The Silver All-Americas, 1936-61
Whatever else was said about the young men who were coming out of American colleges a quarter of a century ago, nobody called them the lost generation. They were freshmen in the fall of 1933, when college enrollment was declining so fast it seemed classes might disappear entirely. "The 1935 season wasn't so bad," said Dr. Prescott Jordan, referring to football in those times at the University of Chicago, "but in 1936 only 40 candidates showed up for fall practice."
Dr. Jordan is now an eminent professor of surgery, but 25 years ago he was a much-trampled guard on the Chicago team that was beaten by Indiana, Purdue, Illinois, Vanderbilt and Ohio State. "By the time the season got under way," Dr. Jordan continued, "11 of us were the first team, with about four substitutes. What system did we use? Well, to tell the truth, we played mostly defense about 59 minutes of every game. Our rallying cry was, 'Oh, hell, here they come again.' "
Captain Whitney Wright is now a distinguished naval officer engaged in duties so confidential that it is almost a breach of security to mention his name—he is head of the nuclear planning division of an important part of the nation's military force in Europe. He learned to play football under Depression conditions at high school in Hyde Park, Mass. "We had no locker room then," he explained, "and had to change in the woods behind the school. Sometimes we'd play until we couldn't see the ball any more. The coach would get the teachers and neighbors to line their cars along the field and turn on the lights." After this Spartan beginning Captain Wright went to Colby College, which in 1936 won one and lost seven for the worst year in its history.
Colonel Charles Meyer is now deputy commander of the northern area command of the V Corps stationed in Germany. His father was an Army officer who once taught philosophy at West Point, and young Meyer grew up on Army posts, some of them in the Philippines, where there wasn't much chance to learn football. Back in the States he tried to make up for lost time, in his senior year at Chestnut Hill Academy in Pennsylvania played every minute in every football, basketball and baseball game, took part in every track meet and worked the school switchboard for his meals. He was so light that when he turned out for the freshman team at West Point nobody paid any attention to him. The only reason he was ever allowed to carry the ball at all was as a courtesy to his father, who visited the field one evening as dusk was falling. Young Meyer was sent into scrimmage, and he got away for two spectacular runs. From starring on the freshman team he went on to star for Army for three years. His weight was always given as 147 pounds, but in fact he never weighed more than 139. "Another Monk Meyer," sportswriters used to say, whenever any good small man beat a good big man. "I was never hurt," said Colonel Meyer the other day in Frankfurt, "in any way a few bandages and a heat a mp wouldn't cure."
"We felt as if we were going into a meat grinder," said Richard Walker Boiling, recollecting the 1936 season in which Sewanee lost six, tied one and won none. Congressman Boiling (Democrat, Missouri) is now serving his seventh term as Representative from Kansas City, but 25 years ago he was a tackle when Sewanee, with 248 students (down from 332 before the Depression), regularly took on Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia Tech, Vanderbilt and other major powers. Young Boiling went to Sewanee after Phillips Exeter and played football because, being six feet tall and weighing 210 pounds, he was one of the largest people at Sewanee, and it was expected of him.
Each Saturday he and his colleagues spent the full 60 minutes in the meat grinder because, as Congressman Boiling remembers it, "there wasn't anybody else to put in." Sewanee never won a conference game, and some of the scores, like that of the Georgia Tech game in 1936 (58-0), looked like a vote for states' rights in the first Confederate Congress in Montgomery. The last game of the 1936 season was with Tulane in New Orleans, and Boiling, whose ankle had been in a cast since the game with Mississippi State (68-0), was in the press box identifying Sewanee players for a radio announcer as Tulane won 53-6. After the game the Sewanee players went to Antoine's for dinner and a few drinks, but it wasn't a festive occasion—"Most of us folded up early," said the Congressman.
William Craig is now a patient and philosophical dean of men at Stanford, but back in 1936 he was working for his board and room at Middlebury College. "Football is very complicated today, and college itself is hard work," he says. "I don't think the kids have as much fun as we did.... We were just 30 or 35 guys who came out voluntarily for football—we weren't invited—and when we won a game in the Little Potato League our joy was unbounded. We never had a huddle, and we never had a signal on defense. Nor did we have a coach-scout in the press box to telephone the bench on every play. We didn't have a press box."
