The Sporting Scene

Dennis Enright is the only man who lives at Soldiers Field. You've probably passed his brown frame house just inside Gate One dozens of times without really noticing it. It's sort of hidden by the shrubbery and you've been in a hurry to get into your seat before the kickoff or to be on time for House football practice.

Mr. Enright is a short wizened, 75-year-old Irishman with blue eyes and a characteristic brown hat. He has seen Harvard football players come and go ever since 1888, when he became head caretaker of the Soldiers Field grounds. Enright was officially retired in 1939, but he still helps out now and then when something comes up that stymies the more inexperienced men.

Before coming to Cambridge, Enright worked for two years in Europe, handling advertising for a Baltimore chemical firm. After his return, he was playing tennis one day with a Harvard friend when the head of the Lawn Tennis Club asked him if he thought he could make some improvements on the deteriorated courts. Enright said he didn't think he could. But he undertook the job and shortly after, in 1887, the captain of the football team, an end named Cumnock, requested Enright's elevation to the post of grounds superintendent. Enright still can't figure out what they had against the man he succeeded.

Enright has been almost all the home games since then, and up until a few years ago he used to make the trip to New Haven. Naturally, he can reminisce with the best of them. It seems the late Percy Haughton was the local originator of post-game goal post demolition, a pastime which was to increase in popularity later on. Haughton was coaching at Cornell at the time and came down to watch a Harvard-Yale game. "He always was a playboy," recalls Enright.

Harvard has always used wooden goal posts except for one game about 14 years ago when metal posts were tried. The steel markers were uprooted in four or five hours, carried over the bridge, and dumped into the river. One of the posts got firmly entrenched in an upright position and caused so much trouble to passing shells before it could be removed that the authorities went back to wooden posts.

Enright takes credit for designing the first nose-guard. Six broken noses in a game was not an uncommon thing in the early days and since no headgears were worn, the first nose-guard was a head band and mouth bit affair.

This was going to be a column on the caretaking procedure followed at Soldiers Field, but the writer got talking to Dennis Enright and the other will have to wait.