50 YEARS AGO WHEN HARVARD, ELI FOOTBALL WAS FOOTBALL

Back in the days when men were men and the H.A.A. ran a weekly hare and hounds race to prove it, the Harvard-Yale football game wasn't the namby-pamby event it has become today.

From 1889 to 1894 the games were held in Springfield, because Boston and New Haven complained about the damage wreaked on them in former years, and these two towns were annually depopulated for one weekend late in November. The seating situation was stringent, for Hampden Park held a bare 9,000 paying customers and the Springfield City Council kept more than 2,000 for the inhabitants of their own city.

Scalpers Fifty Years Ago

The CRIMSON of the Tuesday before the game in 1891 complains bitterly about the seating situation. It seems that the 22 men who made up the football squad reserved 1,050 of Harvard's 3,500 tickets. This was considered unfair, but the team let 220 of them go to the ordinary student buyers and the CRIMSON, calmed down. One undergraduate paid $25 for the first place in the line to buy tickets at the H.A.A. They had troubles in those days, too, with scalpers, and the Springfield police caught counterfeit tickets at the gates.

Captain Trafford left the Yard with his team in horse-drawn "barges," which seem to have been the 1891 version of army transport trucks, late Friday afternoon. Some 500 undergraduates gathered to see the team off and to cheer. They opened with three times three for Harvard and then gave each of the 22 men a separate yell. After cheering the trainet, the coaches and excaptain Cunnock, inventor of the tackling dummy, the crowd chased the barges from the Johnson gate to the site of the Union, cheering madly and ending up with a three times nine.

"With such a spirit firmly implanted in the general body of the University," the CRIMSON commented the next morning, "so called 'Harvard indifference' will become forever a name."

The undergraduate ate a special Mem Hall early breakfast and caught a private train to Springfield, where they alighted to wander around waving crimson flags and flunting crimson neckwear and Harvard buttons till game time, 2:15 o'clock.

This was one year before Harvard initiated the colorful if slightly murderous flying wedge, but this game was not devoid of excitement. From the accounts it would seem that on every play the team with the ball would line up in a sort of wedge formation and the line would charge straight forward. Then the man with the ball would start running wherever he felt he might get someplace. The opposition would proceed to pile on him.

Hefflinger Hero

Every so often and just for variety, the line would pull out practically on masse and head around the ends. It was on two plays like this that the Yale captain, McClung, carried the ball to within striking distance of the Harvard goal, but the real cause of victory was the sensational work of a certain guard named Hefflinger later known to all Elis as "Pudge." The CRIMSON ruefully admitted on Monday that Pudge had done no mean job of opening up holes in the Harvard line.

Eventually Yale won the epic combat, 10 to 0. According to the CRIME, "While Harvard men deplore the result, they rejoice that they were beaten by men who have brought the game up so nearly to perfection."

The ever-optimistic journalists came out on Monday with a gentlemanly editorial on the "fair and square" defeat and, looking ever upward and onward, urged the College to "go forward united and stronger than ever into the victory which we can and will win next fall."