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Seven Fun Facts About Joseph Kennedy, Father of a Dynasty

One summer day in the early 1960s, Joseph Kennedy was sitting in his wheelchair in front of his Hyannis Port home,as a marine helicopter lifted up from the lawn. He had suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak.

Inside the helicopter were his son, President John F. Kennedy, and his son’s friend, Chuck Spalding. Kennedy looked down, pointed at his father and said, “He made the whole thing possible.”

Joseph Kennedy, center, at Jack’s birthday party in Hyannis Port, 1963.

Joseph Kennedy did indeed make his son’s presidency possible. He had made a fortune and served in high office himself, all while founding the Kennedy political dynasty. From 1946, when Jack began serving in the U.S. House of Representatives, to 2011, a child or grandchild of his served in public office.

The gods gave Joseph Kennedy much — money, fame, power. They also took much away. He outlived four of his nine children, and a fifth Rosemary, suffered a botched lobotomy that forced her institutionalization.

Joseph, Jr., died in action during World War II. Kathleen died in a plane crash. John, known as Jack, was assassinated in his third year as president, and Robert was killed on the verge of winning the Democratic nomination for president. Pat married move star Peter Lawford and Eunice founded the Special Olympics, Jean served as U.S. Ambassador to Ireland, and Ted was one of the longest tenured and most effective members of the U.S. Senate.

Joe himself suffered a stroke in 1961 and died on Nov. 18, 1969.

Many stories have been told about the larger-than-life Joseph Kennedy, some true, some partly true, some complete nonsense. Here are seven true ones.

The Kennedy family at Hyannis Port, 1931

1. Joseph Kennedy, Pampered Son

Born Sept. 6, 1888, he grew up in comfort, but didn’t let anyone know. His grandfather, Patrick Kennedy, had immigrated from Ireland, worked in the East Boston shipyards and died at 35, like many Irish immigrant men. But his father, P.J., bought a saloon for a song and prospered with it. He opened more saloons, got lucrative, no-show patronage jobs and won election to the Massachusetts House of Representatives. P.J. also won a seat in the state Senate but left after one term because he preferred being a ward boss.

Joseph Kennedy’s senior high school picture

Young Joe grew up on an elegant tree-lined street in a large waterfront house. His mother, who came from a lace-curtain Irish family in Brockton, spoiled him. “Joe did not come in on a raft,” said his niece. “His life was very comfortable.”

But he loved Horatio Alger books, and wanted people to think he alone was responsible for his success.

2. No Scholar

He got lousy grades in high school, Boston Latin, and had to repeat his senior year. But he excelled at sports, which mattered more to him. He was captain of the tennis team, played basketball and excelled at baseball. He batted an astonishing.667 as a senior, winning the Mayor’s Cup in the high school league. Mayor John Fitzgerald, presided over the ceremonies in which he accepted his trophy.

He didn’t do well academically at Harvard, either, and didn’t quite dominate in sports the way he had in high school. But he managed to marry the mayor’s daughter, Rose Fitzgerald.

3. Joseph Kennedy, Draft Dodger

He dodged the draft in World War I. Though married with two children (Joe, Jr., and Jack) he didn’t qualify for a deferment based on marital status. Instead, he got a job as assistant manager of the Fore River Shipyard, and qualified for an Industrial deferment.

Kennedy had served as president of Columbia Trust Co., a small East Boston bank. He boasted of being the country’s youngest bank president, though he had a step up — his father had helped found the bank.

At Fore River, he wrote a long letter to the draft board describing his responsibilities. It worked. He didn’t get a deferment, but he didn’t get drafted, either.

Joseph P. Kennedy, President of the Columbia Trust Company around January 1914. Photograph in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

One of his tasks at Fore River was to manage the influenza pandemic at Fore River. Two thousand cases broke out among the shipyard workers. He turned dormitories into infirmaries to isolate the sick, and stayed away from home to protest his family from the flu.

4. Joseph Kennedy, Serial Philanderer

Even as a relative newlywed he didn’t always come home at night. He worked long hours, often through the weekends, and slept in his office. Or with someone else – secretaries, waitresses and actresses, including Gloria Swanson.

Rose left him

when she was pregnant with Kathleen, their fourth child. She moved home to her father and mother in Dorchester. Her father told her she couldn’t get a divorce, so she turned to medication to deal with her husband’s infidelity.

Joseph Kennedy also took separate vacations from Rose beginning when Jack, their second son, was five years old. He wanted to relax and play golf in Palm Beach. She wanted to go to Europe and buy clothes.

5. Nurturing Dad

He, not Rose, cared for Jack during his many illnesses. In 1919, two-year-old Jack came down with scarlet fever, which often killed children. Rose had just given birth and was bedridden for three weeks. Joe got him into Boston City Hospital and spent every night and afternoon at his bedside.