In the first game with Union the score was 0-0 in the fourth quarter when Craig, the captain and the right end, blocked a punt and Middlebury won 7-0. The next week Middlebury beat Colby (the team on which Whitney Wright, the future nuclear strategist, played tackle) 6-0. Thereafter Middlebury games were reported like major college football as the winning streak added up to the only undefeated season in Middlebury's history.
"I may be the only man who ever pulled off an opposing player's pants," said James Cheever Farley, referring to equipment failure, one of the problems of the Depression years. Mr. Farley is now a vice-president of the Richmond Engineering Company and a civic leader of Richmond, but 25 years ago he was a relentless guard on the Virginia Military Institute team. In a game at Baker Field in New York, Al Barabas, the hero of Columbia's great Rose Bowl victory, carried the ball on a slant to his left and Farley—making a, desperate lunge—caught the back of Barabas' pants. Barabas' belt broke. He kept going, dragging Farley along. But Barabas was in a desperate situation, holding the ball in one hand and clutching his ripping pants with the other. Farley held on grimly, until at last Barabas and his pants both tumbled to the ground, separately. Columbia won 29-6, but the vivid recollection of the game was of the players of both teams surrounding the scowling Barabas while his new pants were rushed from the locker room. Asked last week if he remembered the incident, Barabas said in astonishment: "Yes. It isn't the sort of thing you forget."
Joseph O'Neill, who is now a director of the Texas Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association and half a dozen other firms, began playing football at LaSalle High School in Philadelphia, and on his first play in his first game caught a 45-yard pass, an experience that guaranteed a lifelong interest in football. Born into a family with nine boys, O'Neill got into Notre Dame without a football scholarship and waited on tables. Notre Dame in 1936 had a great season but lost to Pittsburgh 26-0. "That team really beat us," says O'Neill. "They were the best team I played against in three years." O'Neill punted eight times in that game, averaging 44 yards. Two weeks later Navy also beat Notre Dame, 3-0. "Navy had no business on the field with us," O'Neill says now. "We outgained them 249 yards to 171, but we were a passing team and could complete only four out of 23."
Captain William Bringle, who is now in command of the Navy's new super aircraft carrier, USS Kitty Hawk, played in that game. He was a sandlot football and baseball player in his native Covington, Tenn., when his father, a real estate broker, died of a heart attack early in the Depression, leaving the family almost penniless. "My mother boarded about 20 cadets from Columbia Military Academy, which was right across the street," Captain Bringle recalled. "I helped with whatever I could, did odd jobs and helped coach math. Those were Depression years, and for our family they were hard years." He played football at Columbia Academy under Red Sanders, later the famous UCLA coach. "I was an inland lad," he said, "and the Navy was something entirely foreign to me until I got into the academy.... I knew from the first moment the Navy and I met that I was a career man." After two promising but injury-interrupted years as a Navy end, Bringle sat out three games in 1936 with a damaged knee but got into the Notre Dame thriller. Sneed Schmidt for Navy kicked out of bounds on the Notre Dame one-yard line. Joe O'Neill (the present-day oil man described above) kicked in return, and Bill Ingraham got the ball on Notre Dame's 35-yard line, returning it to the 20. Then he caught a pass for another 10. Notre Dame held, and Ingraham kicked a field goal for the game's only score. Three weeks later Bringle got into the historic melee in which Navy beat Army 7-0 before 102,000 in Philadelphia, a classic in perfect weather and an occasion so high-spirited that it gave some sign that the Depression was ending.
Floyd Blower is now the president of the Blower Paper Company of Santa Ana, Calif. and a pioneer in developing electronic equipment used in making cardboard containers. The son of an Ohio coal mine superintendent, he grew up in California, was a high school football star and worked his way through the University of California. "I waited on tables, was a gardener at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, worked in the bookstore and on weekends washed and polished cars," he said. "For two summers I worked for Earl Warren, the Chief Justice, who was then district attorney for Alameda County. I used to chauffeur him around and do investigative work." Mr. Blower says that he wasn't much of a detective; most of his investigations consisted of trying to locate people who had moved "or who tried to conceal their whereabouts," he added. After a promising football beginning Mr. Blower was injured in a game with the San Francisco Olympic Club, missed one year entirely and part of another but played throughout 1935, when California won nine and lost only to Stanford. In his senior year he married his high school sweetheart, who was also a student at California. "Not many students got married in college in those days," he said, "and it wasn't easy to make ends meet."
