Worth Bagley’s career at the Naval Academy was a triumph of the heart rather than of the mind. While he loved the service and hoped some day to fill a useful place in it, he found more to attract him in football and athletics than in calculus and least squares. But no man who ever entered was more beloved than he, and no man had better friends in the service and out of it. He was turned back twice, but entered, in 1891, the class of ’95, in which year he was graduated. He was a member of the “Five B’s,” composed of Bennett, Barnes, Bagley, Breckinridge, and Baldwin, men who were close friends while they were at the Academy.
But football was Bagley’s ruling passion. During this time, too, the great series of games between West Point and Annapolis, between the army and navy, over which the entire United Service went mad, were played, and Bagley was on the victorious team of ’93, and was named for the “All-America” team.
Bagley roomed during the four years’ course with his chum Breckinridge, who was washed off another torpedo-boat, the “Cushing,” and drowned, as he was trying to get into Havana a few days before the blowing up of the “Maine.”
“Worthless” Bagley (as his intimates called him) and Breckinridge were never left much to themselves in their quarters, for their room was always crowded during recreation-hours with cadets skylarking or asking advice or assistance. There was another intimate and classmate of Bagley, D. R. Merritt, who was killed in the “Maine” disaster a few days after the drowning of Breckinridge.
ROOSEVELT SAVED BAGLEY FOR THE NAVY
When Bagley came up for graduation at the end of the four-years’ course the doctors thought they discovered an irregular movement of the heart, and recommended that he be dropped. Bagley took his case to Theodore Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy.
Roosevelt, looking at him through his glasses with a quick, critical glance, said,—
“You are Bagley, the football player, are you not?”
Bagley said he was.
“Well, you are to stay in the navy while I am here. The service needs more men just like you.”