“During the darkest days I felt that nothing else mattered except his recovery,” wrote Joe to Jack’s doctor. He vowed he would give half his money to the Catholic Church if Jack lived. When he did, Joe wrote a check for $3,740 to the Guild of Saint Apollonia, which gave dental care to Boston children.

John F. Kennedy and Joseph P. Kennedy, 1919. Photo courtesy John F. Kennedy Library and Museum.

6. But Not a Bootlegger

Despite the rumors, biographers haven’t found much solid evidence that he made his fortune through bootlegging. Unethical stock deals, yes. Kennedy bought stock on inside information, then legal but frowned upon. He also engaged in stock pools, where a small group of investors would target an inactive stock and trade it back and forth among themselves to create an illusion that the stock was a good, rising investment.

He made his real money in Hollywood, reorganizing and refinancing several studios that became RKO.

Not until the end of Prohibition did he invest in the distribution rights to Scotch whiskey. He diversified his investments, buying (among other things) the Chicago Merchandise Mart, then the world’s biggest office building.

7. Bow-legged Joe

President Franklin Roosevelt found him annoying. In 1935, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau suggested Kennedy for the post of Allotment Board chairman, where he would oversee the government’s purchases of gold to stabilize the market. Roosevelt said no. “The trouble with Kennedy is you always have to hold his hand,” Roosevelt said. He regularly “calls up and says he is hurt because I have not seen him.”

Joseph Kennedy, Ambassador to Great Britain.

Roosevelt did appoint Joseph Kennedy as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and later as U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom. But before nominating him, Roosevelt called him into his office and asked him to drop his pants. Kennedy complied, and Roosevelt burst into laughter. Roosevelt said, “Someone who saw you in a bathing suit once told me something I now know to be true. Joe, just look at your legs. You are just about the most bow-legged man I have ever seen.”

It mattered, explained Roosevelt, because he’d have to wear knee breeches and silk stockings during his induction ceremony as ambassador. He’d be a laughingstock. Joe, however, won permission from the British to wear tails and striped pants.

Joseph Kennedy became ambassador to the United Kingdom.

With thanks to JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 Fredrik Logevall and THE PATRIARCH: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy by David Nasaw. Morgenthau anecdote from Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded by Ronald Kessler.

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The Brahmin Celebrity Priest Who Wrote O Little Town of Bethlehem

O Little Town of Bethlehem was written by a parish priest considered to be the greatest preacher of his day. His name was Phillips Brooks, and a visit to the Church of the Nativity in 1865 inspired him to write the beloved Christmas hymn.

Though best known for O Little Town of Bethlehem, another of his creations enjoys worldwide fame—Trinity Church in Boston.

Trinity Church in Boston

Brooks especially loved Christmas. “The earth has grown old with its burden of care, but at Christmas it always is young, the heart of the jewel burns lustrous and fair, and its soul full of music breaks the air, when the song of angels is sung,” he wrote.

And he believed that Jesus Christ was the son of God, which is why a five-hour Christmas Eve Mass in the Church of the Nativity inspired him to write O Little Town of Bethlehem.

Phillips Brooks, Author of O Little Town of Bethlehem

He was born Dec. 13, 1835 in Boston to a prosperous Brahmin family. His ancestors included the Rev. John Cotton on his father’s side and Samuel Phillips, the founder of Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., on his mother’s. His great-uncle, Peter Chardon Brooks, had more wealth than anyone else in Boston. Brooks also had a famous son-in-law: Charles Francis Adams.

Phillips Brooks at 22

His parents sent him to Boston Latin School to prepare for Harvard. He graduated from college with class members who would achieve distinction. Alexander Agassiz, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, his second cousin Henry Adams and H.H Richardson, who would later design Trinity Church.

Brooks then got a job as a school teacher at Boston Latin, but failed miserably. He got fired. So he decided to enter what became the family business: the Episcopal clergy.

The Episcopal Church

He went south, to the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Va., in 1856. Three of his brothers followed him into the Episcopalian priesthood—Arthur, Frederic and John Cotton.

New England had not embraced the Episcopal religion anywhere near as much as the South (or even New York) had. But after the War of 1812 it started gaining in popularity. Eventually it became the preferred religion of upper-class Boston ladies, according to Cleveland Amory. “This much I know,” Amory once said. “God is an Episcopalian. From Boston.”

“Although Episcopalians constitute less than 2 percent of the country’s population,” reported the New York Times in 1981, “their social and economic impact is rivaled by few other groups, if any.”

A Giant

Phillips Brooks was ordained as a priest in 1860, just in time for the Civil War. “He was very tall and well proportioned, with a full, round face beaming with health and good nature, a broad forehead, and an erect carriage of the body, with the head thrown slightly backward,” wrote the Times in his obituary. “He had the appearance of a giant, and wherever he went the people were sure to stop in the street and look after him. At 6 feet, 4 inches, he urged his parishioners to pray big. “Pray the largest prayers,” he liked to say. “You cannot think a prayer so large that God, in answering it, will not wish you had made it larger.”