Gilbert James Kuhn is now the president of Ocean Garden Products, the world's largest shrimp-importing firm, and a prominent civic figure in San Diego, but back in 1936 he was an aspiring football player at the University of Southern California and was giving a good deal of thought to earning his way through college. His father was an oil driller—Walter Johnson, the pitcher, once worked on his father's crew—and his mother was a California-born descendant of a Basque family: Spanish was spoken in his home. In high school at Fullerton, Calif., Kuhn played football, sang baritone solos and had the lead in such operettas as The Red Mill and Sweethearts. While going to college he got a job as an extra in a movie, College Humor, in which he played a football player. (A singer named Bing Crosby was in it also.) Mr. Kuhn then had a fitful career as a substitute quarterback and center at Southern California, but he worked fairly steadily in the movies, appearing in Rose Bowl, Pig Skin Parade and Varsity Show. He generally portrayed a football player who could sing.
Dr. Christian Anfinsen, an eminent biochemist who heads the Laboratory of Cellular Physiology and Metabolism at the Government's National Heart Institute in Maryland, was a tall, lanky tackle on the 1936 Swarthmore team that managed to beat Johns Hopkins and Union, but nobody else. The son of a mechanical engineer, he spent his spare time wandering along the banks of the Monongahela River in Pennsylvania, because of a boyhood interest in nature started by reading Ernest Thompson Seton. "I was curious about what motivated life and I just naturally drifted into science. I never thought of doing anything else." A high school swimmer and track star, he found he was expected to play football at Swarthmore, where two-thirds of the 647 students were female, because of his height. When he was picked for something called The All-America Melting Pot team after Swarthmore's unfortunate season, he said it must have been because his name looked Scandinavian.
"Football was no fun but hard, brutal work," said Dr. Joseph Vollmer, the superintendent of schools of Somerville, N.J. (pop. 13,000). A benign, quietly enthusiastic educator, Dr. Vollmer got into Columbia with a $500 academic scholarship from a small New Jersey town. "From frosh to senior year I worked myself up from dishwasher to salad man at John Jay Hall for my meals," he said the other day. Tuition and room charges at Columbia in his student days came to $580. Short the $80 in his junior year, Dr. Vollmer went to the athletic director to see if there was a job he could do that would earn $80.
The athletic director brooded over the problem for some time. In those days $80 was a lot of money to throw around. He discovered, however, that Columbia had been making an exhaustive collection of the University records but lacked a study of fencing at the institution. So Joe Vollmer began preparing the history of fencing at Columbia. There were so many facts and figures that it was impossible to complete the project in one year. The next year Joe found he needed $80 again. He went back to the athletic director. "Without batting an eye and using the same phrases," says Dr. Vollmer, "he told me about the need for the history of fencing. I caught on, and I believe that to this day the history of fencing at Columbia has never been finished."
It was a good investment. Joe was a substitute in the last quarter of the Dartmouth game of 1935, when the score was tied 7-7. He took a routine pass from center, started routinely around right end, saw a horde of Dartmouth tacklers—also a routine situation—reversed himself, stepped inside his own tackle and suddenly found himself in uninhabited country, wandering alone toward distant goalposts. After the initial surprise the eminent historian of swordplay took off toward them, vaguely conscious that an agitated Dartmouth safety man was trying to head him off. Ten yards from the goal the Dartmouth man grabbed him by the arm, but Vollmer shook him off and plowed over the line—a 63-yard run that gave Columbia a 13-7 victory. "I suppose it was a great moment," Dr. Vollmer said, "but it was over so fast I can't remember how I felt. All I know is, it was the last game of the season, and I wasn't sorry to hang up my uniform."
The center of that Dartmouth team was Carl Putnam Ray, who is vice-president in charge of marketing for the Royal McBee Corporation, makers of typewriters and electronic computing equipment, a big business with foreign subsidiaries that reach from Argentina to France and with annual sales of $100 million. The son of a prominent New York physician, Carl Ray went to Deerfield Academy, took life easy, and when he turned out for football in his sophomore year at Dartmouth was 5 feet 10 inches tall and weighed 232 pounds. Coach Earl Blaik took one look at him and put him on a diet that consisted exclusively of roast beef and lettuce. "I never got so sick of anything in my life," Ray says, "but I lost 30 pounds in a hurry." Ray scored the final touchdown against Yale in 1935, for the first Dartmouth victory against the Elis in 51 years of earnest effort. On a cold, wet field Dartmouth had Yale pinned on its own five-yard line. Yale's Kim Whitehead dropped back, obviously to kick out of the end zone. It was, however, a fake, a quick and well-screened pass. "It didn't fool Ray," said The New York Times, "a great center for 60 minutes today. Ray gathered the ball on the eight-yard line and gave everything he had to running to the far corner of the field. He made it and the game was over...."
