1931-56: MEN OF ACHIEVEMENT
Not only the 25 whose All-America vignettes are published in this issue, but literally all who were nominated by more than 80 colleges and universities in response to SPORTS ILLUSTRATED'S invitation, can be called men of achievement. The judges (see page 68) commented on this fact in their verdicts.
"It is not easy to select 25 names from the roster," wrote Meyer Kestnbaum, president of Hart Schaffner & Marx and special aide to President Eisenhower. "Many of the men had distinguished war records and a substantial number of them have been conspicuously successful in their chosen professions. They have quite generally interested themselves in community affairs. It is gratifying to see how many have devoted themselves to working with young people and have exercised a very powerful influence for good." Said William A. Kirkland, board chairman of the First City National Bank of Houston: "It hasn't been easy...to pick out the 25 who, by the narrowest margins, seem to stand out a little more than the others."
One judge faced—and neatly solved—the problem of his own possible election to the Silver All-America. He was Herman Hickman, All-America from Tennessee in 1931, now SPORTS ILLUSTRATED'S own football commentator and the man who proposed the Silver Anniversary awards (SI, Oct. 22). The University of Tennessee nominated him in a citation emphatically concluding: "He has consistently reflected great credit on the University of Tennessee, on the State of Tennessee and on football in general." Hickman struck his name from the lists sent to the other judges. More than one of his fellow judges tried to write him in anyway.
Boston U.
ROGER W. BLANCHARD
Dean, Episcopal Cathedral of Jacksonville, Fla.
When Rog Blanchard, lately starting tackle, got out of Boston University in 1932 clutching his A.B., he shared a puzzlement common to college graduates in that Depression spring: how to keep eating. He shipped to the Pacific as a freighter hand, pondered the world and his own uses, turned back and hitchhiked across the U. S. to Episcopal divinity school in Cambridge, Mass. Since then, in seminary and pastorates East, Midwest and South, he has reinforced the message of religion with the regimens of sport, e.g., by organizing a football team among inmates of the Norfolk (Mass.) Prison Colony, by teaching swimming to Air Corps men in World War II. For six years he headed all college work for the Episcopal Church, now serves a southern parish because, with the South in social strain, "the church can be a force for reconciliation."
Brown
CHARLES C. TILLINGHAST JR.
Corporation lawyer, New York
Saturday afternoons in the fall of 1931, Charley Tillinghast could be found in the center of the Brown line or blanketed on the bench where, as he says, "there was more time for reflection." Nowadays, locating him can be harder; corporation law keeps him busy between New York and Detroit, sometimes takes him overseas. The reflections of Undergraduate Tillinghast led him to Columbia Law School, a near-top standing in his class, a job and eventual partnership with the select Wall Street firm now known as Hughes (for Charles Evans Hughes Jr.), Hubbard, Blair & Reed. Lawyer business tends to be client's business and thus confidential, but the Silver Anniversary judges were also impressed with Tillinghast's longtime community roles. Two current ones: trustee of Brown, treasurer of famous Riverside Church, New York.
Centre
CLEM E. BININGER
Pastor, Second Presbyterian Church, Kansas City
The second of two clergymen on the All-America, Bininger, who played football for traditionally Presbyterian Centre College, Danville, Ky., went to traditionally Presbyterian Princeton Seminary for his theological studies, then to churches in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia before moving in 1951 to Kansas City's Second Presbyterian where, with a membership of 2,400, he leads one of the largest churches in the denomination. A generation out of college, he has been an overseer at Centre and a trustee of Princeton Seminary as well as a national councilman of his old college fraternity, Phi Delta Theta. One matter of fair pride: his son Bob made the All-City high school squad last year, playing his father's old position, right end. For Bininger himself now, it's "golf, every Monday morning, the year around when possible."
Clemson
A.U. (BUCK) PRIESTER JR.
Georgia textiles executive
Buck Priester decided to be a businessman right away, even if it didn't pay very well at first: $9 a week (for a 60-hour week) as a workman beginner for the Callaway Mills (cotton), in his home town of LaGrange, Ga. Priester has kept right on going, in his own version of one of the oldest stories in America, to become a vice-president of Callaway and general manager of the same division in which he began at $9 a week. He still works close to 60 hours a week (for 100 times or more his old pay), and last week he and the 5,000 employees in the division produced, among other things, the following: 95,000 square yards of tufted carpet, 65,000 single-unit rugs, 325,000 yards of draperies, 5,000 yards of industrial fabrics. A civic and church (Methodist) leader, he has two sons, one a three-time Clemson football letterman, the other born last year.