Phillips Brooks

In 1862 he began seven years of service as rector of the Church of the Holy Trinity in Philadelphia. He preached against slavery, delivered a eulogy for Abraham Lincoln and exhorted his parishioners to do charitable works.

O Little Town of Bethlehem

After the end of the Civil War, Brooks took a vacation he’d long dreamed about. He traveled across the Atlantic to Europe and then made a pilgrimage to Bethlehem.

He believed that Christianity was supernatural or it was nothing, wrote his biographer, Giles J. Harp. “For Brooks, the final, non-negotiable bedrock doctrine was the Incarnation. God the Father sending his eternal Son, the Logos, to be born a man in first-century Palestine was the heart and soul of the Christian message; without the Incarnation, there really was no gospel to preach.”

View of Bethlehem, Christmas Day 1898

Brooks described his trip to Bethlehem in a letter home:

“After an early dinner, we took our horses and rode to Bethlehem,” he wrote. “It was only about two hours when we came to the town, situated on an eastern ridge of a range of hills, surrounded by its terraced gardens. It is a good-looking town, better built than any other we have seen in Palestine…

“Before dark, we rode out of town to the field where they say the shepherds saw the star. It is a fenced piece of ground with a cave in it (all the Holy Places are caves here), in which, strangely enough, they put the shepherds…As we passed, the shepherds were still “keeping watch over their flocks or leading them home to fold”.”

Facade of the Church of the Nativity, 1940

Then on Christmas Eve, he assisted at a service in the Church of the Nativity, built over the traditional site of Jesus’ birth. The ancient basilica dated to 326 A.D.; the service lasted from 10 PM to 3 AM, wrote hymnologist Albert Bailey.

Songwriter

Brooks returned to Philadelphia in September. It wasn’t until three years later that he wrote O Little Town of Bethlehem, no doubt remembering what he had seen and felt in the Holy Land.

He asked his organist, Lewis Redner, put the words to music. Brooks told Redner that he had written a simple little carol for the Sunday school service at Christmas and wanted him to write a tune for it.

“Mr. Brooks came to me on Friday, and said, ‘Redner, have you ground out that music yet to “O Little Town of Bethlehem”? I replied, ‘No,’ but that he should have it by Sunday.”

By Saturday night he hadn’t come up with the tune. “But I was roused from sleep late in the night hearing an angel-strain whispering in my ear, and seizing a piece of music paper I jotted down the treble of the tune as we now have it, and on Sunday morning before going to church I filled in the harmony.”

Neither he nor Brooks had any idea of the popularity the song would achieve.

Boston

O Little Town of Bethlehem turned out to be a popular hit and Brooks’ farewell gift to his Philadelphia parish. Trinity Church in Boston named him pastor in 1869 at the relatively young age of 33. He became such a popular idol in that city his photograph was sold in stores. He worked hard, answered every one of his many letters and gave money to just about any poor person who asked, according to his obituary.

The rectory of Trinity Church, where Phillips Brooks died

Known the world over, he grew into one of the most popular preachers in America. He built the Trinity Church building, considered an architectural masterpiece, in Copley Square.

In 1891, he was consecrated Bishop of Massachusetts. He only held that position for a short time, as in 1891 he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 57. Brooks never married.

Statue of Phillips Brooks in Boston

You can hear O Little Town of Bethlehem here.

In the United Kingdom, people sing O Little Town of Bethlehem to a different tune—Forest Green. You can hear it here

* * *

The Christmas holiday actually began in ancient Rome — and so did Italian cookies. The New England Historical Society’s new book, 24 Historic Italian Christmas Cookie Recipes, tells you how to make those delicious treats. It also bring you the history of the Italian immigrants who brought them to New England. Available now on Amazon; just click here.

Images: 233 Clarendon St. By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20434478.

With thanks to Giles J Harp, Brahmin Prophet: Phillips Brooks and the Path of Liberal Protestantism. This story updated in 2022.

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6 Fun Facts About Ezekiel Cheever, Puritan Schoolmaster

Ezekiel Cheever taught Latin, writing and arithmetic to the children of New England’s first Puritans for 70 years. He taught in New Haven, Boston, Charlestown and Ipswich, Mass., earning distinction as the ‘father of New England schoolmasters.’

When he arrived in the New World in 1637, New England was an isolated wilderness separated from the mother country by a vast ocean. For the Saints, or Puritans, to establish “Zion,” pious, educated men were needed, wrote Charles W. Allen. Ezekiel Cheever took his mission to heart, and taught many of the great men of their generation. His pupils included Judge Samuel Sewall, poet Michael Wigglesworth and Gov. Jonathan Belcher.

Cotton Mather

One pupil, Cotton Mather, delivered his funeral sermon, in which he called him “Master Socrates.”

“New England has never known a better,” Mather said.