Dan Hutcheson Edmonson is a vice-president of the Kroehler Manufacturing Company, a large furniture concern, but 25 years ago he was turning to whatever work came along—working as a newsboy was steadiest—to put himself through William and Mary. His main interest was baseball, and he was captain of the nine, a welcome relief because the William and Mary football team won only one and lost eight in 1936.
In 1936 the football players at Michigan State lived over the barracks of the state police in East Lansing. At night, while his teammates were studying other subjects, Fullback Arthur Brandstatter got into the habit of visiting the barracks and talking shop with the cops on duty.
Now Brandstatter is director of the School of Police Administration at Michigan State and an international authority on police work—he entered Korea with an advanced detachment of the U.S. occupation forces in 1945 to reorganize the police force of the country, and has since done a similar job reorganizing the police of South Vietnam. When Michigan State had started its first program of police administration in 1935, Brandstatter had enrolled with two others to become the first students. (As head of the department he now supervises 377 students and a faculty of 15.) Brandstatter was pretty nearly a working cop at the same time he was a star on the 1936 team that lost only to Marquette but walloped its traditional rival, Michigan, 21-7.
A big proportion of the 658,181 men students in U.S. colleges in 1936 worked for their tuition, board and room, spending money or everything. A good many of the 16,000-odd college football players that year did also, and in most cases they worked at bona fide jobs. Dr. Leonard Lovshin, who is now head of the department of internal medicine at the famous Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, was a waiter in a girls' dormitory while he put himself through premedical courses at the University of Wisconsin. Victor Strub, who is manager of the big Owens-Illinois Glass Company branch at Oakland, Calif., was a mechanic at the Oakland airport before he won an athletic scholarship to Saint Mary's. "That was a rare thing in those days," he says, referring to the scholarship, not to the fact that he worked.
Austin Holmes Ross heads the Derby Construction Company of Louisville, one of the five largest companies in the state, an enterprise he started with a secondhand dump truck and capital of $2,000; but in 1936 he was co-captain of the University of Vermont football team and waiting on tables for his meals. His four years in college cost his family about $1,000. Young Jacob Boozer is now president of the Cotton States Life Insurance Company and a prominent civic leader in Tuscaloosa, Ala. In mid-Depression years, when he was a ball carrier on the great Alabama teams, he was mighty relieved to be elected head of the Cotillion Club, because it was a paying job—he booked orchestras for the college dances.
The late Scott McLeod, who became Ambassador to Ireland, was the son of a Standard Oil tank wagon salesman in Iowa. He entered Grinnell College with $100 borrowed for his tuition. The college owned a good deal of property in the town of Grinnell, and McLeod liked to remember that he earned 35¢ an hour painting the college-owned houses, upped to 40¢ when he became a paint mixer.
All in all, the generation that played football in 1936 was made aware pretty early that life was a serious matter regardless of which team won. Vincent Lombardi, who is now the celebrated coach of the Green Bay Packers, did not play high school football in his native Brooklyn until his senior year. Lombardi spent three years as a guard on Fordham's great teams.
Dean Stevenson, who is now Archdeacon of the Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem, Pa., had been accepted for West Point when he decided to enter the ministry instead. He became a three-year letterman at Lehigh (as well as the college heavyweight boxing champion) before going on to theological school. Henry Curry Estabrook, who is now president of the Sealright-Oswego Falls Corp., a large manufacturer of paper containers in Syracuse, N.Y., had been forbidden by doctors to play football because of a childhood illness, but he was allowed to turn out for baseball in his freshman year at Hamilton College. The track coach saw him running bases and recruited him for track, after which it was merely a step to playing on the Hamilton football team.
