What unites the four is that the senders’ comments are in German or French, which begs the question of why someone would send a football-themed postcard -an All-American activity- while writing their message in a language other than English. Were the senders immigrants, international students, or what? And, in the days before telephones and text messages came into common use, what information did people transmit using football-themed penny postcards?

Postcards of the time often have messages related to the postcard’s subject matter. Still, in many cases, people wrote messages on whatever postcard they had lying around, or that was readily available. Until partway through 1907, the reverse side of postcards was for the addressee information only; USPS regulations prohibited messages on the reverse. As a result, postcards often had substantial white space on the front for messages, and people scribbled messages wherever they could find space. So, let’s look at the postcards’ subject matter and decipher the messages sent more than one century ago. (Some of the messages are difficult to read and translate, so the transcriptions and translations below are my best attempt, substantially aided by AI.)

The first two postcards show a scene from the 1901 Harvard-Yale game, the last of those matches played in Cambridge before Harvard Stadium opened in 1903. After their 22-0 beatdown of Yale that day, Harvard was generally considered the 1901 national champion. This image of Harvard, close to scoring from their tackles-back formation, captures the game.

1901 Harvard-Yale game action postcard #1

The first set was sent from a woman named Rosa H., who appears to be an employee of Mr. Henrici, who has been ill. Both live in Boston.

She mailed the postcard to August Kuhnert, a businessman in Waterville, Maine, on November 3, 1903, 11 days before Harvard christened their new stadium in a game against Dartmouth.'

Boston, Mass. Nov. 3rd 1903 (Written in English by a German speaker using the American date form.)

Sehr geehrter Herr Kuhnert! Nun habe ich aber lange nicht geschrieben, hoffentlich denken Sie nicht, dass ich …Sie ganz lieb vergessen habe. Aber ich habe all meine Correspondenzen vernachlässigt … zur Erinnerung an so manch[e] …

Mr. Henrici fühlt sich schon seit einigen Wochen gar nicht wohl und musste auch 10 Tage das Bett hüten. Es geht aber nun wieder etwas besser. Hoffentlich sind Sie wohl und munter.

Mit freundliche[n] Grüsse[n] verbleibe ich Rosa Ha…

Boston, Mass. Nov. 3rd 1903

Dear Mr. Kuhnert! Well, I haven’t written in a long time now — I hope you don’t think that I have quite forgotten you. But I have neglected all my correspondence, … as a memento of many a …

Mr. Henrici has been feeling quite unwell for some weeks now and even had to stay in bed for 10 days. But it’s going somewhat better again now. I hope you are well and in good spirits.

With friendly greetings, I remain, Rosa Ha…

August Kuhnert Esq.

P. O. Box 194

Waterville, Me.

The sender dated the card November 3, and it was received in Waterville the following day.

1901 Harvard-Yale game action postcard #2

Another copy of the postcard with the 1901 Harvard-Yale image was mailed from Boston on November 21, 1903, several hours after the 1903 Harvard-Yale game. Unlike the previous postcard, this one was sent to France, with the message in French. Also, unlike the previous postcard, this message largely concerns the football game and atmosphere around town, especially the number of horse-drawn carriages and automobiles streaming to the game, suggesting there were more of the latter than the former.

Boston 21 nov. 03. Jour même d’un semblable « game » à Harvard!

D’innombrables voitures et surtout automobiles s’y rendent en ce moment!

(The writer uses the English word “game,” suggesting a direct equivalent did not exist in French.)

Boston, 21 Nov. ‘03. The very day of a similar “game” at Harvard!

Countless carriages, and above all automobiles, are heading there at this very moment!

Postmarked Boston, Back Bay Station, Nov 21, 1903, 4:30 PM, with a Château-Gontier (Mayenne) receiving mark.

Vicomtesse de Poiré

Château de la Rivière Mesnil près Château-Gontier

Mayenne

France

1907 Northwestern pennant postcard

Our third postcard isn’t football-themed per se, but it’s close enough for our purposes. It has a Northwestern pennant on the front and is part of a College Pennant Series that included hundreds of other schools. Canceled in Chicago at 9 AM on August 16, 1907, the postcard arrived in Beecher, Illinois, by 5 PM the same day. (Beecher is 45 miles south of Chicago along a railroad, and had a large German immigrant community.)

This is another postcard whose subject matter was seemingly drawn at random. It appears that B. H[o]rn of Chicago is replying to a previous message from Mrs. Emmy Sass, who asked to extend her visit in Beecher, where she is staying with Mrs. L. R[ü]stenpart.

Chicago d. 15ten Aug[us]t 1907

Brief habe erhalten, [k]annst bleiben. Gruss B. H[o]rn

Chicago, the 15th of August 1907

Received [your] letter — you may stay. Greetings, B. H[o]rn

Mrs. Emmy Sass

per Adresse Mrs. L. R[ü]stenpart (“per Adresse” is the German equivalent of “c/o”)

Beecher, Ill.

Will County

1908 Harvard Annual Practice

The fourth postcard shows a practice game or scrimmage at Harvard Stadium. Herman Harck mailed it on January 22, 1908, from Boston to Otto Seidemann or Heidemann, of Berlin. (The postcard was in Estonia by the time it was offered on eBay and has since been repatriated.)

The addressee is an engineer or draftsman, based on the honorific “Mr. Ingenieur” used in addressing the postcard. The sender explains that the postcard shows the football field at Harvard, which adds local color to the note, but the message primarily informs his friend in Berlin of his new mailing address in Boston.

Dies ist der Fußballspielplatz der berühmten Harvard-Universität in Cambridge bei Boston.

Nebst tausend Grüßen erlaube mir … besten Gruß H. Harck

This is the football field of the famous Harvard University in Cambridge, near Boston.

Along with many greetings, allow me to … best regards, H. Harck

Mr. Ingenieur W. [Seidemann / Heidemann]

Berlin N. 4 Schlegelstr.

29 II Germany

22. I. 1908 or 22. 7. 1908

Lieber Otto! Bitte send[e] mir das … an folgende Adresse: … … 329 Tremont St. Boston, Mass., Nord-Amerika

Herzlichen Gruß, Dein Freund Hermann

22 January 1908 or 22 July 1908

Dear Otto! Please send me the … to the following address: … 329 Tremont St., Boston, Mass., North America.

Warm regards, your friend Hermann

So, the messages are not particularly surprising. Postcards were an inexpensive way to communicate a limited amount of information. The messages were often simple and functional. When sent to a nearby city, they could be delivered the next day, making them a timely way to communicate. When sent to Europe, they traveled by boat, which took a tad more time.

Two of the four, the two mailed to Europe, appear to be from students, visitors, or recent emigres who highlighted the football content, providing a friend or family member across the water with a sense of the strange game embraced by Americans. The other two appear to be first- or second-generation immigrants living and working in America, who sent their messages on football-themed postcards for no apparent reason. Both were messages sent in their mother tongue to someone who understands the language, as still happens among immigrants in America today, though we use other technologies.