Ezekiel Cheever

Born Jan. 25, 1614 in London, he came to Massachusetts toward the end of the great Puritan migration.

Soon after he arrived he went to New Haven Colony and taught for 12 years. He then moved to Ipswich, Mass., in 1650, where he taught for 11 years. Then on to Charlestown for nine years. He ended his career as the first master of the Boston Latin School, where he taught for 37 years.

Boston Latin School.

He married twice, first to Mary Culverwell for 11 years and then to Ellen Lathrop for 54. From 1639 to 1664, he had 12 children, but only nine survived to adulthood.

He taught in his home for most of 70 years. In the early years, he had a young and growing family. Historian Charles W. Allen concludes ‘the youngsters must have been confined to a small upper or adjacent chamber and kept entertained for the six to seven hours the house was used as a school.”

He never made much money, and more than once he had to beg local officials for back pay.

Ezekiel Cheever died Aug. 21, 1708 at the age of 93. Here are six fun facts about the old Puritan schoolmaster.

1. His Teaching Style—Not Progressive

He did not spare the rod. Nathaniel Hawthorne, in Grandfather’s Chair, wrote,

It would require a pretty good scholar in arithmetic to tell how many stripes he had inflicted, and how many birch rods he had worn out, during all that time, in his fatherly tenderness for his pupils.

Ezekiel Cheever’s Latin textbook

He also wrote a textbook, probably the first in America. Called Accidence: A Short Introduction to the Latin Tongue, American schools used it for at least a century. Hawthorne commented,

…the good old man, even in his grave, was still the cause of trouble and stripes to idle schoolboys.”

2. He Hated Periwigs

The controversy over periwigs raged throughout New England during the 17^th century. The periwig was a highly styled wig, a fashion imported from Europe.

Wig opponents called it wasteful and extravagant. It also made men look as if they had more interest in ‘courting a maid’ than to ponder God’s will, they said.

Samuel Sewall.

The early Puritans hated them, but they eventually won acceptance. Cotton Mather, for example, wore a long brown periwig.

Samuel Sewall, like Cheever, wore a black skullcap. He wrote a eulogy for Ezekiel Cheever that ended with the sentence, “He abominated periwigs.”

3. He Helped the Puritan Project Succeed

During Cheever’s lifetime, colonial settlements grew into thriving towns along New England’s coast. Cheever gave hundreds of New England boys the tools to build those Puritan cities on hills. His best students entered Harvard and were ordained as ministers.

Map of New Haven in 1644, when Ezekiel Cheever lived there

Even those who didn’t do so well at Latin contributed to the success of the Puritan project.

Hawthorne described, as only Hawthorne could, what would happen to Ezekiel Cheever’s math students.

These boys are to be the merchants, shopkeepers, and mechanics of a future period. Hitherto they have traded only in marbles and apples. Hereafter some will send vessels to England for broadcloths and all sorts of manufactured wares, and to the West Indies for sugar, and rum, and coffee. Others will stand behind counters, and measure tape, and ribbon, and cambric by the yard. Others will upheave the blacksmith’s hammer, or drive the plane over the carpenter’s bench, or take the lapstone and the awl and learn the trade of shoemaking. Many will follow the sea, and become bold, rough sea-captains.

Sixty years after Ezekiel Cheever set foot in primitive Boston, the town contained 1,000 houses and 7,000 people dedicated to building schools and churches, wrote Henry Crocker in his A History of New England.

Boston Harbor around 1720

Toward the end of his career, Cheever earned 60 pounds a year at the Latin School, a handsome salary (when the town managed to pay it). He taught in a new schoolhouse, rather than his own house, and he even had an assistant – his grandson, Ezekiel Lewes.

4. He Was Extremely Pious

His pupil Cotton Mather described his ‘untiring abjuration of the Devil.’

Ezekiel Cheever believed the Puritans could grow spiritually and achieve perfection on earth in their new home. Mather struggled with that concept. He didn’t understand how saints could live among sinners on earth. When he brought the question to Cheever, the old schoolmaster replied,

What! The Spouse of CHRIST have the Foul Disease! Never tell me That!

5. His Beard Revealed His Mood

No images of Ezekiel Cheever exist, but an acquaintance, Samuel Maxwell, offered a description:

“He wore a long white beard terminating in a point; that when he stroked his beard to the point, it was a sign for the boys to stand clear.”

6. John Cheever Claimed Him as an Ancestor (But He Wasn’t)

The novelist John Cheever boasted of Ezekiel Cheever as his ancestor, but Ezekiel was just a cousin of his ancestor, Daniel Cheever. Nevertheless, John Cheever had a bit of obsession with Ezekiel. He wrote that he had nothing in his veins but ‘the blood of shipmasters and schoolteachers.’

John Cheever

Cheever talked about Ezekiel a lot in interviews, and named two main fictional characters after him: Ezekiel Farragut in Falconer and Ezekiel Cheever in his Wapshot books. He also named his Labrador retriever Ezekiel, and urged his son Ben (unsuccessfully) to give his son the name.