Colorado
JAMES HALEY
Physician and surgeon, Longmont, Colo.
Jim Haley weighed only 150 pounds as a halfback for the University of Colorado but he was the old-fashioned triple-threat kind who could kick, pass and run like something greased, so his college nickname, naturally enough, was Slick. He is a member of the International College of Surgeons now, but he did not turn to medicine until he had tried coaching at a Colorado dust bowl area high school for $113.50 a month. When they threatened to cut his pay, Slick Haley decided to follow his father in the doctor business. That led to general practice, followed by three years as an Army surgeon in New Caledonia, Okinawa and Korea. Now, with a reputation as one of the finest surgeons in his state, he makes up for the football he misses by a year-round program: golf, tennis, squash, fishing, hunting and trap shooting.
Dartmouth
WILLIAM H. MORTON
Municipal securities dealer, New York
Handsome Bill Morton was one of the outstanding football heroes of the 1931 fall; the game in which he kicked a field goal to tie Yale 33-33 is one the Ivy League still talks about. It wasn't Bill Morton's favorite game; tying isn't winning. He prefers the Cornell game: "We beat a superior team by getting the jump, putting on pressure and keeping it there." Morton went from Dartmouth to Wall Street at a bleak time for young bond salesmen, stuck with it and started his own investment house, William H. Morton & Co., at 37. Says Bill Morton, who believes in competitive sport as a molder of character and manners: "I played against Barry Wood [see opposite page] for four years. We slammed into each other for four years. Yet we never had a semblance of a harsh word." (For more Morton see page 70.)
Denver
JAMES W. HECKMAN
Telephone company executive, Boise, Idaho
Basketball was Jim Heckman's sport when he entered the University of Denver, but the football coach, Jeff Cravath, who later coached at Southern California, looked over Heckman's husky 6-foot 3-inch frame and made him into a good end. After college he took the first job he could get—as it happened, in a ten-cent store. He did not stay long at that particular job, but he gained a respect for the importance of small change; today he is Idaho chairman of the March of Dimes. That, of course, is only a part-time activity for Heckman—along with being a member of the Governor's Traffic Safety Committee for Idaho and a member of the vestry of Boise's Episcopal Cathedral. For 22 years his job has been the Mountain States Telephone & Telegraph Co., where he began at $90 a month and where he is now, at 46, vice-president and Idaho general manager.
Florida
JOSIAH C. HALL
Superintendent of Public Instruction, Dade County, Fla.
Next month Joe Hall takes over as Superintendent of Public Education of the bulging Dade County (Miami) public schools, one of the nation's most challenging positions for an educator. A quiet-spoken man with a resemblance to Gary Cooper, he has been preparing himself in teaching and administrative posts since he left college—a football, boxing, wrestling and decathlon star, debater, president of his fraternity. Today his extracurricular schedule is just as heavy but runs to planning sessions for the establishment of junior colleges in Florida, work for the National Conference of Christians and Jews, square dancing. Still a teacher at heart, his only strictly teaching job nowadays is in a Baptist Sunday school. He is also a qualified pistol teacher; he got quietly good at that during 17 months of destroyer duty in World War II.
Harvard
WILLIAM BARRY WOOD
Vice-president, Johns Hopkins University & Hospital
Before and after each game in his last season at Harvard, Captain Barry Wood jabbed his thumb and the thumbs of agreeable teammates, collected the blood smears on slides. Captain Wood, quarterback, was curious about the effect of muscular exertion on the leucocytes (white corpuscles). Harvard has never forgotten Barry Wood; the Crimson has not had an All-America backfield man since. And Wood has never forgotten the leucocytes; his work in microbiology has led medicine well beyond old frontiers of knowledge about the role of the white blood cells in fighting disease. Today, as vice-president of the Johns Hopkins University and the Johns Hopkins Hospital, he is the directing officer of a major share of America's medical research. He was the only unanimous choice of the Silver Anniversary judges.