BTW: If someone is better at reading and translating turn-of-the-century German or French than what is shown above, please suggest alternatives.

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In that case, you’re left looking at the image for team logos, signage, or unique aspects of the setting where the game was played. In most cases, the images reveal nothing, and the teams’ identity is lost to time.

A few years ago I bought the RPPC below, which I determined was the U.S.S. Connecticut team from 1908 or 1909. I don't recall how I figured that out, but the guy in the Naval Academy letter sweater is William A. Richardson, a multi-sport letterwinner and fullback who started at Navy from 1906 through 1909. He served on the Connecticut the summer after his first year at Navy, and again in 1910 and 1911 when he served on Admiral Seaton Schroeder's staff, when the Connecticut was the flagship of the Atlantic Fleet.

Recently, I came across another copy of the same postcard, but this one came with two game-action photos showing players wearing the same jerseys with large Cs on the front. None of the RPPCs have labels, but the game-action photos show distinctive buildings in the background. Assuming those buildings were at one of the Navy’s East Coast ports, which one was it?

It turns out the Connecticut was at the New York Naval Yard in Brooklyn, being overhauled during the summer of 1907, before leaving in December to serve as the flagship of the Great White Fleet.

A review of images of the Brooklyn Naval Yard turned up a 1914 baseball game, showing the same buildings in the background.

Once I confirmed the location, I recalled another game-action RPPC I picked up a few years back, which was also played at the Brooklyn Naval Yard.

So, with that mystery solved and the connection to the Great White Fleet made, it is worth pointing out that battleship teams played some of the earliest American football games in France in 1909, England in 1910, and Italy in 1913.

After graduating in 1910 and being assigned to the admiral's staff on the U.S.S. Connecticut, Richardson was made the ship's athletic officer and football player-coach. He led the Connecticut to victory in a Thanksgiving Day game in Weymouth in 1910, before losing in the fleet championship game at the Crystal Palace a week later. However, they won the fleet championship in 1911 upon returning to the U.S. The Connecticut was at Brooklyn Naval Yard from early November 1911 to mid-January 1912, so the Connecticut team picture and two game action shots likely date to this period.

Richardson continued switching between duty aboard ship and staff or teaching roles. He assisted Navy’s football team in 1916, after which he was awarded the Navy Cross and Silver Star for commanding the U.S.S. Parker during anti-submarine activities in WWI. While ashore in England, he won the hand of the daughter of a British admiral, so he had that going for him.

He served in athletic administration and assistant football coaching roles in the Navy in the 1920s before retiring and becoming the football coach and AD at King’s College (TN), where he passed away in 1936.

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On the Pigskin Dispatch Podcast, Darin Hayes and I discuss the Continental Football League of the 1960s, which was similar to the UFL and other minor leagues that have popped up from time to time. If you thought the NFL-AFL merger was interesting, the CFL combined the remnants of several leagues before folding.

Watch or listen to the podcast here or on other podcast feeds. You can read the original Tidbit below.

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Voice commands are verbalizations that tell football players what to do during games or what they cannot do. Voice commands played a major role in early football, with some disappearing, others evolving, and new ones emerging.

Initially, voice commands came only from players and officials. Coaches didn’t exist early on, and once they did, they were prohibited from instructing or coaching players during games until the 1960s (at the college level).

Since the game has had various voice commands throughout its history, I’ll split the discussion into a few articles, with the first examining the ball carrier crying “Down” when tackled and the tackler yelling “Held” at times.

Football’s original rules of 1876 required the ball carrier to cry, “Down,” when tackled to the ground and held, a rule that carried over from the Rugby Union.

Yelling “Down” stopped play and reduced the threat of piling on, so it was in the ball carrier’s best interests to be loud and clear when acknowledging that he had been stopped.

Recall that before 1880, all scrimmages were contested, just like rugby today. But American players wanted a more open, scientific game, so they introduced the system of possession in 1880, which allowed one team to retain possession of the ball and start play during a scrimmage by heeling the ball back with the foot to a teammate.

By norm, teams that failed to move the ball punted after a few attempts, though the rules did not require them to give up the ball. It did not take long for a team named Princeton to decide it was sometimes to their advantage to stall by keeping the ball play after play, seldom giving up possession, in what became known as “block” games.

While Princeton traditionally gets all the blame for the block games, Harvard employed a similar trick, and perhaps others did, too.

When Harvard hosted a club from Montreal in October 1881, the Montrealers played by Rugby Union rules when they had possession, meaning they employed the contested scrimmage. Harvard did not. They snapped it back American-style when they had the ball. Montreal soon became frustrated, especially when, during Montreal scrums, Harvard players pulled a stalling trick. During play, the Crimson youths would lie on or touch the ball on the ground and yell “Down,” stopping play. Harvard also knelt behind their goal line for safety touches, which did not yet score a point or two for the other team. So, the Bostonians were stallers just as much as the Princetonians.

Due to all the stalling, the 1882 rule book introduced the system of downs, which forced teams to gain five yards in three downs or surrender the ball. Less often mentioned is that another rule change required the player making the tackle to cry “Held,” in addition to the runner crying “Down.”

I’m reading between the lines here, but it appears that requiring the defender to yell “Held” before the runner yelled “Down” kept offenses from unilaterally downing the ball unless they ran out of bounds.

The rule requiring the defender to cry “Held” remained in the rule book through the 1887 season, but disappeared in 1888 when they allowed either the ball carrier or the ref to cry “Down” to end play.

Then, in 1889, another rule change instructed the referee to use a whistle to signal the end of play. Presumably, whistles were so effective at ending play that players’ verbal calls were no longer needed. By 1895 or 1896, the tackler no longer had to cry “Held.”

So, “Held” went away in the mid-1890s, but what about the runner crying “Down?” The 1896 rule indicates that the runner still had the option to cry “Down,” which would cause the referee to blow his whistle. This procedure appears to have remained in place to give ball carriers a method to voluntarily end the play, much like taking a knee accomplishes today.

That need remained in place until 1932, when the rules changed so the ball carrier was considered down when any part of his body other than his feet and hands touched the ground. That meant a ball carrier could give himself up simply by taking a knee. Surely with that rule in place they could eliminate the option to cry “Down,” right?

Not so fast, my friends. The football rulemakers have sometimes worked in mysterious ways, leaving rules in place long after teams stopped taking advantage of them (e.g., return kicks) and other times failing to institute rules since everyone already followed the practice without the rule (e.g., requiring face masks). Some rules left in place, like this one, didn’t hurt anyone by being there, so they let them sit.

In this case, runners could still cry “Down” until 1963, when the rule in the 1962 rulebook disappeared from the game.

The rule change may have resulted from a change in the Rules Committee’s leadership, with David Nelson becoming the NCAA Football Rules Committee’s secretary-rules editor in 1962. However, they didn’t eliminate the return kick until 1967, despite few using it for years.

