance, 14, and Giles, 12, the two surviving children from his first marriage. Little Damaris, about three, may have been conceived before the marriage. Elizabeth was pregnant at the outset of the voyage.

She probably hoped to have her baby on land, but crosswinds and storms extended the unpleasant Mayflower voyage. She gave birth to Oceanus in a dark, cramped berth below the decks of the gyrating vessel.

Stephen, though a Traveler, held a position of importance in the colony. Because of his time in Jamestown, he could hunt and he knew about Native Americans. When the English-speaking Native American Samoset came to Plymouth, Elizabeth and Stephen put him up that night in their tiny house (the 1749 Court House Museum in downtown Plymouth stands on the site).

The house had at the very most three rooms, cramped quarters four adults, three children and the Hopkins’ two servants, Edward Doty and Edward Leister. The crowding probably didn’t help anyone’s temper. The two servants had fought and wounded each other in a sword-and-dagger duel a few months before that Thanksgiving.

Stephen was not the godly sort, and we can imagine Elizabeth wasn’t, either. They would have five more children, run a tavern and occasionally get into trouble with the authorities. Stephen had to pay fines for allowing drinking and shuffleboard on Sunday, for overserving and for overcharging customers.

But theirs seems to have been a successful partnership. When Stephen died in 1644 his will directed he be buried as close as possible to Elizabeth.

Eleanor Billington, Troublemaker

Eleanor Billington, on the other hand, was a troublemaker from a troublemaking family. The younger of her two sons, Francis, nearly burned down the Mayflower as it lay anchored in Plymouth Harrbor in December of 1620. He’d set off some homemade fireworks with his father’s gunpowder.

Eleanor had a hard time controlling her sons, if she even tried. Both tended to wander off unsupervised. In one case her older son John roamed into a camp of Nausets, who had clashed with the colonists upon their first arrival.

William Bradford

Gov. William Bradford described Eleanor’s husband, John Billington, as “a knave.” Billington contemptuously challenged Capt. Myles Standish’s orders during a militia drill in March 1621.Had he not begged forgiveness, the Plymouth authorities would have punished him. In 1630, he did get punished – hanged for murdering a neighbor.

Bradford then described the Billingtons as one of the “profanest families among them.” He could not understand how the Pilgrims had allowed them to join them from London.

Eleanor Billington also caused trouble. In 1636, she went to the stocks and received a whipping for slandering another Plymouth citizen, John Doane.

But troublemakers have to eat, too, and Eleanor Billington undoubtedly pitched in to make that giant feast.

The Others

Five teenaged girls survived the winter, and they would have worked alongside the four Thanksgiving cooks. Mary Chilton was 14 when she came ashore from the Mayflower, the first woman to set foot on Plymouth soil.

The oldest, Priscilla Mullins, at 19 had lost her mother, father and brother during the winter. She would soon marry John Alden after a courtship immortalized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, their descendant. Other descendants include John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Marilyn Monroe and Calvin Coolidge.

Illustration of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins

Constance Hopkins (13 or 14), Elizabeth Tilley (14 or 15) and Dorothy, an unnamed maidservant, perhaps 18 or 19, would have helped prepare the meal as well.

They probably also had to keep an eye on the children, who included Bartholomew, Mary and Remember Allerton, Humility Cooper, Samuel Eaton and Desire Minter. The older ones would have helped.

Perhaps they minded fires, turned spits, carried water, plucked wildfowl or shucked shellfish. Maybe the lucky ones got the easy job of setting the tables – rough boards covered with cloth. They had just knives and spoons, as the first fork wouldn’t arrive in America until 1633. Tableware would have included pewter or wooden trenchers, tankards and lots and lots of napkins. Since they ate roast meat with their hands, napkins were a must.

Football, But No Pumpkin Pie

While the women cooked, the men entertained their guests. They showed off their military drills for the Wampanoags. And they probably played a version of football on the beach with the Natives, using a deerskin ball stuffed with deer hair.

At least they’d brought food. Bradford ordered four (probably including Stephen Hopkins) to shoot wildfowl. They blasted their muskets for the benefit of the Wampanoags, who outnumbered them.

The first Thanksgiving — the preferred version for many.

They may have shot some turkey, but they most likely got duck, geese, swans and maybe even carrier pigeon. The women would have plucked, trimmed and trussed them, then spit-roasted the small birds and boiled the larger ones.