Hobart
JAMES W. BAMPTON
Aerosol products manufacturer, Philadelphia
As a football player Jim Bampton had a long, richly saturated experience of defeat. During his years Hobart lost 27 in a row. The "big game" for him was his last, which he helped Hobart win. So Bampton is a first-class example of a man who played football for the fun of the game, even in adversity. He would do it again for "the training in teamwork and desire to win." After college, both lessons deeply learned, Bampton headed for Harvard Business School and then into business. Today he is president of Krylon, Inc., manufacturers of a versatile and growing line of aerosol sprays, ranging from paints to sun-tan oils, which employs 300 plant workers and salesmen across the U.S.; active in his church, local education and boys' work. "I know," he says, "those years of Hobart football taught me something difficult to learn in most other ways."
Illinois
RAY ELIOT
Head football coach, University of Illinois
A lot of football players try coaching for a while, then pass on to other careers. Ray Eliot made up his mind to be a coach before he ever went to college, headed for Illinois to learn the trade "because Red Grange was going wild out there in those days." There was no athletic scholarship for Ray; while winning his letters in football and baseball he worked at odd jobs around campus, swung a pick on road gangs in the summertime, was short-order cook in a local hash house, a bouncer in a downtown nightspot. In the past dozen years Coach Eliot's Illini have been Big Ten champions three times, Rose Bowl winners twice. "I don't know how to explain it," he says, "but I sincerely believe that football is the greatest game in the world. I know it may sound trite, but this is what we preach in my department at Illinois—and friends, this is football!"
Lehigh
G. DOUGLAS REED
Spice company executive, Baltimore
Twenty-five years after he earned his football letter, Douglas Reed is vice-president in charge of manufacturing for McCormick & Co., the nation's largest spice distributors, with operations to direct in Baltimore, San Francisco, Mexico City and Milan. He was busy this month with the effects of the dock strike on McCormick shipping, with spice inventories at warehouses, production rates at plants. Yet on his desk, too, was the latest financial report of Lehigh University, and part of his work this month has been boosting alumni contributions to his old school. But work (50 hours a week) and alumni efforts did not prevent Reed from scheduling some duck shooting and family bowling. His quiet conviction: family life comes first. He meets any raised eye with a raised eye. "Isn't that true with everybody?" he asks, with the air of a man who considers it self-evident.
U.S. Military Academy
EDWARD W. SUAREZ
Vice-commanding general, Central Air Defense Force
Army went handsomely through a rough schedule in 1931 with sturdy help all season from Right Tackle Suarez. One of the best ways he knows to spend an afternoon, still, is to watch football, but this fall he had to get his games by TV and radio. As a brigadier general in the U.S. Air Force—and vice-commander of America's Central Air Defense Force—he was normally on duty or call 24 hours a day at his base near Kansas City, Mo. A native Mississippian appointed to West Point from Alabama, Suarez switched from infantry to Air Corps, served as a colonel in the Strategic Air Force in the Pacific in World War II. Nowadays General Suarez weighs in at 180 pounds, 15 pounds less than Right Tackle Suarez. The Air Force believes in leanness, and the vice-commanding general of the Central Air Defense Force has just knocked off 25 pounds in the national interest.
Minnesota
CLARENCE L. (BIGGIE) MUNN
Director of Athletics, Michigan State University
Biggie Munn, playing his last year for Minnesota, made one of the guard positions on Grant-land Rice's All-America (Herman Hickman was the other). His career, like that of Coach Ray Eliot (opposite), has been dedicated, and with conviction, to sports ever since. As coach and director of athletics at Michigan State, he has not only been strikingly successful in producing winning teams but in developing assistants who have also become head coaches: Kircher at Washington State, Evashevski at Iowa, Devine at Arizona State, Sebo at Penn, Edwards at North Carolina State and Duffy Daugherty at MSU. Biggie Munn rejects Tad Jones's old dictum, but at Rose Bowl half time in 1954, with his team trailing UCLA, he told his players: "You have 30 minutes left to play, and a lifetime to remember." They roared out and won 28-20.