So, “Down” came into football with its original rugby rules; “Held” followed soon after, but was booted after a decade or so, while “Down” remained an option into football’s modern era.

In the next few days, we’ll tell the story of some verbal commands issued by the referee, umpire, and linesman before and after whistles entered the game.

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In the days before players wore helmets, some wore glasses on the field without any apparent means of protecting them. J. M. Hewlett, Columbia’s captain in 1889, who then played for Brooklyn Crescent Athletic Club, wore eyeglasses on the field.

Likely driven by the use of goggles by aviators, the 1920s saw some players wearing prescription goggles on the football field, with Cal’s Irving “Brick” Marcus being among the best known.

The late 1930s saw the emergence of birdcage face masks, which protected the top half of the face with bars similar to today’s face masks. They literally popped out and up at Washington in 1939 when two tackles played far better when wearing eyeglasses and face masks.

Although the combination of eyeglasses and birdcage masks allowed them to play more effectively, their glasses still got knocked around quite a bit and fogged up when they perspired.

On the other side of the country was a 6’ 6” end and hurdler, Thacher Longstreth, who, by name alone, belonged at Princeton. Apparently, his ancestors came to America in the 1600s. Despite their tremendous vision, he was terribly shortsighted with 1/20 vision, meaning he saw at 1 foot what a normally sighted person sees at 20 feet. Well-to-do, the family fortune disappeared in 1929, leading him and his brother to work their way through elite schools, including earning scholarships to Princeton.

After playing freshman football in 1937, Longstreth started at right end in 1938 and 1939. He had trouble seeing balls passed to him -seemingly an important trait for an end. He later told the story that he once had the ball bounce off his hands, but then he saw the brown leather ball reappear in front of him. He grabbed the ball and would not let go as an opponent struggled to remove Longstreth’s hands from the ball. Longstreth then realized the brown object was not the ball, but his opponent’s helmet with his head inside it, so he let it go, resulting in an incomplete pass.

Trying to solve the sight problem, Longstreth began wearing glasses and a birdcage mask, but he found the steel glasses dug into his face.

During the 1939 season, Princeton’s trainer connected with Theodore Obrig, a pioneering optician, who joined with Ernest Mullen to develop the first plastic scleral contact lenses. The connection led Longstreth to become the first football player known to wear contact lenses.

The contact lenses of 1939 were unlike those of today. Yes, they came into contact with the wearer’s eyes just like today’s, but they nearly covered the entire eyeball, and the backside was not custom-fit to the shape of the eyeball like today. The lack of a perfect fit meant the contacts became loose when the wearer’s head was jarred, which happens on occasion in football.

Whenever Lognstreth had a loose contact, he remained on the field since he played before free substitution came into play. To fix his contact, he pulled out a small suction cup, grabbed the contact, repositioned it, and played on.

Perhaps due to his vision issues, or the team’s shortage of tackles, the coaches moved him inside as a senior. Unfortunately, a bad leg sidelined him for much of the season before he suited up for the Harvard game, during which he never left the bench.

Disappointed, Longstreth, who spent his life as a teetotaler, went to a party that evening and knocked back a few, which meant he broke the team’s training rules. Disappointed in himself, he confessed his sin to Tad Wieman, the head coach, who promptly suspended him from the team. He was allowed back on the team a week or two later, but his senior season, contact lenses or not, was a disappointment.

Graduating in 1941 as the senior class president, he took the physical to join the Navy and followed the rules by not wearing corrective lenses. They rejected him due to his eyesight, so he went to another location, surreptitiously wearing his contacts, and passed, allowing him to serve in the Pacific aboard the U.S.S. Wasp, an aircraft carrier, earning two Bronze Stars for bravery.

After the war, he worked in advertising and real estate, was president of the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce for years, and twice ran as the Republican nominee for mayor of Philadelphia, losing both times.

For 35+ years, he attended every Princeton home and away game, until illness came his way. Longstreth passed away in 2003 at age 83, but never lost sight of his love of Princeton or the joy of telling tales about the days when he first saw the light on the gridiron.

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Pigskin Dispatch Podcast’s Darin Hayes and I discuss the pre-1900 rule that awarded teams a first down when they lost 10 yards, and a few years later when losing 20 yards. Those were crazy days, and we cover the craziness.

Watch or listen to the podcast here or on other podcast feeds. You can read the original Tidbit below.

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Sure, they added pennants or flags atop the poles, and eventually added a target-like disc, but all the improvements were variations on a theme. The down box or marker is another story, as countless inventors have improved those devices to better communicate the down to players, coaches, and fans alike.

Until today, I did not realize that one inventor improved both the chains and down marker, and even had his devices adopted by the NFL, at least for a few years, before they faded from memory. I also learned why one of his devices was known as the “Eckielipp” Linesman Equipment, a tale I will tell shortly.

Born in Chicago in 1888, Julius Jeffrey Lipp used progressively shorter nicknames -Joel or Joe or JJ- which befit a man standing 5 feet 4 1/2 inches tall. He attended the University of Chicago for one year, participating in football and track, before leaving school to make money.

He came to run the J. J. Lipp Paper Company, which survived him and was run by his son for several decades. Still, he was best known as a sports official, both as a football head linesman and a timer of everything else. He invented timing devices for swimming and track, personally timed numerous world records, and was the timer of record for boxing matches in Chicago, handling Joe Louis and other fights.

Lipp also worked with Swiss watchmakers to create a 75-minute watch for football officials, which kept time for both halves and the 15-minute intermission.

On the football field, he officiated his first Big Ten game in 1917, and you’ll find his name in box scores over the next 25 years, handling many big games, including the 1927 USC-Notre Dame game, the first two college all-star games in Chicago, and East-West Shrine games in San Francisco.

For much of the 1920s, Lipp was the head linesman on an officiating crew with referee Walter Eckersall, the UChicago All-American and Chicago Tribune reporter, as well as umpire John Schommer, a four-time basketball All-American and winner of 12 letters at Chicago.

Lipp filed for a patent in 1925 for a device that enhanced football measurements. The combination included the classic four-sided down box and two sets of chains connected to the poles.

They marketed the grouping as the “Eckielipp” Linesman Equipment, after the more famous Walter “Eckie” Eckersall and Lipp, who received second billing.

Why were there two sets of chains? One chain sat on the ground, like on all other football chains, and a second chain rose three feet off the ground. Suspended from the upper chain were 9 markers, much like hotel key chains of old, spaced one yard apart.

Before the 240 Lockney Lines were added to football fields near the inbound lines and along the sideline in 1954, football fields only had lines every five yards, so officials and everyone else had difficulty knowing how many yards a team had to gain for a first down. The markers dangling from Eckielipp’s upper chain helped enough that football teams used them.

In 1941, Lipp stopped officiating college games and switched to the NFL. At that point, he convinced Elmer Layden, the Notre Dame Four Horseman and recently appointed NFL commissioner, to use his devices in NFL games starting with the 1942 season.