With thanks to Journey of Promise: West From Sempringham by Charles W. Allen.

Images: Boston Latin School plaque by By User:Swampyank / Swampyank at en.wikipedia – User:Swampyank, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17345900.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The Greatest New England High School Football Rivalries

New England high school football rivalries go back to the days when teams traveled by stagecoach to visit their opponents. When there were no field goals or forward passes and when no one was really all that sure about the rules. When schools held fundraisers to buy the ball – which, by the way, was round.

Many people associate high school football rivalries with the South. And yet New England, with 4.5 percent of the U.S. population, has about a third of the centuries-old high school football rivalries in the country. But considering that players originally called football ‘the Boston Game,’ perhaps it’s not all that surprising.

Beginning in 1875, New England high schools have celebrated their football rivalries with bonfires, pep rallies, parades, snake dances, community dinners, alumni reunions … and fights, riots, bomb threats and eggings.

In no other region do so many high school football teams play on Thanksgiving Day every year. Many, but not all, of the Thanksgiving Day games involve ancient rivalries. Massachusetts has about 50 of them, Connecticut 15 and Rhode Island about 20.

Northern New England has only two Thanksgiving games, probably due to the weather. Manchester, N.H., holds a Turkey Bowl to determine the league champions, and Portland, Maine, features a crosstown rivalry between the Deering High School Rams and Portland High School Bulldogs.

In 2020,the COVID-19 pandemic put all those rivalries on hold, as state and school officials canceled entire football seasons.

Boston Latin-Boston English. Classic.

Before the Civil War, football was more of an excuse for a brawl than an actual game. But then a more organized version evolved. Boys from East Coast prep schools began to play what they called the Boston Game, something of a cross between rugby and soccer.

Then a group of students from Boston schools, including Boston Latin and English High, formed the Oneida Football Club. They played pickup teams starting in 1862 on Boston Common. In 1925, surviving members dedicated a small monument on their old playing field. They bragged they’d not only never been beaten, they’d never allowed an opponent to score.

Artists’ rendering of an Oneida Club game on Boston Common.

The Oneida Club disbanded after a few years. Then in 1887, Boston Latin played English High on Thanksgiving at Harvard Stadium. They did it again for 130 consecutive football games. It’s the oldest continuous Thanksgiving high school rivalry in the country.

Latin tends to beat English (they’re 80-38-13), and in 2011 the Wolfpack gave the Bulldogs a 50-0 drubbing. With Latin ahead 44-0, Latin let a woman player onto the field, senior Kathy Le. The crowd cheered.

Massachusetts has 11 other high school football rivalries that go back more than a hundred years.

Some Thanksgiving games between rivals attract thousands of fans, like the 100^th annual Salem-Beverly contest in 1998. The game drew 11,000, a bigger crowd than struggling Major League Baseball teams can sometimes lure to their ballfields.

Beverly’s first team

Needham-Wellesley

Five years before Latin and English went after each other on the gridiron, Needham and Wellesley high school athletes played their first game. The rivalry started when West Needham and East Needham split up in 1881 amidst a bitter controversy. They took their high schools with them, so West Needham became Wellesley.

On Thanksgiving Day in 1882, they started the oldest public high school football rivalry in New England.

As the two teams lined up on the crooked midfield line, the Wellesley captain realized he only had nine players. So he sent his brother into the stands to find two more.

The rivalry intensified over the next few years, and by the end of the century both teams used ringers – including ‘out-of-town professionals.’ Then in 1901, the schools limited ringers to town residents, which made for lousy football but good boxing. Several fistfights livened up the game, which featured frequent fumbles and ended in a 0-0 tie. Andrew Wyeth’s uncle managed the first all-boys’ team in 1906.

The Needham-Wellesley Thanksgiving rivalry had to take a break for the world wars because so many players enlisted. Officials also cancelled the games from 1950-52 because rioting broke out.

As recently as 1991, the game was called because of a bomb threat on the field. It turned out to be a prank by some Needham High School kids.

Fitchburg-Leominster

In 1898, the eighth Fitchburg and Leominster game went to a 0-0 score until the last two minutes. Then Fitchburg scored on a punt return — with the help of the hometown crowd, which kept any tacklers away from the ball carrier. The referee ruled the game a scoreless tie.

The next day the Fitchburg Sentinel had the audacity to report a win with the headline, “Fitchburg Wins 5-0.” The score stayed in the record books that way until 2010, when a Leominster Sentinel and Enterprise reporter insisted on changing it to 0-0. At the end of 2019, the Leominster Blue Devils have played the Fitchburg Raiders on Thanksgiving 104 times. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of the match-up in 2020.

Norwich Free Academy vs. New London

Six years after the first ever collegiate football game, two Connecticut high schools started the longest high school football rivalry in history: Norwich Free Academy and New London High School. Ulysses S. Grant was president.