Football in 1936 meant the University of Minnesota. Its great team started the year with an undefeated streak of 24 games (with 17 consecutive victories), and every game was news. Figuring in most of the news was Charles Wilkinson, the son of the head of a large home-financing company in Minneapolis. For the past 15 years Bud Wilkinson has been coach at the University of Oklahoma, where his teams won 12 consecutive undisputed conference championships, six bowl games and 47 consecutive games in five years for the alltime national collegiate record—the record that his University of Minnesota team was trying for in 1936.
Wilkinson was then quarterback. He had moved from the guard position he played in his first two years and in which he would have been certain All-America. Minnesota's first game in 1936 was with Washington. With the score 7-7 in the last quarter, a Washington pass was intercepted on the Minnesota 20. There was an exchange of punts, the Washington kick was fumbled and Minnesota had the ball on the Washington 35. Wilkinson caught a pass that carried to the Washington 20. Another pass on the next play put it over, and Minnesota won 14-7, with the winning streak now 18.
By this time interest was nationwide. But the pressure was increasing. The next week Minnesota ran into an unexpectedly powerful Nebraska team. Again the score was tied 0-0, Nebraska's ball, with only 68 seconds to play. A Nebraska punt sailed comfortably to the Minnesota 28-yard line, where Wilkinson caught it. He ran forward five yards, stopped and suddenly lateraled to Andy Uram, the Minnesota end, who went along the opposite sideline for 73 yards and a touchdown. At the time Wilkinson's lateral was viewed as a remarkable instance of quick thought, almost as brilliant football as was Uram's great run. Was there any particular reason for his decision, he was asked recently. "Well, yes," said Wilkinson thoughtfully. "I was about to be tackled."
The Minnesota undefeated streak stretched to 28 games in 1936 and Northwestern did not look too menacing, especially after Minnesota had beaten Michigan 26-0 and Purdue by a score of 33-0. The game was played at Evanston, with 47,000 people in the stands. "It was a terrible day, rain and mud, a dog-eat-dog affair," said Dr. Stephen Reid, who was running guard on Northwestern's team that day. Dr. Reid is now a noted surgeon, an associate professor of surgery at Northwestern's medical school and physician of the Northwestern team. He was born in Chicago, the seventh son of a Chicago fireman, and was overshadowed in his early years by his older brother John, "the captain of the Loyola University team, who later became a famous criminologist.
Against Minnesota, Reid played opposite Ed Widseth, a 240-pound giant who was to become nationally famous during the game. There was a nightmarish quality to the afternoon, in which the plodding Northwestern team and especially the unshakable Reid (who was an All-America guard in 1936) seemed to represent fixed determination pitted against frustrated skill. In the final minutes of the last quarter Minnesota threw three wild laterals, and each was recovered by Northwestern, which, however, each time lost the ball in turn.
At the start of the last minute of this muddy melodrama Northwestern recovered a fumble on the Minnesota 13-yard line. The final setback was too much for Ed Widseth who, when the pileup was peeled away, was observed to be steadily punching a Northwestern player on the nose. Or at least a referee said he had seen Widseth twice hit a man after the whistle. It wasn't Dr. Reid—he and Widseth subsequently became good friends. The rain was now drenching, the wind strong and the light weak, and the spectators peered through the dusk in bewilderment when the ball, as a result of the penalty, was placed almost on the goal line. Northwestern pushed it over and won the game 6-0. Whether this frustrating conclusion to Minnesota's unbeaten streak played any part in Bud Wilkinson's motivation later on in coaching the Oklahoma team to its alltime record is debatable. Even now, the players who were on the field that afternoon haven't much to say about it. Dr. Reid says pacifically that the movies showed somebody was pushed. Bud Wilkinson says, "I think it best not to comment. Let's say that at the time I couldn't agree with the call."
Ten of the 1961 Silver Anniversary Award winners served in the Navy during World War II, nine in the Army, one in the Air Force, two were wartime agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and one was a civilian chemist doing malaria research for the Army. A good many of them started their military training while they were still in college or enlisted soon after graduation, before the war began. One was a private on a transport between the Philippines and Hawaii when Pearl Harbor was bombed. One was stationed at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii at the time. Another saw his first action flying from an old four-stacker, air-catapult cruiser. By the end of the war the Philippines-bound private was a lieutenant colonel. All told, the list of Silver Anniversary Award winners includes two colonels, two lieutenant colonels—one a chaplain—and four majors, plus two Navy captains and three lieutenant commanders.
By the end of the war the men of this hard-pressed generation tended to be laconic, self-possessed and given to understatement. As a group, the winners are now big, well-preserved individuals, accounted handsome, all family men and all weighing about what they weighed in college.