Not only did the NFL adopt the “Eckielipp” Linesman Equipment, they also adopted his new Down Recording Disc, which replaced the short box that most people in the stands could not see with a large metal disc atop an 8-foot pole.

The assistant linesman handled the big disc, rotating a color-coded internal disc to indicate the down:

• First down: Black 1 on amber background

• Second down: Green 2 on white background

• Third down: Black 3 on amber background

• Fourth down: Red 4 on white background

(It is worth noting that NFL rule books of the era referred to the guys holding the sticks as “rodmen.”)

For those who enjoy old game films, below is five and a half minutes of YouTube highlights of the 1944 Chicago Bears-Cleveland Rams game, during which you can see the Down Recording Disc along the far sideline. At the 2:27 mark, you can clearly see the Down Recording Disc and the markers dangling from the “Eckielipp” Linesman Equipment.

Lipp officiated during the 1943 season, and then retired from the game. By then he had already developed an illuminated down marker for use in night games, and had plans to build goal posts of Lucite, which would illuminate at night. However, since Lucite was a war material, it was not available on the civilian market to make goal posts. Whether he pursued his Lucite goal post dream after the war is not known.

A look at game film from the 1946 NFL championship game shows the Down Recording Disc was no longer on the sideline, though perhaps it remained in use in some locations. Unfortunately for Lipp, Roy C. Baker developed the flip-style down marker in the early 1940s as well, and his device became the new standard while he was away at war.

Despite Baker’s device becoming the go-to down marker, let me know if you spot an image of a Lipp’s Down Recording Disc in the wild. I’d love to find a higher-quality image of his invention.

Last, I believe someone sent me an image of the Down Recording Disc a few months back, but I don’t recall who did. If you are reading this and sent me the image, please stand up and be counted.

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Coaches opposed numbering players since it stank of individualism, and it aided scouts and opposing players in identifying who was who. Through the late 1920s, selected coaches refused to number their players or met the letter (or number) of the law by putting their teams on the field wearing four-digit numbers or Roman numerals. Greater specificity by the Rules Committee solved that problem, but what about teams wearing numbers on the front of their jerseys? The NCAA did not require numbers on the front of jerseys until 1937, so which team was the first to wear them?

If I gave you a month of Saturdays to guess the team, I’d bet you would get it wrong, though I’ve written about this team on multiple occasions. Nonetheless, following esteemed practice used on Jeopardy, please write your answer in question form: “Who is (team name)?”

“Do do do do do do do....”

I’ll give you a hint. The answer appears among the teams listed on the fun illustration of the 1928 Pacific Coast Conference schedule:

Yes, my friends, the answer is the San Francisco Presidio (Ninth Corps Area) football team, often referred to as West Coast Army, a team of active-duty soldiers stationed on the West Coast that played college teams and finished their season with a game against the Pacific Fleet on Armistice Day.

Although the idea of wearing numbers on the front and back, what they initially called double numbers, seems obvious today, it was not until the start of the 1928 season that the soldiers pulled it off. They started the season on September 15, playing the San Francisco Olympic Club at Kezar Stadium. The image below shows their coach talking to the team captain before the game, and the captain wears a number on the front of his jersey, making this the earliest known image of a football player wearing a number up front.

They played Stanford the following week in the back end of Stanford’s season-opening doubleheader, when Stanford beat them 21-8. Stanford heard of the West Coast Army innovation and Pop Warner liked the idea, so they wore numbers the next week as well, marking that game as the first in which both teams wore front numbers.

A few days later, Washington State announced plans to wear numbers on the front of their jerseys, and they followed through with those plans.

Below are a few images of Stanford wearing front numbers, followed by Washington State doing the same.

Wearing numbers on the front of jerseys received lots of positive publicity from members of the press, who previously needed a team manager or two to act as spotters to inform them of who ran the ball or made the tackle. More pressure for wearing front numbers came from the announcers on the still emerging practice of radio broadcasting, who liked to inform their listening audience of who was carrying the ball, even when the runner was coming toward the press box, not just away from it.

Front numbers appeared at the 1928 Army-Navy game and the 1929 East-West Shrine game. The 1929 season was a banner year for front number adoption. Among those picking up the habit were: Northwestern, NYU, Penn, Duke, Ohio State, Santa Clara, St. Mary’s, Cal, Furman, Villanova, Penn State, Oklahoma, and the NFL’s Buffalo Bisons.

The standard eventually developed that football jersey front numbers should be smaller than those on the back, but Washington State had not heard that news when they donned front-number unis for the second season in 1929.

There you have it. That is the story of how football’s front numbers came to be. We have the West Coast Army team to thank for the innovation, though we don’t know who came up with the idea and made it happen.

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Pigskin Dispatch Podcast’s Darin Hayes and I discuss Tulsa’s 1943 football team and its assortment of freshmen and 4-F players who were good enough to reach the Sugar Bowl.

Watch or listen to the podcast here or on other podcast feeds. You can read the original Tidbit below.

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While other sports clearly are not as wonderful as football, they have their place, and reviewing their old equipment reminds us that football was not the only sport to use archaic, oddball goods. Below are some favorites on sale 116 years ago.

The relatively new sport of basketball had balls with laces and nets with bottoms. Just like footballs of the time, basketballs had to be unlaced to be reinflated, and each new basketball was shipped uninflated, requiring the user to lace it themselves using the supplied needle.

Likewise, basketball shoes came with either treads or suction cups on the soles, while the pants were padded

Spalding did not ignore the needs of American women, since they offered a line of scientifically designed gymnasium suits featuring bloomers that were “large and full,” which was just what a girl needed in those days.

When advertising school pennants and flags, Spalding opted to include examples for major Eastern and Midwestern programs, including the usual cast of characters: Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Michigan, Wisconsin, Northwestern, and, of course, Oberlin.

Just as ski shoes and skis are separate items, so were ice skating shoes and blades. Also notice on the left-hand page that the ice skate blade guards were called scabbards.

As we know, pole vaulting can be dangerous today with their fiberglass and carbon fiber poles, but the poles of 1910 had two notable differences. First, they were bamboo, and second, they had steel points at the planting end, one of which looked like the world’s largest hypodermic needle.

Want to know who put the dumb in dumb bells? I’m thinking it was Eugen Sandow, who patented dumb bells that improved your grip and your strength.

Last, and certainly not least, was their home gym equipment. You might think that home gyms are a new thing, but those aspiring to physical fitness in 1910 could just do it by slapping down $24 to $99 in gold-backed currency and quickly achieve an Adonis-like physique.

That’s it for now.

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I’ve spent a lot of time researching football played by active-duty military teams over the years. It started with the 1918 and 1919 Rose Bowl teams (1, 2, 3, 4). Another big effort came for the West Point Cavalry Detachment teams of the late 1920s and early 1930s, which included the earliest all-Black team known to have won a championship in an otherwise all-White football league. I’ve documented lots of other stories of military football, including the East Coast President’s Cup and the West Coast Armistice Day games.