It started on May 12, 1875, and it hasn’t been continuous. But it has been fierce, with faculty sometimes playing as ringers. One year a Norwich-favoring referee let the clock wind down a little too slowly, time enough to let his Wildcats score the winning goal.

In 1898, the Wildcats were playing the Whalers in New London when a sudden snow squall enveloped the playing field. An NFA punter kicked the ball in the air, and it disappeared. The game ended since the teams had no more balls.

Another game ended early four years later, when Norwich Free Academy scored 130 points on New London in the first half. The game was called.

The Norwich Free Academy football team, 1898.

In NH, It Starts in Little League

On New Hampshire’s Seacoast, boys start hearing about the epic rivalry between Dover High and Rochester’s Spaulding High when they’re in Little League. In 2011, 30,000 fans watched the teams compete in a playoff match.

One long-tenured Rochester coach brought such intensity to the game that the Dover players believed he spied on their practices from the nearby woods. And whenever a small plane flew overhead, they’d stop their drills and mill around the field because they thought Spaulding wanted aerial photos of their practices.

In 1969, the Spaulding Red Raiders and the Dover Green Wave played their 63^rd game to a 0-0 tie. A rainstorm reduced the field to a quagmire, the players so covered with mud it was hard to tell the teams apart. A Red Raider claimed he scored a last-second touchdown, but no one could tell for sure.

Weather conditions probably explain why the three Northern New England states have only two Thanksgiving Day games — the Manchester, N.H., Turkey Bowl and the game between Crosstown rivals Portland Bulldogs vs. Deering Rams at Fitzpatrick Stadium in Maine.

Cony, Gardiner and … Chizzle Wizzle?

“Chizzle Wizzle, Chizzle Wizzle, sis boom bah! Cony High, Cony High, rah, rah, rah!”

That cheer for Augusta’s Cony High School Rams inspired students in 1892 to form the “Chizzle Wizzle Association” to raise money for the team. The Rams faced the Gardiner Tigers that year in their first of many games.

Miss Aldine Holmes kicked off the first Chizzle Wizzle in 1893 with a piano solo and Miss Cusick and Mr. Studley ended it with a duet. Ice cream and cake were served during intermission.

If that sounds decorous, the games were anything but. Ten years after the first game, the Gardiner Journal called the schools ‘old time rivals’ and complained of rowdyism.

Gardiner won by 2-0 in the 1910 game that involved quarreling and ‘the mixing up of the crowd and the players after nearly every play.’

After losing the 1926 game, Cony students threw rotten eggs at the Gardiner fans. ‘One girl’s hat, stockings and coat were ruined,’ reported the Gardiner Journal, which also noted Gardiner fans ‘went home quietly with sad faces,’ when they lost. Augusta, on the other hand, didn’t feel the need to be ‘sportingly generous.’

Augusta’s Chizzle Wizzle now lasts four days and ends with a ball, not a brawl. Cony students claim it’s the longest running high school variety show in the country. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic drove the variety show online.

A Marine recruiter talks to Cony players after they beat Gardiner in 2016. Photo courtesy U.S. Marine Corps.

Vermont’s ‘The Game’

In Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom they just call it ‘The Game’ – the St. Johnsbury Academy Hilltoppers vs. the Lyndon Institute Vikings. In 2013, a USA Today survey of the country’s greatest high school football rivalries. ‘The Game’ won the Vermont, New England and Eastern regions and finished fourth in the United States.

Sometimes thousands of fans attend the game between two towns that don’t have 15,000 residents between them. Excitement mounts in the week before the contest, with bonfires, a parade, class floats, a pep chapel, an alumni dinner and, as the Caledonian Record put it, ‘screaming teens.’

These Vikings really wanted to win.

The rivalry dates to a game played on Oct. 27, 1894. Lyndon had never played an opponent before and lost 28-0. To commemorate the 100^th anniversary of The Game, a state lawmaker (clearly a St. Johnsbury fan) sponsored a resolution that gloated over that first victory. Even though anyone who could even remember the game was probably long dead.

But on that ‘auspicious and historic’ fall day, the resolution went, the two teams ‘met on the gridiron’ to play the ‘new and intriguing sport’ evolving into one of Vermont’s ‘favorite autumnal activities.’

In that game, the two squads of ‘interscholastic athletic pioneers’ played a game in which St. Johnsbury ‘demonstrated their strategic mastery’ and ‘handily defeated’ Lyndon.

Three Miles Apart

No two high school football teams have played as many games against each other as Westerly High in Rhode Island and Stonington High in Connecticut. Though in different states, the schools are only about three miles apart. They’ve played against each other since 1911, and in 1913 they started playing on Thanksgiving as well as during the regular season.

The town Rotary Clubs take turns holding a dinner for both teams the night before the Thanksgiving game. The schools hold pep rallies in their auditoriums and the townspeople go to nighttime rallies on the commons.