These 25 Silver Anniversary Award winners have it in common that they all played football for their colleges for the last time in 1936; they all worked toward graduation the next year; they all could look forward then to a future that seemed threatening at best. They have all distinguished themselves since graduation by their genuine contributions in innumerable ways to American business, professional and community life. Because of these contributions, they were nominated by their colleges, and the judges, who are pictured on page 119, after considering the records of all the candidates, chose them to receive the Awards that have come to be synonymous with the twin ideals of sportsmanship and public service.
Well, 1961 is part of the future of 1936 and, whatever else was anticipated then, this particular development was not expected by the football players of that dramatic year. One characteristic they possessed in common was a tendency to play down both difficulties and accomplishments, and they added a note of caustic humor to their view of themselves, the world they lived in and the football they played.
They often had to work for what their predecessors in more prosperous times took for granted. Hard times imposed hard-headedness on them. They did not become bitter, but they certainly looked skeptically at extravagant claims and emotional appeals. They were in a paradoxical situation with regard to their own careers. They were enterprising and ambitious and often had to test the limits of their enterprise to work their way through college. But they came out of college in a period when demands for a radical revision of society were clamorous and when the old familiar goals of material success alone seemed shabby and inadequate in the face of the widespread distress of the time.
What they did, if any credo can be evoked from them, was focus their efforts into narrower limits than their predecessors had done and add a sense of civic and social responsibility to their concept of their duties. A certain pride in good operations as such, a sort of craftsmanship in business, replaced the high-pressure drive of the years before: the men of this generation generally valued the work they did for its own sake. Dr. Vollmer summed it up when he said of teaching: "There's no money in it, never has been. You have to like the work and want to help young people learn."
Young Boozer is a tireless fund raiser for hospitals, charitable causes and his church. Dean Stevenson now occupies an office in the hall in Lehigh where he lived as an undergraduate, and oversees the activities of some 50 churches in the diocese. Gil Kuhn, who organized a chain of packers of shellfish in Mexico and built up Ocean Garden Products entirely with Mexican capital, flies his own plane regularly between San Diego and Mexico City and the corporation's eight packing and quick-freezing plants. Joe O'Neill lives in Midland, Texas and in Palm Beach, plays golf—"I usually have to pay off," he says—and shoots ducks for recreation. He is interested in the experimental drilling for power from live steam, conducted by one of his companies in California's Salton Sea.
During the Normandy invasion Captain Bringle was skipper of the First Observation Fighting Squadron, flying fighters off a flattop at the mouth of the Rhone. Shot down on his third low-level strike, Bringle survived, and was moved with his squadron to the Pacific, where he won six Distinguished Flying Crosses and 17 Air Medals—he already had the Navy Cross—in more than a hundred attack missions against enemy shore installations. "I think football is the finest possible athletic training for military minds," Captain Bringle said the other day. "It drills fight, teamwork, strategy, fast thinking and quick decisions into a young mind. It is the closest thing to real combat you can possibly get in athletics."
Captain Bringle and the men of his hard-pressed generation know too much about both combat and football for any outsider to debate the matter with them. Yet in looking over their records and the contributions they have made, it is obvious that war has changed a good deal more than sport has. When Bud Wilkinson was reminiscing about his days as quarterback at Minnesota he said that there have been fewer changes in football in 25 years than one might expect. The new multiple offense isn't new, to begin with. "We ran 10 different formations as part of our regular attack in 1936," he said. The patterns are different because most teams then used the single wing as a basic set, but all the plays were there, including the T formation.
In Wilkinson's opinion the biggest change has been in the tempo of football, and of other sports, too. Precollege coaching has improved, so players come to college better trained. Individual mobility and quickness are now exploited constantly, as they only rarely were 25 years ago. Better and lighter equipment, a ball that is easier to handle and throw, have accentuated the trend toward greater quickness and mobility. "The change is particularly evident in measurable sports, such as track and swimming," Wilkinson said.
"I can't say I'm perturbed about the state of the world," said Colonel Meyer in Frankfurt. "We here in Germany realize that the consequences of a nuclear holocaust are terrifying. But I and others are prepared to do our job."