So, I took immediate interest in an undated Real Photo Postcard (RPPC) on eBay showing a football team practicing on the battleship U.S.S. Oklahoma’s main deck, port side. It’s not every day one finds such an image, so I bought it, figuring I’d research the team’s history, find an interesting anecdote or two, and tell the tale here, which I have done (or am doing).

Things took a bit of a turn when the seller informed me that the RPPC came from her grandfather’s collection, as he served on the Oklahoma during WWI and perhaps later, after reenlisting.

Family histories fade with time, so it was unclear whether Tromp played on the battleship team. However, I found no information about him playing in his hometown, Omaha, so I suspect he also didn’t play for the Oklahoma.

One family story the newspapers corroborated was that while serving on the Oklahoma, Tromp received a sweater through the Red Cross that was knitted by a young lady from New York. After the war, the two met, married, and the union eventually resulted in their granddaughter, who today is dispersing an RPPC collection documenting Tromp’s time aboard the Oklahoma.

Commissioned in 1916 as America’s first oil-burning battleship, the Oklahoma served in the Atlantic through WWI, providing convoy support, including escorting President Wilson to the Paris Peace Conference, when he became the first sitting U.S. President to visit Europe.

In 1922, the Oklahoma transferred to the Pacific, where it remains today, at the bottom, after it sank, for the second time.

Naval ships commonly had football teams in those days, and with 860+ sailors aboard, the Oklahoma had the numbers to field a fair team. Battleship teams mostly played other battleships when in port, but they also played college, semi-pro, and town teams.

I did not find documentation of the Oklahoma’s football team playing before 1922, but surely they did, even if intramurally. In 1922, they played numerous games against other battleships at Trona Field, in Los Angeles-San Pedro harbor.

They also played in 1924, though they were not contenders for the fleet championship. Despite not being competitive with other battleship teams, they opened the 1925 season against the University of Washington in a doubleheader when the Huskies faced the sailors before dealing with the West Seattle Athletic Club in the nightcap.

Washington, playing with a split squad, dominated both games, though it’s worth noting that the Huskies went undefeated that season until Alabama beat them 20-19 in the 1926 Rose Bowl.

The Oklahoma played college teams in the early 1930s, including two games with Whittier College during the years Richard Nixon was a reserve for the Poets. A game with Pacific Lutheran rounded out their games against the academically inclined.

The next time that the Oklahoma and football intersect came the morning of the 1941 Pacific Fleet football championship game. The Oklahoma team was not among the championship contenders. Instead, the U.S.S. Pennsylvania and Arizona were slated to play for the title at 1:00 PM on December 7, 1941.

The Pennsylvania was in dry dock, slightly removed from Battleship Row, from which the Keystoner team planned to leave for the game at 8:00 AM. One player, Mickey Ganitch, stood topside in his football gear, ready to leave when the first wave of Japanese airplanes arrived at 7:55. His battle stations position was up in the crow’s nest, so he climbed up in his football gear and spent the next few hours directing anti-aircraft fire.

A bomb hit the Pennsylvania, penetrating a level or two before exploding, killing others but saving Ganitch’s life. Despite the damage, the ship returned to service quickly, as did five other damaged battleships over the next year or two, including two that sank that day.

As we all know, a bomb penetrated the Arizona’s powder magazine, causing a massive explosion. It has rested in place ever since.

At least 5 torpedoes hit the Oklahoma before it capsized, leading to 429 Oklahoma sailors, or half its complement, being among the 2,403 killed in the attack.

They raised the outdated Sooner in 1943, but it never returned to service. In 1947, while being towed to San Francisco for scrapping, it sank in a storm 500 miles from Hawaii.

Below are additional U.S.S. Oklahoma RPPCs from Basil Tromp’s collection during his time serving aboard.

As noted at the beginning, telling a story based on an old RPPC is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re gonna get.

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Pigskin Dispatch Podcast’s Darin Hayes and I discuss Oklahoma’s 1970 football staff, as talented a crew as you will find, but many were ethically challenged.

Watch or listen to the podcast here or on other podcast feeds. You can read the original Tidbit below.

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Shoulder pads came along in 1895, apparently at Yale; at least the Elis were the first documented users. Their shoulder pads were custom or homemade, stuffed leather or cloth pads, sewn on the exterior of players’ jerseys.

Sporting goods manufacturers, who were close with the top teams, picked up on the trend and introduced commercially available shoulder pads that mirrored the homemade versions: simple stuffed pads sewn atop the jersey.

Although many teams and players wore the fancy leather pads from Spalding and their competitors, those with fewer resources rolled their own.

While the early pads typically sat atop the shoulders, they soon added protective caps over the bursa and extended the padding to cover the collarbones. As those changes occurred, shoulder pads evolved into integrated units connecting the left, right, and middle, and began taking the shape resembling shoulder pads today.

An element of shoulder pad use that seems strange today is that early wearers of the integrated units did not always wear their shoulder pads under their jerseys. Some wore them atop the jersey.

When teams began covering their shoulder pads can be difficult to determine since, relative to the monster shoulder pads that came later, early integrated units were small and thin. Their size and the quality of game action images often make it difficult to tell whether a team or player wore shoulder pads under their jerseys.

You might think that those who wore their shoulder pads over their jerseys were uninformed rubes, the sort whose great-grandsons wore jorts or capris pants. I thought the same until I looked at the 1910 Spalding Fall and Winter catalog. The cover has an illustration of two teams in a game in which it is unclear whether either team wears shoulder pads.

Inside the issue, however, Spalding makes it clear that wearing shoulder pads atop the jerseys is perfectly acceptable, perhaps even recommended.

The integrated shoulder pads worn atop the jersey styling did not last long, and neither did Spalding’s 1914 shoulder pads, which had prominent bumps at key locations.

Instead, shoulder pads were soon smoothed out and universally worn under the jerseys. Presumably, wearing the jersey over the shoulder pads was more aesthetically pleasing than wearing them atop the jersey. Also, wearing them under the jersey made the shoulder pads more difficult to grab, a tactic we saw with horse collar tackles that resulted in penalties as of 2008.

So, a simple issue like whether the jersey should cover one’s shoulder pads took a few years to institutionalize, but doing so cleared the way for the many shoulder stripes that football welcomed in the 1930s, which were a bit much.

Still, the early shoulder stripes ultimately led to the signature striping that UCLA, LSU, and other teams adopted a few decades later, which has been a good thing.

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Pigskin Dispatch Podcast’s Darin Hayes and I discuss the evolution of football’s rules for how referees spot the ball, which hung on the question of whether to rotate or not to rotate.

Watch or listen to the podcast here or on other podcast feeds. You can read the original Tidbit below.

