I guess we established the hard-luck record that Fall. Kendall went first. He was left tackle, and a corker. He fell down in exams. Then Penniwell, first-string quarter, got hurt in the Bates game and developed water on the knee. Next Hanson, fullback, pulled a tendon in practice. Of course, he would be out only a couple of weeks, but on top of everything else it made us feel a bit sick. It reminded one of the nursery rhyme of the Ten Little Indians. “One got charley-horse and then there were nine.” Only it didn’t stop at nine, not by a long shot. Stearns, our best halfback, fell down three dinky steps coming out of a recitation hall and broke an arm. Joe Leverett said he hoped it would be a warning to him and teach him to keep away from recitations. You’d think we’d about reached the limit then, wouldn’t you? We thought so, anyway. We tackled Amherst with just four of last year’s team in the line-up and barely escaped a licking. The Amherst game was the third on the schedule, and after that we had the big teams to meet. Of course by that time some of the earlier invalids were getting back into shape, and we figured that if we could stall through the next two games we’d be in pretty good shape for Princeton and Yale. But Fate wasn’t through with us. On the Tuesday following the Amherst scare they hurried Tom Shawl off to the Infirmary at eleven in the morning and operated on him for appendicitis at four P. M. Good-night!
Of course you remember Shawl, all-America halfback two years running, the hardest line plunger in the country and a wizard at kicking. One of the New York papers the year before said that “yesterday, at New Haven, Tom Shawl, assisted by the Harvard eleven, defeated Yale 17 to 0.” The paper wasn’t so far off, either. Anyway, you can imagine what it meant to us to lose Shawl. There was some vague talk of his getting around in time to play against Yale, but no one believed in it. We just about threw up our hands then. I’ll never forget the conference we had in Pete Haskell’s room that evening. I was manager that year. There were five of us there: the Head Coach, Porter; Jewell, who had the linemen in charge; the trainer; Pete and myself. We were a sick and sober lot, I can tell you. We talked and talked and snarled at each other for two solid hours and nothing much came of it. The only thing we decided was that Hackett, right end, would have to go into the backfield. He had played half before they’d made an end of him, and he was a good one. But that meant we’d have to find a corking good man for right end, and there wasn’t one in sight. There were plenty of candidates, but not one showed the real stuff. We talked them all over. Finally Jewell said:
“Where’s that chap Perrin, who played left end on the Freshman team last Fall? Isn’t he back this year?”
Porter sat up. “He’s our man!” he cried. “He will have to come out!”
“What’s the matter with him?” asked Jewell.
“Folks won’t let him play,” said Pete. “He got hurt in the Yale Freshman game last year. It wasn’t anything serious, but his folks got scared, I guess.”
“Piffle!” said Jewell. “Get him out. We need him.”
“I’ll see him to-morrow,” said Porter. “Glad you thought of him, Walt.”
We talked some more, and about ten o’clock life looked a bit brighter. With Perrin at right end and Hackett at left half, we might get by. Of course, losing Shawl’s goal-kicking meant that we’d have to reorganize the whole campaign against Yale, and that there was just about three months of hard work to do in six weeks, but we were all a bit more hopeful when we said good-night. I stayed behind after the others went. Billy Sawyer, who roomed with Pete and played fullback on the Second, came in just then and we three chewed it all over again. Billy shook his head over Perrin, though.
“You won’t get him,” he said. “I know him pretty well. We were at Milton together. He’s that sort.”