They may have stuffed the birds with onions and herbs from their garden, and maybe chestnuts from the woodss. The next day, they would have taken the leftover meat and made a broth or a potage in their Dutch ovens.

The Wampanoags killed five deer and brought them as gifts. The women would have also cooked them on spits outdoors. Vegetables like corn, turnips, cabbages and carrots went into Dutch ovens on the hearths.

They would have eaten lobster, mussels and clams without butter, because cows didn’t arrive until later. Cod, bass and eels likely appeared on the tables.

They probably also served native fruit—cranberries, wild plums, melons and grapes – as well as walnuts, beechnuts and chestnuts.

Pumpkin, called pompion, undoubtedly would have appeared on the menu. The early colonists ate vast quantities of the stuff. In fact, the first American folk song is a lament about how much pumpkin they ate.

The four women who cooked the first Thanksgiving most certainly did not make pumpkin pie. With no flour, sugar or baking ovens, they probably just stewed it.

But at least they had football.

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — from the New England Historical Society’s latest ebook. Available from Amazon (click here).

With thanks to Mayflower Lives: Pilgrims in a New World and the Early American Experience by Martyn Whittock. This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Fun Facts About New England Olympians

Hundreds of New England Olympians have won, lost and placed in the summer games since they restarted in Athens in 1896.

New England’s colleges, especially the Ivies, produced many, but not all of the region’s Olympians. Some came from humble backgrounds, though a Rockefeller won a gold medal in 1924.

Some parlayed their Olympic fame into sporting careers, while others distinguished themselves in other fields.

Here, then, are six fun facts about New England Olympians.

1. Boston Sent Most of the First New England Olympians

Nine of the 14 Americans who competed in the 1896 Olympics came from either the Boston Athletic Association or the Suffolk Athletic Club of South Boston.

The Suffolk Athletic Club sponsored James B. Connolly, born in South Boston to poor Irish immigrants. He won the first event– the triple jump – thus becoming the first Olympian since the Athenian Zopyrus won the pankration in 385. Or maybe it was the Armenian Varasdates who won at boxing in 369.

James Connolly, one of the first New England Olympians (and one of the first modern Olympians)

He took home a silver medal (gold medals weren’t issued then) and an olive laurel wreath. He almost didn’t make it because a thief stole his wallet on the way to the games.

Connolly went on to have a successful writing career. He published more than 200 short stories and 25 novels, and he ran for Congress twice as a Progressive Party candidate. He lost both times.

The Suffolk Athletic Club also sponsored Thomas Burke in those first games. Burke, a second-year law student at Boston University, won the 100-yeard dash and the 400-yard run. He thus became the first person to win two events in the modern games.

Burke, too, followed a career as a writer. He worked for the Boston Journal and the Boston Post.

2. Margaret Abbott Wins in High Heels

Margaret Abbott never knew that she was the first woman to win an Olympic event.

She competed in the 1900 Paris Olympics, which coincided with the Paris Exposition and was treated as a sideshow. Called the Championnat Internationaux instead of the Olympics, it stretched out over six months and received little media attention.

Margaret had spent her early years in Boston but moved to Chicago when her mother, Mary Abbott, got a job there as literary editor of the Chicago Herald. Mother and daughter both took up golf as members of the Chicago Golf Club. Then in 1899 they moved to Paris, where Margaret studied art with Rodin and Degas. Her mother worked on a travel guide.

Margaret Abbott in her golf togs.

The Championnat Internationaux only allowed women to compete in five sports: golf, tennis, croquet, sailing and equestrianism. Mother and daughter entered the golf tournament held on Oct. 4, 1900, with no idea that it was an Olympic game.

Margaret won the tournament, despite wearing high heels and a long, tight skirt. She never realized she’d won an Olympic game. Only after her death did a University of Florida professor, Paula Welch, figure it out. Welch also served on the Olympic board of directors.

Margaret Abbott returned to Chicago, where she married the well-known humorist Peter Finley Dunne. Her son, Phillip Dunne, also won recognition as a Hollywood screenwriter. She died in 1955 in Greenwich, Conn.

3. Harry Hillman, the Raw Egg Man

A rogue wave washed over the deck of the steamship that carried the US. Team to the 1906 summer Olympics in Athens, injuring Harry Hillman and several other athletes. Hillman suffered a knee injury that Impaired his performance, and he won no medals.

Perhaps he took comfort in the fact that the Olympic Committee didn’t recognize the 1906 games.