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• Lafayette Cup

• Albert Russel Erksine Trophy

• Eugene C. Bonniwell Trophy

I also wrote about the days before conferences played full schedules. Teams played varying numbers of conference games, so they decided conference championships based on each team’s conference win percentage, excluding ties. (The NFL followed the same procedure through the 1932 season.)

Today, those separate streams merge in the story of the Edgar B. Schwabacher Perpetual Trophy, which originated in 1921, when its namesake donated it to be awarded to the Pacific Coast Conference (PCC) football champion.

The Schwabachers were a trophy-donating family. The Sam I. Schwabacher Challenge Trophy arrived in 1911 as the traveling award for the West Coast crew championship. Funnily enough, Stanford won the trophy in 1916, dropped the sport after that season, and chose not to pass it on to the next winner.

The Edgar B. Schwabacher Trophy was also a traveling or perpetual trophy. It is a wonderful period design, two statuettes: one is a placekicker, and the other is a holder, lying on the ground holding the ball using the over-under technique, plus there were small, football-shaped engraving plates to list each year’s winners.

Cal won the title and trophy for the first several years; Stanford and Cal shared it in 1924, so each school had the trophy for six months. Washington earned it in 1925 and Stanford in 1926.

Things got interesting in 1927 when Stanford, USC, and Idaho tied for the conference championship, with Stanford and USC winning four conference games and tying one, while Idaho won two and tied two, giving all three teams a perfect record since ties did not count in the calculation. Nevertheless, there was controversy since Idaho’s wins came over Washington State and Oregon, who combined for one conference win.

The controversy ended at the conference meeting when the members voted Idaho an equal share, but they also discussed moving to a round-robin conference schedule, a step they never took.

Thankfully, Idaho got to hold the trophy for four months following its title win.

USC won the title in 1928, while 1929 saw a four-way tie among 6-1 USC, 5-1 Stanford, and 4-1 Cal and Oregon.

By some accounts, the four-way tie and the schools’ inability to agree to round-robin scheduling led them to stop naming a conference champion and to return the trophy to the donor. (Sources commonly cite conference winners, including those who tied, through the 1958 season.) Whatever the truth of the story, Washington State proudly accepted the trophy in January 1931, but the trophy is absent from media reports thereafter, aside from occasional retrospective stories.

Whether the trophy gathers dust in a Washington State basement, was returned to the donor, or became a boat anchor, it disappeared from view; we shall not look upon its like again.

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Four died in action in France, and many others were wounded. Over time, various team members saw action at Belleau Wood, Meuse-Argonne, the Banana Wars, Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Korea. Of the 20+ who played for the 1917 Mare Island Marines, five became Marine Corps generals, and one, by happenstance, served with the 13th Marines in France, the same unit as my maternal grandfather.

Following the war, 18 played in the early NFL, and 6 became NFL head coaches; others coached college football, including George Halas, Paddy Driscoll, Roy Andrew, Jimmy Conzelman, Dick Hanley, Dick Romney, and Charlie Bachman. Of course, most team members were not so famous, living everyday lives.

I know what happened to most of them because I spent an inordinate amount of time tracing every one of the 178 men I identified as playing a part on one of the four teams. I had to track each man down because the book was meant to verify or disprove a 1969 claim by one of those Marine Corps generals that half the players in the 1918 Rose Bowl had died in service to their country.

I eventually proved his claim was untrue, but the only way to confirm it was false was to track every individual mentioned as practicing and playing with the teams, and sort out where they went. That was not an easy task. One of my first blog stories described the challenges of dealing with misinformation, misspellings, typos, and other errors that took me down incorrect paths.

Despite scouring military records, newspaper archives, genealogical sites, and college archives, I could not find some of the 178 guys, so I appealed to anyone who might have information on the remaining 11.

Periodically, I have looked for the remaining 11, but I didn’t find anything until now, leaving 10 to be identified.

Several times recently, when I encountered research brick walls, I turned to AI to help. I did so the other day with Hastings, and after numerous queries and dead ends, AI turned over a stone I had not. One thing led to another, and now I can tell the story of the guy named Hastings on Camp Lewis’ 1918 Rose Bowl team.

Back in 2017, I only knew Hastings’ surname and that he supposedly played football for Fresno High School, though most California high schools played rugby at the time. The records I had showed he did not appear in a game all season, yet suddenly, he was on the traveling squad for the Rose Bowl, so I half-assumed the name was a typo or some other error. Still, my 10-year-old notes show that I investigated a dozen guys named Hastings among the 30,000+ soldiers who trained with the 91st Division at Camp Lewis, near Tacoma.

One way or another, I or AI had a breakthrough and found an article listing the Camp Lewis team roster that provided Hastings’ first name:

Armed with his first name, I found Robert Roy Hastings’ WWI Draft Registration form from June 1917, showing he was born in Chicago, lived in Fresno, and was employed at the Preston School of Industry, a state reform school for boys, so he was a Central Valley guy.

My notes from 2017 show that I looked at him then, but could not find any links, so I moved on. Part of the challenge of tracking him down back then was confusion about his unit at Camp Lewis. The newspaper listed him as part of the 403rd Engineers, a group that did not exist, at least not by that name. In fact, he served with the 403rd Aero Squadron, which was formed at Camp Lewis in 1917 and was briefly known as the 403rd Aero Construction Squadron (Engineers). Rather than a group of flyboys in training, the 403rd was involved in logging efforts in the Northwest, since the area’s Sitka spruce produced the wood for WWI airplane frames.

Despite not playing a game all season, the record shows that Hastings traveled with the team to the Rose Bowl. While I have not found evidence that he played, he is listed on the injury report with a bad ankle.

Stories published a few years later indicate he played in the game -some said he starred in the game- and suffered a broken ankle or leg requiring a silver plate to stabilize the damage. The injury led to his discharge from the Army in early 1918.

Hastings shows up again in October 1918 as the coach at Pomona High, east of LA. Since many California high schools had played rugby since 1906 and were just getting back into football, Pomona was lucky to have a guy with his football background volunteer to assist the team. Newspapers covering his hiring reported that he played at Harvard and was an all-star in several sports. However, he quickly clarified, saying his football experience came from playing on Fresno-area town teams.

The Pomona High kids loved him; he soon became their paid head coach and led them in a season that extended into February, as numerous games were postponed due to Spanish Flu quarantines.

He married and had a little girl in Pomona in January 1921. There was a story or two about him briefly coaching Fresno State Normal’s football team in 1921, though I couldn’t corroborate it.

Then, seemingly out of thin air, Hastings gained all kinds of unwanted publicity in December 1921, when he traveled with a pilot named E. H. Tanner from Fresno to San Francisco, where a local newspaper promoted an airplane stunt show that described Hastings as the general manager of the Marina Flying Association.

On Saturday, December 4, 1921, Hastings got in the backseat of E. H. Tanner’s plane. After taking flight, the plane rose to 2,500 feet, at which point Hastings jumped from the plane.