By 2018, the Westerly Bulldogs and the Stonington Bears had played 98 games on Thanksgiving Day, with pretty even won-loss records. The 2018 game was a mismatch, though, with Westerly beating Stonington by 61-0. That, however, was only half as bad as the 1917 game, when Westerly beat Stonington by 122-0. In fairness, most of Stonington’s first-string players had enlisted and left to fight World War I.

There’s a terrific mural commemorating the rivalry behind C.C. O’Brien’s Irish Sports Bar and Café at 8 Mechanic Street in Pawcatuck.

Andover vs. Exeter

Two of the greatest ever football coaches played in one of the greatest ever high school football rivalries.

Amos Alonzo Stagg suited up for Phillips Exeter’s Big Red nearly a hundred years before Bill Belichick played center for Phillips Andover’s Big Blue.

An Andover-Exeter game. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones collection.

Stagg probably had to take a stagecoach for away games. Belichick was there in 1971 when some Andover students got caught trying to spray paint Exeter’s field blue.

The oldest private high school football rivalry began on Nov. 2, 1878 when both schools had existed for about a century.

Stagg, a poor Irish student, attended Exeter with the intention of going to Yale as a divinity student. But as a standout athlete he felt sports calling to him, and he ended up playing key roles in the development of intercollegiate football and basketball.

Belichick, the son of an assistant coach at Annapolis, went to Andover as a postgraduate to improve his chances at college. He played center in a game against Exeter that left the team undefeated. Buzz Bissinger, who later won the Pulitzer Prize for Friday Night Lights, reported on the game for the Phillipian. They won 34-8. Belichick, 37 years later, gave his daughter Amanda a felt pennant with the score of that game on it when she entered Andover.

He later said he learned about the science of football at Andover, and that he owed the school a lot. Patriots’ fans should be forever grateful.

Bill Belichick at Andover with his friend Ernie Jones.

Massachusetts High School Football Rivalries

Phillips Andover Academy and Phillips Exeter Academy (New Hampshire) since 1878.
Wellesley High School and Needham High School since 1882.
Milton Academy and Noble and Greenough School (Dedham) since 1886.
Boston English High School and Boston Latin High School since 1887.
Malden High School and Medford High School since 1889.
Winchester High School and Woburn Memorial High School since 1891.
Beverly High School and Salem High School since 1891.
Newburyport High School and Amesbury High School since 1891.
B.M.C. Durfee High School (Fall River) and New Bedford High School since 1893.
Athol High School and Ralph C. Mahar Regional High School (Orange) since 1894.
Leominster High School and Fitchburg High School since 1894.
Newton North High School and Brookline High School since 1894.
Barnstable High School and Falmouth High School since 1895.
Reading Memorial High School and Stoneham High School since 1899.
Marlborough High School and Hudson High School since 1900.
Melrose High School and Wakefield High School since 1901.
Whitman-Hanson Regional High School and Abington High School since 1910.

Connecticut High School Football Rivalries

Norwich Free Academy and New London High School since 1875.
Ansonia High School and Naugatuck High School, since 1895.
Shelton High School and Derby High School since 1904.
Stonington High School and Westerly (Rhode Island) High School since 1911.

Maine High School Football Rivalries

Cony High School (Augusta) and Gardiner High School since 1892.
Thornton Academy (Saco) and Biddeford High School since 1893.
Hebron Academy and Kents Hill School since 1894.
Lewiston High School and Edward Little High School since 1897.
Portland High School and Deering High School (Portland) since 1911.

New Hampshire High School Football Rivalries

Phillips Exeter Academy and Phillips Andover Academy since 1878.
Spaulding High School (Rochester) and Dover High School since 1906.

Rhode Island High School Football Rivalry

Westerly High School and Stonington (Connecticut) High School since 1911.

Vermont High School Football Rivalry

St. Johnsbury Academy and Lyndon Institute since 1894.

Thanks to Wikipedia for the list of oldest high school football rivalries. This story was updated in 2022.

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Walter Camp and the Birth of Modern Football

Leave it to a clockmaker named Walter Camp to turn a chaotic excuse for a brawl into a game of precision and time limits. We now know it as football.

Camp starred in football for Yale just as the game came back into fashion in the 1870s. His real contribution to football, though, was in setting the rules over 15 years of meetings with collegiate athletic directors at a Springfield, Mass., hotel.

Walter Camp

Walter Camp, the Father of Modern Football. National Portrait Gallery.

Walter Camp was born in New Britain, Conn., on April 7, 1859, into the family that owned the New Haven Clock Company. Chauncey Jerome founded the company in 1817 and made a fortune by selling cheap clocks with brass works. A devastating fire and Jerome’s own mistakes allowed his nephew, Hiram Camp, to take over the company. By the time Walter was born, the New Haven Clock Co. was the world’s largest clockmaker.