Harry Hillman, who became a long-time coach at Dartmouth

It did, however, recognize the 1904 games, in which Hillman won gold medals for the 400-meter race, the 200-meter hurdles and the 400-meter hurdles. And in the 1908 games, also recognized, he won a silver medal in the 400-meter hurdle.

The next year he set an odd world record that no one has broken. He and Lawson Robertson ran a 100-yard three-legged race in 11 seconds.

Hillman went on to coach track at Dartmouth from 1910 until he died in Hanover, N.H., in 1965. As track coach, he urged his hurdlers to swallow raw eggs. He believed them “excellent for the wind and stomach.”

4. Eight New England Olympians From Yale

Elis have won 107 Olympic medals, including the gold medal for rowing in the 1924 Olympics. The team, called the Yale Eight, had two members who had illustrious careers.

Captain James Rockefeller

James Rockefeller captained the team and later led the bank that became Citigroup. His grandson said he took more pride in his Olympic medal than in his banking career.

New Haven native Dr. Benjamin Spock rowed on the Yale Eight as well. Later, as America’s most famous baby doctor, he warned against putting young children into “excessive competition.”

5. Albina Osipowich, Worcester’s Sweetheart

Albina Osipowich was a 17-year-old high school student from Worcester when she boarded a steamship bound for the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam. She belonged to the U.S. Olympic swim team, which also included two future Tarzans: Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe. When she returned to Worcester weeks later, 100,000 people greeted her and fellow Worcesterite Harry Devine, a boxer who had won a bronze medal. She had catapulted to world fame by winning two gold medals.

The U.S. women’s Olympic swim team. Osipowich is third from left.

Osipowich had so excelled at swimming she trained at the Boys Club, mostly competing against boys. She nearly didn’t make the Olympic team, though, because she came down with the flu just before the trials. But she made it, breaking a world record while winning the 100-meter freestyle and winning the 400-meter relay.

The people of Worcester collected $4,000 for her tuition to Pembroke, then the women’s college of Brown University. In 1930, Brown let her swim in the Colgate-Hoyt Pool, the first woman to do so.

She met and married a basketball player, Harrison Van Aken. They raised two children and until her death in xxx she rarely talked about her Olympic glory.

6. Collegiate Olympians, By the Numbers

New England colleges have produced hundreds of medal-winning Olympians. Through 2016, Harvard students took home 108 medals, with Elis close behind at 107. But they only rank eighth and ninth in the country behind the big California, Florida, Texas and Michigan schools.

Dartmouth has produced 63 medal winners, Brown 37, Boston University 23, Northeastern 18 and UConn 14. Williams and MIT students have each grabbed 12.Those in the single digits include

Middlebury 5
Boston College 3
Holy Cross 2
UNH 2
Brandeis 1
Community College of Rhode Island 1
Emerson College 1

Wondering who those lone winners are?

Brandeis fencer Tim Morehouse ’00 who scored a silver medal with the U.S. men’s sabre team at the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

Simon Shnapir of Emerson College won a bronze in team figure skating in 2014. His partner, Marissa Castelli, studied at the Community College of Rhode Island.

This story updated in 2022.

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When Ernie Shore Overshadowed Babe Ruth

Babe Ruth cast a very large shadow, but on June 23, 1917, Ernie Shore overshadowed the big guy. He even managed to do it after the Babe got kicked out of the game for punching an umpire.

Ernie Shore with Grover Cleveland Alexander

It happened at Fenway Park in a game against the Washington Senators. Ruth, the starting pitcher for the Red Sox, got thrown out of the game after one batter. Shore relieved him by getting the next 26 batters out.

Ernie Shore

Shore was a country boy from North Carolina, born March 24, 1891. He began his baseball career as a right-handed pitcher for the New York Giants in 1912. Then in 1914 he went to play for the Boston Red Sox.

He won three games and lost one in both Red Sox world championships in 1915 and 1916. Shore played for the Red Sox through the 1917 season. He missed the 1918 World Series because he served in the military during World War I.

Then Harry Frazee sold him to the New York Yankees. Frazee also sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees, bringing the Curse of the Bambino onto the team. He ended his career in 1920 with a 65-43 won-loss record and a lifetime earned run average of 2.47. Ruth’s was slightly better at 2.23.