U.S. Naval Academy
LOUIS J. KIRN
Captain, USN
Bullet Lou, they called Kirn when he played halfback for Navy in 1931. He poured out his share of ammunition in World War II, too, won the Distinguished Flying Cross leading his dive bomber squadron from the carrier Saratoga and later, after his ship was torpedoed, won the Navy Cross for strikes from Guadalcanal against the Japanese fleet's "Tokyo Express." A fresh test of Kirn's courage came in 1954 when he was hit with a rare inflammatory paralysis known as Guillain-Barré's syndrome; Kirn, who could not move a muscle, lived in an iron lung, lost 80 pounds, surprised doctors by pulling through. Then he set himself a rehabilitation schedule that might have worn out an average man. Recovered now, he is finishing studies as a U.S. armed services guest at Britain's Imperial Defence College, takes an Atlantic sea command next month.
Oklahoma
ERNEST L. MASSAD
Housing development and oil leases, Oklahoma
Iron Mike was the nickname clapped on Massad, half sardonically, when he first turned out for football at Oklahoma, a 150-odd pounder with fullback ambitions. With stubborn Syrian pride Mike Massad put on weight and muscle, won his fullback spot, worked hard to earn his way by cleaning floors and helping to build the east wing of the stadium. An ROTC man, he jumped into uniform before Pearl Harbor and wound up a colonel of artillery with a Silver Star medal for risking his life to help wipe out a Japanese position on Luzon. A successful businessman now in oil leases and housing, Mike Massad says: "Up to the time I played college football I was a pretty rough kid and I'd get into a fight at the drop of a hat. Matter of fact, I'd go out of my way to drop the hat. Then I found out about working with others—teamwork."
Pittsburgh
RALPH DOUGHERTY
Physician and surgeon, McKeesport, Pa.
Somewhere along the line," says Ralph Dougherty, "everyone must find himself. For me it was the game we lost to Notre Dame 25-12, our only defeat that year. I learned that in a tough situation you've got to put a little more into it, more than you think you have. I also learned even that isn't always enough to win." Dougherty outcharged Notre Dame's All-America center, Tommy Yarr, that day and spilled enough other Notre Dames on the field to be elected to their all-opponents team, win All-America mentions himself. Surgeon Dougherty, whose job now is picking up people, was the son of a steamfitter and went to Pitt with the help of an athletic scholarship. Member of the American College of Surgeons, active in community and church affairs, he says: "I would have been a steam-fitter too if football hadn't offered me the chance of an education."
Southern Methodist
WILLIS M. TATE
President, Southern Methodist University
When Southern Methodist played Texas on Oct. 31,1931 there were two future college presidents on the field. The team of the future president of SMU beat the team of the future president of the University of Maryland (see below) 9-7. Tackle Tate of SMU took his first job coaching football in a San Antonio high school (the same town where, 16 years before, an ex-West Pointer named Dwight Eisenhower coached football part-time). A college president needs learning, skill in administration and wizardry in reaching fiscal objectives. Tate proved his as teacher and graduate scholar, fund raiser, dean and vice-president before becoming SMU's president last year. He still retains enough unfettered enthusiasm for football to have been observed not long ago publicly demonstrating the Statue of Liberty play to a Methodist bishop (SI, Oct. 15).
University of Texas
WILSON H. ELKINS
President, University of Maryland
President Elkins describes himself as another man who would never have gone to college but for an athletic scholarship. Once Texas took him in, he showed how broad his talents really were: he played quarterback and wound up president of the student association, a Phi Beta and a Rhodes scholar (at Oxford he was history, track and Rugby). He is the only one of the Silver All-Americas who carries old football scars with him (a twice-broken left leg and trick knee), but like the rest he would do it again. At Maryland, where Elkins became president in 1954 after 15 years in Texas college presidencies, winning football has long been a matter of emphasis. Says Elkins, who is interested in raising the academic levels of football squads: "I don't say every football player should be a scholar but if it can give him a chance to learn, then it has been a good thing."
Texas A&M
J. EARL RUDDER
Land Commissioner of the State of Texas
At his desk in Austin this month, busy at the job of being land commissioner of Texas, sat Earl Rudder, who is entitled to wear the Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Star, Legion of Merit, Purple Heart, Bronze Star with oak leaf clusters and the Croix de Guerre with palm. On the morning of June 6, 1944 Lieut. Colonel Rudder stood at the base of a 100-foot cliff four miles west of Omaha Beach, a reservist commanding three companies of U.S. Rangers. On the heights above and beyond, the Germans had stationed a battery of howitzers capable of sweeping Omaha and Utah beaches. Earl Rudder led his rangers by ladders up the cliff (and was twice wounded), silenced the German battery. Rudder played center for Texas A&M in 1931. He disagrees with Tad Jones about the ultimate of ultimates. "My marriage and my five kids come first," he says.