When his parachute opened at 2,000 feet, 3,000 earthbound spectators saw a trapeze hanging beneath the canvas chute. The plan was for Hastings to strap both wrists to the trapeze and perform tricks while descending. However, witnesses saw Hastings hanging from the trapeze by only one arm, and as he reached with the other arm, his bound hand slipped from the strap. He fell, landing in the city, east of the Presidio, near Divisadero and Lombard Avenues.

It’s unclear where Hastings got his aviation background. The obituaries claimed he served with an aero squadron in San Diego, but he was at Camp Lewis in December 1917, broke his leg, and was discharged, so if he ever flew in the military, it was before he arrived at Camp Lewis. Perhaps he got involved in the aviation stunt game after the war. It’s anyone’s guess now, but we know it didn’t work out well in the end.

In death, Hastings joined those who perished during the war, and a Rose Bowl opponent, Marine aviator Dutch Molthen, whose plane crashed at Quantico in 1920. There was a Great Lakes player who died from football injuries in a 1919 college game, so while a few who died young, most of those who played for the four Rose Bowl teams lived good, long lives, at least for their day.

Now, after identifying Robert Hastings a decade after 168 others, Hastings becomes 169 of 178, so only 10 more to go. I’ll report back if future searches prove fruitful.

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Girls Will Be Girls

Lest you think that high school girls of 1914 were delicate little flowers, let’s consider the events following the Toledo Scott-Toledo Waite high school football game. Waite won the game, leading some of their coeds to celebrate on the field after the final gun sounded.

After taking offense, a sizable number of Scott girls went on the offensive, leading to pulled hair, missing ribbons, and a few knuckle sandwiches. The mail cheerleaders helped break things up, and while an investigation was promised, none occurred, at least based on the lack of follow-up in local newspapers.

Pinstripes in Football

A reader, J David Holt, recently asked whether football teams have worn pinstripes. Despite all the stripe variations that have appeared on the sleeves, shoulders, chests, pants, stockings, helmet, and shoes since football began, it was not until the 2018 Notre Dame team that someone in a position of authority thought it was a good idea to put pinstripes on a football uniform, for their Shamrock Series game at Yankee Stadium.

As seen below and in the YouTube video of the game, putting pinstripes on a football uniform was not a good idea.

Pinstripes have appeared on football practice fields in the past when various coaches wore them. Back in the day, coaches often wore football pants and other gear on the practice field. A few wore baseball pants, either because they coached baseball as well or found them comfortable.

Below are images of coaches rocking pinstripes on the gridiron.

Guards Back Formation

Mass and momentum plays ruled football from the late 1880s until 1905. American football did not yet require a certain number of offensive players on the line of scrimmage. Neither were there rules that kept players from being in motion at the snap or from running toward the line.

To take advantage of those rules, Penn’s coach, George Woodruff, devised the “guards back” formation shown below.

Positioning the guards in the backfield and the ends aligned at angles allowed all kinds of movements with several players leading the ball carrier through the hole and others pushing him from behind.

Rather than diagramming the play, as football coaches had begun to do, the newspaper boys illustrated how the players were positioned midway through a play. I can’t make heads or tails of it, but perhaps you can.

Mass and momentum play proved dangerous, leading to rule changes that:

• Allowed only three men in motion at the snap in 1894,

• Required seven players on the line of scrimmage in 1903,

• Prohibited pulling, lifting, carrying, pushing, or charging into the ball carrier to assist his forward progress in 1910.

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Pigskin Dispatch Podcast’s Darin Hayes and I discuss West Point’s Ralph W. Drury, who wore football’s first documented head harness. Largely unknown and previously unidentified, his contributions to football are now revealed.

Watch or listen to the podcast here or on other podcast feeds. You can read the original Tidbit below.

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Soccer and rugby are British games that formally split when rugby established its laws in 1871. American football split from rugby several years later with the founding of the Intercollegiate Football Association. While that happened in the distant past, watching World Cup games reminds us that the three games share common roots. Each is played in an enclosed space, with teams working to move the ball into their opponent’s territory, where they kick it under or over the crossbar.

Though commonalities remain, football has changed in both sudden steps and gradual ways. Adopting the system of downs in 1882 was a sudden step, fundamentally changing the game all at once. A more gradual process change was how football has punished fouls, as it evolved from rugby’s three simple fouls: awarding a free kick, loss of possession, and disqualification.

Football’s approach to penalties changed following the 1882 adoption of the system of downs, which gave teams possession of the ball for three downs, with an additional set of downs granted for gaining five or more yards. The system of downs increased the value of yardage and precision around yard lines.

Several years after adopting the system of downs, football was beset by complaints that the game was too rough. Harvard’s faculty threatened to ban the game unless rule changes eliminated rough play, a threat they carried through on during the 1885 season. Princeton’s faculty issued similar threats, though the Tigers continued to play.

After Harvard’s faculty announced its football ban in early 1885, a Harvard student committee recommended several rule changes related to officiating and fouls that, if enacted, would allow the resumption of play. Among their proposed changes were to:

• Change the officiating crew so the referee is responsible for managing the ball, and an umpire monitors the players, focusing on fouls.

• Have the referee make decisions without consulting captains or judges.

• Allow the referee to punish unsportsmanlike acts, such as piling on, not explicitly covered by the rules.

• Develop a system of graduated penalties, up to season-long disqualifications for striking with an open hand.

Meanwhile, Princeton argued for awarding points for certain fouls, including:

• A two-point penalty for violating Rule 28, which concerned throttling, hacking, tripping, and other forms of unnecessary roughness

• A one-point penalty and player disqualification for intentional delay of the game.

The IFA passed both rules at its February 1885 meeting, but changed the penalty for intentional delay of the game in October, so the offending player was disqualified and his team suffered a five-yard loss, making it football’s first distance penalty. I have not found documentation that the IFA revoked the two-point penalty; neither have I found examples of it being invoked in a game, so it was likely tossed out in October 1885 as well. (I have yet to locate copies of the 1885, 1886, and 1887 rule books, so I’m working from newspaper reports for this topic.)

Football’s continued violence led to other calls for change, but the IFA team captains were unwilling to make them, instead committing to encouraging their teams to play fairly.

We, the undersigned, captains of the intercollegiate football teams, hereby pledge ourselves to coach our teams to stop holding in touch line, slugging, and all other improper plays.

‘Football Rules Changed,’ New York Herald, March 27, 1887.

Later that year, the IFA turned most rulemaking, the assignment of game referees, and other major decision-making over to an alumni board headed by Walter Camp, marking the point at which the players effectively ceded control of the game to the adults in the room. The adults made the rules from then on.

The 1888 rule book noted that, unless otherwise noted, all offensive fouls resulted in a loss of a down, while defensive fouls resulted in a five-yard penalty, enough for a first down in most instances. One or two other fouls led to the loss of possession, and unnecessary roughness resulted in player disqualification, which was supposed to limit violence, but was not called often enough to do so.