The Incident

On that June day in 1917, Ruth took the mound for the Red Sox and walked Ray Morgan on four pitches. He believed Ball 2 and Ball 4 were actually strikes. So he charged the umpire, Clarence “Brick” Owens. Ruth yelled, “If you’d go to bed at night, you *expletive*, you could keep your eyes open long enough in the daytime to see when a ball goes over the plate!”

Owens told him to get back on the mound and pitch or he’d throw him out of the game. Ruth replied, “Throw me out and I’ll punch you right in the jaw!” So Owens threw him out. Ruth again charged the umpire and took a swing at him, just managing a glancing blow to Owens’ ear. Owens fell down and threw Ruth out of the game. Police then escorted him off the field.

Ernie Shore then took the mound and Morgan tried to steal second. He was thrown out, and Shore then retired the next 26 batters. )For those of you non-fans, that is a rare feat in baseball.) Not one reached first base. That created a conundrum for scorekeepers. Was it a perfect game, since Shore was on the mound for every out in the game? Or was it a combined no-hitter with Ruth? They eventually ruled it a combined no-hitter.

The Red Sox, by the way, won 4-0.

Babe Ruth, 1918

Aftermath

Shore retired from baseball after the 1920 season and for many years served as the sheriff of Forsyth County in North Carolina. He led the effort to build a minor league ballpark in Winston-Salem, N.C., now named after him. He died at the age of 89, the last surviving member of the 1915-16 Red Sox championship teams.

Babe Ruth received a $100 fine and a 10-game suspension. He also apologized publicly, and went on to create more mayhem and make baseball history.

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Melvil Dewey, the Womanizing OCD Librarian who Organized the Olympics

Melvil Dewey had an obsession with the number 10. He slept 10 hours, wrote 10-page letters and created the Dewey Decimal System to organize libraries. He also had an obsession with women, as in kissing and hugging them. Which is why he’s described as having a “complex legacy.”

Melvil Dewey

Dewey had an enormous impact on the development of libraries in the second half of the 19^th century. He founded Columbia University’s library school and the American Library Association, and he started the traveling library, the library for the blind and the interlibrary loan. He also helped organize the 1932 Olympics in Lake Placid, where he started a health resort. There his obsessions manifested themselves with $10 membership and a requirement that people turn out their lights at 10 p.m.

Another unpleasant Dewey trait showed up at Lake Placid: his bigotry. He only allowed white Christians into his resort.

Those biases were reflected within the Dewey Decimal System, which marginalized non-Eurocentric subjects.

Melvil Dewey

He was born in 1851 in Adams Centre in upstate New York, known as the Burned-Over District. Waves of reform and evangelism swept over it from 1800 to 1850. The district gave rise to Mormonism, Millerism, the Shakers, the Oneida Colony, abolitionists, suffragists, temperance, educational reformers and Melvil Dewey.

His parents, Joel and Eliza Dewey, made and sold boots and shoes from their little shop. Known as the hardest working people in town, they did not show much affection. That may explain their son’s predilection for unwanted hugging and kissing of women.

As a boy, he had a mania for system and classification. According to an aunt, he liked to arrange his mother’s pantry. He earned nickels and pennies for doing chores and then walked 10 miles to buy an unabridged dictionary with his savings.

His obsession with the number 10 began in high school when he discovered the metric system. He also realized his birthday, December 10, 1851, occurred exactly 52 years after the French National Assembly adopted the platinum meter bar as a standard unit of measurement. The meter measures one ten-millionth of the shortest distance from the North Pole to the equator passing through Paris.

On Jan. 29, 1868 16-year-old Melville Dewey was attending class at the Hungerford Collegiate Institute, a college prep school. A fire broke out in the building, and Dewey carried as many books out as he could. The fire got worse, so he watched from outside in the cold. Exposure and smoke inhalation resulted in a bad cough that left him bedridden for months. His doctor didn’t think he’d live. That near-death experience left him obsessed with something else: efficiency, because life is short.

Amherst College

After high school he taught for a while, went to Alfred College for a semester and then transferred to Amherst College.

In his junior year at Amherst he got a job at the library, then in Morgan Hall. He fretted over the unsystematic way the library shelved books. Back then, libraries had their own systems, but they had to re-catalogue and re-index books when they acquired new ones.

Main quad at Amherst College

Dewey had an “aha” moment when he came up with the answer: a system using letters and decimals to organize books according to their contents. He suggested it to the Amherst Library Committee, which liked the idea. Not only did the committee let him implement it, it named him assistant librarian.