Tulane
ELDON C. UPTON JR.
Insurance executive, New Orleans
The full name of the right tackle on Tulane's 1931 team was Eldon Claggett Upton Jr.; his teammates called him Tick. That was the season Tulane went to the Rose Bowl and lost to Southern California 21-12, and though he still deplores the score, Tick Upton calls his bowl game the best he ever had: he played all 60 minutes, the weather was perfect and "we all felt a big lift playing before that big crowd." Upton got another big lift last November when, an active Republican in what has long been normally a Democratic stronghold, he helped carry Louisiana for Eisenhower. Both in football and politics (his full-time business is representing the Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Co. as general agent) Upton has known what it is to lose. He thinks football teaches this lesson well. He is fond of football for another reason: "Winning is so much fun."
Vermont
EDWARD M. WINANT
Orthopedic surgeon, New York
The year 1931 was not one of Vermont's best seasons in football; the Catamounts won only one game and opposing teams ran up 238 points against them. Quarterback Winant, who led his out-manned team with courage and good grace, is better remembered now at Vermont for his accomplishments since. He stayed on in Burlington for courses in medicine (and coached freshman football), eventually swung to New York for a career in orthopedic surgery. Demands on his time and skill increased as he became attending orthopedic surgeon at five big city hospitals, but he has devoted consistent effort to building up Vermont's College of Medicine, is now national chairman of a $7 million Medical Alumni Fund campaign. A wartime Army surgeon, he earned a battle star in the Marianas. "But don't write that down," he says like a Vermonter. "I was just there."
West Virginia
JOHN E. DOYLE
Country doctor, Ridgway, Ill.
On d-day, Lieutenant John Doyle waded ashore with his medical unit on Utah Beach (about the time Earl Rudder—see page 83—was silencing German howitzers on the cliffs beyond). Doyle kept right on going—through the battles of the beachhead, Saint-L√¥ and Malmedy until his unit reached the Elbe, performed operations in front-line medical stations, earned the Purple Heart, five battle stars and the Bronze Star. John Doyle, halfback and a star of West Virginia's 1931 team, grew up in Pennsboro (pop. 1,700), West Va., and football gave him his chance to go to college. Back in the States after the war, Doyle picked out another small town, Ridgway (pop. 1,100) in southern Illinois, now lugs his country doctor's 20-pound medical bag throughout three counties. His hours: all hours. "Country towns are pretty short on MDs, you know."
William & Mary
JOHN W. TUTHILL
Senior economic officer, Paris Embassy
John Tuthill weighed 135 pounds when he went out for freshman football at William & Mary and his favorite game is still one against the varsity: "Twice I managed to stop the varsity quarterback." Never heavier than 152 in college, Tuthill won his letter (at end) more by determination than brawn. Told of his election to the Silver All-America, he asked, "Are you sure they've got the right man?" William & Mary is sure. After college Tuthill took graduate business courses, passed examinations for the U.S. Foreign Service and now has spent 15 years specializing in economic affairs. This month, as senior economic officer in the Paris Embassy, it was his job to assess Western Europe's oil needs as a result of the Suez crisis. Involved in the accuracy of his estimates were the warmth, industrial production and mobility of most of free Europe.
Yale
DOUGLAS MacARTHUR II
Counselor, U.S. Department of State
Douglas MacArthur II has spent a large part of his life in the echoes of great names. At Yale, where he played guard, MacArthur broke his nose three times running interference for his captain, Eli's never-to-be-forgotten Albie Booth. In the Foreign Service, to which he was welcomed in 1935 as the nephew and namesake of the never-to-be-forgotten Douglas MacArthur I, he was assigned to guard duty in a succession of nose-breaking posts in Canada, Italy, Portugal and France. Last week, as Counselor of the State Department, he was preoccupied with Suez, Hungary and the world at large. When the Senate meets in January it will be asked to confirm him as new U.S. Ambassador to Japan. MacArthur takes his confirmation for granted: he is having his subscription to SPORTS ILLUSTRATED transferred from Washington to the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo.
FIFTY PHOTOS