When Walter Camp was a year old, the sport that would become football was banned by Yale, and a year later Harvard would follow.

Mob Football

Walter Camp as a Yale football player.

It was then known by different names, but it resembled the medieval European sport of mob football. The game had unlimited players, and one of its few rules disallowed manslaughter and murder as methods of moving the ball to the goal.

By the 19^th century, mob football moved to college campuses as an intramural sport. Each college played by its own rules. A Harvard tradition known as Bloody Monday started in 1827, when the freshman class played the sophomore class. Winslow Homer illustrated the game in an engraving called Class Day at Harvard University in 1858.

But the game evolved into an excuse for a brawl that usually ended with injuries. Under pressure from the surrounding towns, college administrators banned it.

At that point another version was becoming popular at East Coast prep schools. Called the Boston game, it used the round, inflatable ball introduced in 1855. Graduates of Boston’s elite prep schools played it. They called themselves the Oneida Football Club, which some consider the first organized football club.

The Oneidas played pickup teams from 1862-65 on Boston Common. In 1925, surviving members of the club dedicated a small stone monument on the Common. It claims the Oneidas never allowed a point. The inscription reads,

On this field the Oneida Football Club of Boston, the first organized football club in the United States, played against all comers from 1862 to 1865. The Oneida goal was never crossed.

Football Returns to College

By 1873, football returned to college campuses. On October 20 of that year, representatives from Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and Rutgers met at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City. They intended to agree on the first set of collegiate rules.

Harvard refused to participate because the soccer-based rule conflicted with the Boston game, to which Harvard was committed. The new rules spread quickly, though, to college and high school campuses throughout the country.

Such was the state of affairs when Walter Camp entered Yale in 1876. Football was again becoming popular and the rules were just starting to be codified. Camp was a star athlete who played halfback for the football team as an undergraduate and later as a medical student. He was named captain, a position equivalent to head coach at the time. He also became a member of the Intercollegiate Football Association, formed during his freshman year.

Massasoit House

Class Day at Harvard University, 1958, by Winslow Homer

Three years after the Intercollegiate Football Association met in New York, the Massasoit House hotel in Springfield, Mass., hosted representatives from Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia to adapt rules based on rugby rather than soccer. That decision was just one step in the evolution of football that Walter Camp would so greatly influence.

Camp would become a fixture at Massasoit House, bringing a technocratic approach that perfected the game step by step, year after year. The same kind of Yankee inventiveness that revolutionized clock-making went into 15 years of refinements that resulted in America’s most popular sport.

As a senior at Yale, Camp prevailed at Massasoit House and cut the number of players to 11 from 15. That year he also came up with the idea for a static line of scrimmage. In 1882, the Yale-Princeton game ended in a scoreless tie, and Camp revised the rule to require the offense to gain five yards in three attempts or give up the ball. He also added measuring lines to the field. The next year, he revised the scoring system.

In 1883, Camp’s medical studies were interrupted, and he ended up working for the family clock-manufacturing business. He did maintain his interest in the workings of the human body and later developed a set of exercises for the U.S. military called the Daily Dozen.

A Football Powerhouse

From 1888 to 1892, Camp was unpaid head coach at Yale while working for the family business. As an engineer he understood the advantages of planning and specialization. Each Yale player trained for a specific role including quarterback, which Camp invented, along with offensive signal calling. He borrowed mass-production techniques from the clock company to shape the team’s drills. From 1885 to the end of 1899, Yale won 46 straight games and outscored its opponents by 2018 to 29.

For years, Camp and journalist Caspar Whitney selected the annual All-American team, known as Walter Camp’s All-American team. For 42 years he edited the yearly college football guide, and he wrote and spoke prolifically about the sport. By 1892, he had created the game we now know as football. At the age of 33, Walter Camp was called the ‘Father of American Football.’

The Oneida Club dedicates a monument to the game on Boston Common, 1925

Camp had his critics. As Yale’s head coach, athletic director and spokesman, some viewed him as a self-promoter who compiled questionable statistics to support his views. He hoarded gate receipts for the football program at the expense of minor sports like wrestling and swimming. And he used an alumni-funded slush fund of $100,000 to pay for gifts and vacations for his star players.

Hall of Fame

None of that could stem the rising popularity of football. Rivalries sprang up all over the country, usually culminating in the Thanksgiving Day game we watch today. As far back as 1887, Boston Latin High School and the English High School of Boston faced each other on Thanksgiving – and they’re still doing it every year.

By the time he died in 1925, Camp had written 30 books and 250 magazine articles creating the myth of football players’ manliness and courage. His foundation has awarded the Walter Camp Player of the Year award since 1967. No player from Yale has won the award.

Walter Camp died on March 14, 1925. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach in 1951.

This story was updated in 2023. If you enjoyed this story, you might also want to read about the improbable beginnings of the New England Patriots here.

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