Game Returns After Three-Year Hiatus; 'Crinkly Tweeds' Fill Stadium

Football fever swept Harvard in the fall of 1946, as the Crimson returned to official varsity play after a three-year wartime hiatus.

Boston newspapers called the team "the best Harvard 11 in decades," and hopes were riding high for an Ivy League championship and perhaps even a berth in the Rose Bowl.

The squad that took the field against Connecticut on Sept. 28, 1946--under Coach Dick Harlow--was composed largely of military veterans. A Crimson fullback, Vince Moravec, came to the team after pulverizing an informal Harvard squad the year before while playing for the New London Submarine Base.

Other players, such as wingback Cleo A. O'Donnell Jr. '44, had played for Harvard in 1942 and returned to the team after tours of duty in the war. O'Donnell, a pint-sized speedster, was elected captain in the fall of '42, but joined the Marines before getting the chance to lead. He was again elected captain by the '46 squad.

New players, meanwhile, carried the promise of the post-war period. Observers predicted that one such player, guard Emil Drvaric '49, had the potential to become an all-time Crimson great.

The high expectations seemed merited through October, as the Crimson posted five straight victories against Connecticut, Tufts, Princeton, the U.S. Coast Guard Academy and Holy Cross.

The team's first loss came in its first game ever against Rutgers Nov. 2. The Crimson was overmatched and shut out, 13-0, and any hope of a Rose Bowl appearance was dashed.

Two weeks later, at a rally before the match-up with Brown, students chanted "Remember Rutgers" as they marched from University Hall to the steps of the Indoor Athletic Building (now the Malkin Athletic Center). There, alumni delivered pep talks and cheerleaders unveiled a new flash-card system.

A leisurely 28-0 triumph against Brown that Saturday sent the Crimson into Yale Week with confidence.

The Game

Demand for tickets to The Game was so strong that, for the first time since Harvard football's heyday of the 1920s, the Harvard Athletic Association (HAA) limited students to two tickets apiece.

Undergraduates lined up for hours along Quincy Street waiting for tickets. The Crimson accused the HAA "not of playing fast and loose with the undergraduate body, but of an almost criminal inefficiency," while a committee of the Student Council investigated the HAA's methods of ticketing the Yale game.

On the Friday before The Game, the Harvard Band serenaded the Crimson on Soldiers Field as the team completed its final practice. That afternoon, physical-education classes were canceled so first-years could attend a pep rally at Memorial Hall, where the biggest crowd in a decade turned out to march through the rainy streets of Cambridge.

Later that night, as Eliot and Winthrop House students danced in tuxedos, Harvard police prevented a group of 300 Elis from defacing the John Harvard statue.

Formal dances followed Saturday night at Leverett, Kirkland, Lowell and Dunster, along with formal dinners in each house, and according to The Crimson, "at least one party in every entry." In the yard, women were permitted to dine in the Union--the first-year dining hall--for the first time that year.

Socializing was not interrupted by The Game itself, as many 'Cliffies accompanied Harvard men to watch the game unfold.

"Girls, the Harvard Stadium was simply filled with thousands of those wonderful Harvards this afternoon," wrote "Lavinia Dirndl;" in a guest column for The Crimson. "You've never seen so many crinkly tweeds in your life."

Even the heavens were aligned for the highlight of the fall term as a solar eclipse took place about 90 minutes before kickoff.

Amid a light drizzle, the Harvard 11 got off to a hot start against the Elis, with two touchdowns in the first period.

Quickly, however, Yale stormed back on the strength of its organization and a lucky wind, and "a heavy, well-coached, poised Eli team" came away with a 27-14 win.

But there was more riding on The Game of 1946 than a weekend of parties, an exciting rivalry or even an Ivy League championship. The return of The Game--like the return of official, varsity football altogether-meant a return to the normalcy of the pre-war days.

In that Monday's Crimson, J. Anthony Lewis '48 called Yale weekend a throwback to the 1920s, citing "Cars blocking streets half a mile up Massachusetts Avenue...crowds jamming every restaurant, bar, cafeteria and drugstore around the Square...flags flapping in the breeze up Mount Auburn Street, wrapping themselves around the flagpoles."

In an editorial, The Crimson staff framed The Game in terms of a war fought and won, and a future too unknown to tackle.

"The last time Harvard and Yale met together on a field called Soldier's 1941, and Pearl Harbor stood in the wings waiting for her December cue," The Crimson wrote.

"Somehow, knowing that the ancient feud has been renewed with all its tradition-hoaried trappings furnishes a sense of continuity with the world that went before which is strangely comforting."