Colonel Meyer was twice wounded in the war, when in command of the 2nd battalion, 127th infantry of the 32nd division—the famous Red Arrow—fighting through New Guinea, Papua, Leyte and Luzon. He later served on the 6th Army staff in Japan. After Korea he was on the faculty of the Army War College at Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania. There he worked with a group of seasoned experts on theoretical studies of what the role of the military might be in the reasonably near future. Great as the changes in warfare have been, Colonel Meyer says that its older pattern persists. Discussing nuclear warfare, he said, "Until we have an adequate deterrent, today's concept of conventional warfare has a decided place as part of the posture we must maintain. Otherwise we may be nibbled to death."
Colonel Meyer is slight, broad-shouldered, lean and alert. His face behind his owlish shell-rimmed glasses is surprisingly young. His brown hair, barely flecked with gray, is a crew cut that gives him somewhat the appearance of a well-groomed Indian brave. "I guess my chance of making the team nowadays would be less," he said, when asked if he would play football again. "The average Notre Dame back-field now weighs 210 pounds. Still, I would give it a schoolboy try."
And the next 25 years? Dr. Jordan, whose rallying cry in his University of Chicago days was, "Oh, hell, here they come again," refuses even to speculate. "What's ahead? Even in medicine I have no idea," he said. "My recreation now is trout and salmon fishing, but that's not really exercise. One sits on the posterior aspect of one's anatomy and tells tales. There is no greater reward."
"I worry about the future," said Carl Ray. "But I'm an optimist about America. We usually pull together in a crisis. And somehow I can't see a grinning Khrushchev on Manhattan Island."
Said Gil Kuhn, "I think we have an era of greater sanity ahead—it has to be—and a return to the dominance of common sense."
"In the 25 years ahead of us the main fact is going to be the struggle for peace," said Congressman Boiling. "It may take that long to win, but I think we shall win it."
TWO ILLUSTRATIONS
ELEVEN PHOTOS
WINNERS OF THE SILVER GOALPOSTS
Young J. Boozer Jr. (Alabama)
Insurance executive
Joseph I. O'Neill Jr. (Notre Dame)
Oil company director
Prescott Jordan (Chicago)
Heart surgeon
Austin H. Ross (Vermont)
Builder
Whitney Wright (Colby)
Captain, USN
Floyd A. Blower (California)
Packaging executive
James C. Farley (VMI)
Engineering executive
Richard W. Bolling (Sewanee)
U.S. Congressman
Charles Wilkinson (Minnesota)
Football coach
L. Victor Strub (Saint Mary's)
Glass manufacturer
Carl P. Ray (Dartmouth)
Business machines executive
Henry C. Estabrook (Hamilton)
Paper manufacturer
Gilbert Kuhn (USC)
Food processing executive
Stephen E. Reid (Northwestern)
Surgeon
Joseph H. Vollmer (Columbia)
School superintendent
Dan Edmondson (William & Mary)
Furniture manufacturer
Christian Anfinsen (Swarthmore)
Biochemist
Charles R. Meyer (West Point)
Colonel, USA
The late Scott McLeod (Grinnell)
Ambassador
Leonard Lovshin (Wisconsin)
Internist
Arthur Brandstatter (Michigan St.)
Police administrator
William G. Craig (Middlebury)
Dean of men
Dean T. Stevenson (Lehigh)
Clergyman
William F. Bringle (Annapolis)
Captain, USN
Vincent T. Lombardi (Fordham)
Football coach
THE JUDGES
Sixty U.S. colleges proudly submitted the career stories of their lettermen, and these 11 judges—some old football players themselves, some not, but all qualified to judge achievement—took time off from other duties and preoccupations to cast the votes that helped SPORTS ILLUSTRATED determine the winners of this year's Silver All-America awards.
CHESTER J. LaROCHE
President
Football Foundation and Hall of Fame
RALPH McGILL
Publisher
Atlanta Constitution
EDWARD STEINIGER
President
Sinclair Oil Corporation
HAROLD FLORSHEIM
President
Florsheim Shoe Company
RICHARD M. NIXON of California
DR. GLENN T. SEABORG
Chairman
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission
RICHARD S. REYNOLDS JR.
President
Reynolds Metals Company
JESSE W. TAPP
Chairman
Bank of America
JOHN R. WANAMAKER
Chairman
John Wanamaker
ROBERT F. KENNEDY
Attorney General of the United States
CHARLES TILLINGHAST JR.
President
Trans World Airlines