He graduated in 1874, but continued to work at the library. In 1876, he published A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloging and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library. Today, more than 200,000 libraries in 135 countries use it, according to one estimate.

Another of his ideas didn’t go over so well: spelling reform. He changed the spelling of his name from Melville to Melvil to eliminate those inefficient and unnecessary letters at the end of his name. He often signed his last name Dui.

In 1876, he left Amherst for Boston—regretfully, according to his efficient spelling.

“Sum day, dear Amherst, may it be my happy lot tu pruv how great iz the love I bear yu. Proud, always, everwher to be counted among yur sonz, I am Very truly, Melvil Dui.”

Boston

Two years after moving to Boston he married Annie Godfrey, the former librarian of Wellesley College. They had one son, Godfrey.

In Boston he started a company that made and sold library supplies, including the hanging vertical file, which he invented..

From Boston, now “Melvil” organized a librarian convention at the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia, which then led to the American Library Association (ALA). He also helped found the American Library Journal.

New York

Dewey and his family moved in 1883 to New York, where he got a job as librarian at Columbia University. There he founded the school of library economy. He encouraged women to apply, probably so he could get at them more easily. He admitted 17 women and three men. Applicants had to submit photos so Dewey could gauge their attractiveness. Dewey often commented “You cannot polish a pumpkin.”

Low Library at Columbia University

Columbia officials didn’t like having ladies at the college and decided to close the library school. But in 1888, Dewey left for Albany, where he got a job as state librarian. He also took his library sciences school with him, reestablishing it as the New York State Library School. (It returned to Columbia in 1926.)

Over the next 20 years, Dewey expanded and modernized the state library. Gov. Teddy Roosevelt called it “an inspiration to intellectual life throughout the state.” As state librarian until 1906, he created the first library for the blind, the first traveling library, the first interlibrary loan program and the first children’s library.

Olympics

In 1895, while serving as state librarian, he founded the Lake Placid Club, a health resort. There he could indulge all his whims, his obsessions and his bigotry. He banned Jews, blacks and other religious and ethnic groups. Dewey also continued his unwelcome hugging, kissing and touching of female subordinates.

And at Lake Placid, he could spell the way he wanted to. One 1927 menu listed “hadok, poted beef with noodls, parsli or masht potato, butr, steamd rys, letis, and ys cream.”

A promoter of winter sports, he also helped organize the 1932 Olympics at Lake Placid.

WPA poster for the 1932 Olympics

That Complex Legacy

He did have friends, who sometimes got tired of defending him against persistent complaints about his behavior. In 1924, Tessa Kelso, former head of the Los Angeles Public Library, wrote in a letter, “For many years women librarians have been the special prey of Mr. Dewey in a series of outrages upon decency.”

In 1906, he went on a trip to Alaska sponsored by the American Library Association. He hit on four prominent librarians during the trip. Unlike women he’d hugged and kissed in the past, they spoke up. Dewey had to quit as state librarian.

At least one woman welcomed his advances. In 1924, two years after his first wife died, he married Emily McKay Beal.

In 1930, at the age of 78, he had to pay his former secretary at the Lake Placid Club more than $2000 in a sexual harassment settlement.

System of Bigotry

It wasn’t just his personal behavior that inspired criticism. His Dewey Decimal System marginalized non-Christian religions and the works of people of color. It also classified lesbian and gay subjects under “Abnormal Psychology,” “Perversion,” “Derangement” and “Medical Conditions.”

New York State Library

Dorothy Porter, for 40 years librarian at Howard University, challenged the Dewey Decimal Classification. “Now in [that] system, they had one number—326—that meant slavery, and they had one other number—325, as I recall it—that meant colonization,” she said in her oral history.

Porter said that in white libraries “every book, whether it was a book of poems by James Weldon Johnson, who everyone knew was a black poet, went under 325. And that was stupid to me.”

Porter developed a new system of classification. Ironically, she was the first African American to graduate from Columbia’s school of library science.

Melvil Dewey died December 26, 1931, of a stroke at Lake Placid.

In 2019, the American Library Association voted to take Dewey’s name off of its highest honor, the Melvil Dewey medal. ALA members voted to rename it the ALA Medal of Excellence.

With thanks to Joshua Kendall Melvil Dewey, Compulsive Innovator in American Libraries March 24, 2014; William Weigand, Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey and to Mass Moments, Dewey Proposes Library Classification System.

Images: Amherst College By David Emmerman – PicasaWeb, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10411732.

This story last updated in 2022.

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