Returning from the athletic field one day, Harry Grant, Coe Taylor (captain of the baseball team), a man named Herrick, Harry Morse, myself, and others saw a crowd of Cambridgeport boys—hoodlums—kicking a football about. We took it away from them and started kicking it ourselves. Some one suggested that it would be fun to have a real football—this was a round rubber one—so we all subscribed and sent into Boston for an egg-shaped one made of leather. To our consternation, we found we could not handle it at all. However, we were interested; some one found a book of rules and gradually we learned the game.
Then it was a question of finding a team to play against. No college in America knew the game at the time, so we sent a challenge to McGill in Canada, and to our surprise we beat them to death. They came down for a return match, and we beat them again. Swiftness of foot was of more importance than strength then, and I was allowed to be one of the team, but could not go to Canada, as everyone paid his own expenses and I did not have the money.
I did not realize that our amateur attempts had amounted to anything, and when I came to America in 1891 I asked a young woman I met about the Harvard baseball scores. She seemed rather vague on the subject and, looking at me as if I were an antediluvian, said:
“Oh, baseball is old-fashioned. Football is the thing.”
There is a tradition in Harvard that, although football was not actually born until 1872, the first seeds were planted long before the Civil War. The sophomores and freshmen—always enemies—used to take this round rubber ball out on the field as an excuse for a fight. By 1859 this resulted in so many minor accidents, that finally, when one boy’s leg was broken, the authorities stopped it altogether.
One evening after this rule was enforced, a queer gathering of people proceeded to the Delta (athletic field). It had the air of a mediæval funeral procession with its priests carrying tall candles, chanting solemnly, and preceding a small bier borne by draped figures and followed by mourners of every description, weeping and wailing their sorrow at the departure of a loved one. In this case the dear departed was a football, red in color and looking suspiciously like a large toy balloon, which rested lightly in its casket. With all the ceremony of a real funeral, it was solemnly interred.
Three nights after, a very different procession went forth along the same way. There was a clash of cymbals, bright lights, music, gayly decorated banners, and maidens dancing joyously. Again they proceeded to the burial ground where, after curious incantations had been performed over the grave—to the astonishment of everyone who saw it—the soul of the football detached itself from its resting place and rose grandly and sedately to the heavens!
It seems to me that we cannot overestimate the importance of eating and drinking, for out of these desires of the human body have come most of the clever ideas of the world. Conviviality stimulates the brain, and, while the viands may be of ever so simple a quality, the atmosphere in which they are partaken means everything to sensitive genius. From a general poverty of purse, if not of mind, sprang the Stomach Club of Paris, and likewise, if I may compare them, the Hasty Pudding Club of Harvard. It began when two or three clever men found it necessary to economize, and they made up their minds to live on that delectable New England dish—cornmeal mush. Probably, having only one kind of food to cook, they became proficient in the art, for in my day it was certainly good to eat. The three or four men had developed into a large number, and the meetings came to have a very different purpose from that of the economy of food; but never had they varied in any degree from their first idea, and not a single dish was added to their fare of—hasty pudding.
A certain quality of cohesion is necessary to make a crowd of fellows stick together through so many years, so gradually, a number of tests came into being, and a novice must pass these before becoming a full-fledged member. As these tests vary in every case, but all are based on great principles of truth, honor, and manhood, I am not giving away the secrets of the organization if I tell a few of the amusing incidents of my initiation into the Hasty Pudding Club.
For two weeks before his final acceptance, the candidate is required to run everywhere he goes, and he must not speak a single word to anyone except the member appointed to be his keeper. I had faithfully kept this rule of silence—hard as it was for me—when one night at dinner I tried to attract the waitress’s attention, with no result.