Additional rule changes came in 1889, when they required the referee and umpire to use whistles, a tool whose volume had been greatly improved by England’s James Hudson’s invention of the Acme whistle in 1883, to indicate the cessation of play on fouls and downs. Presumably, the use of whistles reduced piling on and other fouls occurring after plays.

In addition, the rulemakers further graduated the penalties for foul acts. Players continued to be disqualified for unnecessary roughness, hacking, and striking with a closed fist, while throttling (choking), tripping up, and intentional tackling below the knees resulted in the offended team being given the choice of a 25-yard penalty or a free kick. The 25-yard penalty is also the point at which football introduced the half-the-distance concept for fouls committed near the offending team’s goal line.

In 1894, piling on warranted a fifteen-yard penalty, and offside play incurred a ten-yard step-off; these distances were later applied to other types of fouls.

Football instituted a two-yard penalty in 1906 for teams calling more than three timeouts per half.

Football added its only horizontal-distance penalty in 1913, which applied to punters who feinted a punt during the puntout. Since the punter executed the play from behind his opponent’s goal line, they had the offender move five yards further from the goal posts rather than applying a vertical distance penalty. Puntouts went away in 1920, and with it, the horizontal-distance penalty.

Since the 1920s, football’s rule book has expanded and now includes an almost uncountable number of fouls, most of which carry distance penalties. The 2026 NCAA Rule Book includes nine different types of penalties applied to a host of transgressions:

• 45 fouls lead to a five-yard penalty

• 15 fouls result in a ten-yard penalty

• 44 fouls call for a fifteen-yard penalty

• 10 offensive fouls lead to the loss of a down

• 1 foul (defensive pass interference) leads to the ball being spotted where the foul occurred

• 21 defensive fouls result in an automatic first down

• 6 fouls cause a charged timeout

• 9 fouls lead to player disqualification

• 1 foul, for unfair acts, gives the referee wide discretion over the penalty, including awarding points to the offended team.

Of course, the breadth of penalties and fouls is an attempt to make the punishment proportionate to the crime. Early football had few fouls and penalties, but the game’s increasingly complex, technical nature led to a wider range of them. Of football’s three original penalties -awarding a free kick, loss of possession, and disqualification- only disqualification survives, and it is most often applied today to targeting, likely the game’s most controversial penalty.

As has occurred on many occasions in the game’s history, attempts will be made to modify the rules, improve call accuracy, or revise penalties for certain fouls. Regardless, people will complain about the situation, just as they did in the 1880s. It’s just the nature of sports, and the judgment calls officials make when enforcing the rules.

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Last week, I published a story about shoe branding that included five images from the 1971 Wilson Fall and Winter catalog, one of which caught the eye of one of my two sons, who sent me the following message:

Really enjoyed the shoe branding tidbit from a few days ago. What was going on with that sawtooth cleat in the last image?

Here’s the image he referenced:

His question about a seemingly innocuous catalog item revealed my failure to convey a meaningful element of football’s past to him. Then, as I began researching the history of ripple shoes, I realized I was not alone in this failure, as my research showed how little documentation exists about this vital element of football history.

Ripple-soled shoes, or ripple shoes, should be recognized by anyone who played football or had gym class in the 1960s, 1970s, and parts of the 1980s. During that time, they were the quintessential coaching shoe, and game officials wore them as well. They symbolized coaching, so my failure came in not passing on to my son the thrill I felt when I landed my first paid coaching gig, which led me, nay, required me, to buy the finest pair of ripple shoes I could find. That is just what coaches did back then.

Ripple sole shoes were the brainchild of Nathan Hack, who led a Detroit-based shoe manufacturing company before retiring to Santa Monica. In SoCal, he continued tinkering and collaborated with former USC faculty member Laurence Morehouse to develop a boot suitable for paratroopers and those with leg wounds who needed extra cushioning. A patent emerged from the research, allowing Hack to sell his sole, or a license for the same, to many shoe companies.

Hack touted his ripple soles as the first innovation in shoes since Julius Caesar put heels on his Legionnaires’ sandals 2,000 years before, saying the ripples reduced shock by 40 percent and extended the wearer’s stride by pushing them forward. They pitched the shoes as ideal for postal workers, nurses, and others who spent much of the day on their feet.

In the sports world, they were seen as a potential aid for a BYU runner looking to break the 4-minute mile barrier, and Los Angeles State’s basketball team, which wore versions with up to six-inch-tall ripples.

The first reference to ripple soles on a football field came in 1959 when UCLA’s Billy Kilmer wore them to reduce pain from ankle injuries. Despite Kilmer’s early use, the earliest I could find in a sporting goods catalog was in 1962, when they were positioned as coaches' and officials’ shoes.

Over the next 20 years, many catalogs listed ripple shoes for coaches and game officials, and while I recall them being nearly ubiquitous among football coaches, little was written about them, at least in the newspapers. Consumer advertisements for casual ripple shoes were everywhere, but their use by coaches went largely unmentioned in the press.

Ripple shoes received coverage before the 1963 NFL title game, when New York Giants coach Allie Sherman brought them as an option for players to wear in the expected icy conditions. Sherman is also mentioned in 1968 for wearing ripple shoes while giving a pre-game speech. A 1969 article profiling NFL officials noted that the league supplied game officials with all their gear except their shoes. As the author noted:

The officials have to provide their own shoes, usually the ripple sole variety.

Hand, Jack, ‘Weatherman Is Key Figure In NFL Title Game, Newark Advocate, December 28, 1963.

Another spate of press coverage came in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when players wore ripple shoes for games played on the new artificial-turf fields. That idea was novel enough in 1971 that West Virginia’s Bobby Bowden had his team try them after seeing the Texas and Arkansas backs wearing them during a televised game.

Although some players wore ripple shoes, the only listings in my catalogs are for shoes intended for coaches and officials, so I have some apparent gaps in my collection.

Although catalog images of coaching shoes are great, I wanted to find game-action images of famous coaches wearing ripple sole shoes. That required some digging, but eventually, I found a picture of Jackie Sherrill during his coordinating days at Iowa State wearing a pair of Riddell ripple-sole shoes.

Still, I was sure there were others, and the search led to Tom Landry, who, like Sherrill, favored Riddell’s ripple-sole coaching shoes. After additional searching, I found this picture of ol’ Tom taking an extra-long stride in those magical shoes.

While that picture shows the real, live Landry wearing ripple shoes, the pièce de résistance is the statue of Landry that stands outside AT&T Stadium in Dallas today.

Check out the close-up of ol’ Tom’s kicks as he stands forever on the sidelines, knowing his comfortable ripple-sole shoes will keep him there longer than all the other neighborhood statues.

I feel better now, knowing that ripple-sole shoes have found a place in the pantheon of American football, and I believe that by documenting this fact in a Tidbit, I have once again fulfilled my fatherly duties.

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