An interesting eBay listing regarding the 1939 UCLA-USC game, and what may have been Grenny Lansdell’s worst nightmare come to life . . .

In an earlier post, I discussed newspaper coverage of the 1939 UCLA-USC game—the game in which UCLA’s tie allowed USC into the 1940 Rose Bowl game, and cost UCLA that opportunity. The conference records of the two teams were the same, except UCLA played one more game, which ended in a tie, so both teams had the same number of wins, but UCLA had on more tie. Why that would be considered a worse record is unknown to me. (See details below.)

I saw the listing on its first day, but the listing was an “Or Best Offer” listing, and when I saw it, the seller had already accepted someone’s offer. The Buy It Now price was $50, and honestly, I don’t think I would have been interested at that price, or anything near that price. But I think $50 would have been a fair price.

By the way, I have bought a few great photos on eBay, including one of Kenny Washington in his all-star uniform, one of a UCLA backfield from that era (which was published in the Daily Bruin), and one of Kenny from 1939 or so, actually inscribed by Kenny.

Anyway, the eBay listing under discussion was for two original newspaper photographs (AP Wirephotos), one of which is a familiar image of Howard Jones reacting in surprise. (According to the caption, he was reacting to a 19-yard USC gain.)

The other photo is basically the same as the one I discussed a post a few posts back. The photo in the listing was a bit clearer, but not revolutionarily so. Here is an extract from the eBay listing (seller name: darree1):

As I said in an earlier post:

“According to Wikipedia, USC’s conference record in 1939 was 5-0-2.

“Okay, and also according to Wikipedia, UCLA’s record was 5-0-3.

“Try as I might with my little UCLA-educated brain, I cannot figure out on what basis 5-0-2 is better than 5-0-3.“

Here is roughly the portion of the eBay photo that corresponds to the image I discussed in an earlier post:

This is noticeably “warped,” since the eBay photos were not very flat and were taken from an angle. Grenny’s left arm is noticeably more clear here than in the version I showed before. As I said before, I think he was possibly trying to use that arm to straight-arm Jackie Robinson (who is horizontal, with his knee on the turf).

So, yeah, this must have been one of the worst moments—if not the worst moment—in Grenny Lansdell’s USC career.

The caption accompanying the photo in the auction states that “Lansdell was tackled by Mathews” (he’s the guy with his right forearm across Grenny’s thigh) and that Strode recovered the ball (in the end zone) “for an automatic touch back.”

Those who have seen the footage know that Strode ran the ball out of the end zone a nice distance, but it was indeed a touchback (or at least that’s what it seems).

The account in The Minneapolis Sunday Tribune (discussed by me in an earlier post) indicates that the reaction of Jones was regarding this play, but based on what I said above, that appears not to be the case.

Notice that Woody Strode is far to the left in this photo, yet he made the recovery.

The Minneapolis paper says, “Lansdell then took the ball, crashed over the battered right side of the Bruin line, and as he reached the five was tackled from behind.” This appears to give credit to Mathews, with no reference there to Jackie Robinson.

I’ve discussed elsewhere the apparent roles of Mathews and Robinson in this tackle.

If this post seems a bit jumbled and fragmented, that’s probably in part due to the “new” post-creation methodology that WordPress seems to be requiring me to use. I’m not used to it, so creating this post was much more awkward and difficult for me than it was previously. Hopefully, I will get used to it.

—Tom Sawyer

November 19, 2022

Ten members of the 1919 football team were members of Phi Kappa Kappa . . .

At least ten members of the 1919 (first football season) Southern Branch football team were members of Phi Kappa Kappa in their freshman or sophomore (or both) years. Here is an image of the page of portraits of men in that organization, from the 1921 The Southern Campus (via the Hathi Trust Digital Library, item digitized by Internet Archive from an example at the University of California). That volume deals with the 1920-1921 academic year, and it was the second Southern Branch yearbook (not in this group of pictures, but listed in the yearbook as a member, Burnett Haralson):

Here are enlargements of the 1919 team members from the above:

ABOVE (LEFT TO RIGHT): Wayne Banning, Winfred Bullock, Robert Huff

ABOVE (LEFT TO RIGHT): Charles Marston, Raymond McBurney

ABOVE: Eddie Rossell

ABOVE: William Stephens

Listed in the 1920 yearbook as members of Phi Kappa Kappa (viewable on the Hathi Trust site): Raymond Meigs (who unfortunately drowned in mid-1920) and John Binney.

—Tom Sawyer

August 31, 2020

• A few quick facts about UCLA’s first football season . . .
• UCLA’s first football team — 1919 . . .
• For comparison — a team portrait of California’s 1919 football team . . .
• UCLA’s first “Varsity” football team — its first “intercollegiate” team — 1920 . . .
• UCLA’s first yell-leaders? Probably!
• Gee, I wonder whether these men are sophomores, or juniors, or what!
• UCLA’s third football team, 1921 — a return to the “informal’ team photograph . . .
• The 1921-1922 yell-leaders for S.B.U.C. (UCLA) . . .
• SBUC (UCLA) yell-leaders — the first three years (1919-20; 1920-21; and 1921-22) . . .

Well, was Jackie Robinson UCLA’s first four-sport letterman, or not?

UCLA hangs so much importance on Jackie Robinson that you would be forgiven if you thought UCLA gave birth to him. But remember, Jackie was only there for his junior and senior years, and I’m pretty sure he did not complete his senior year. This doesn’t take away from his significance in connection with the modern integration of major league baseball, but surely it has some connection with the degree to which UCLA should be bragging about him as a UCLA guy.

UCLA doesn’t seem to play up Kenny Washington in the same way, though UCLA has much more claim on having shaped Kenny, since he was at UCLA all four years, and he even coached UCLA freshman football after his senior year. And I think (but am not absolutely positive) that Kenny got a degree from UCLA. Kenny and a few others—but probably mainly Kenny—played a role in integrating the NFL that was similar to Jackie’s in connection with baseball.

UCLA desperately needs a statue of Kenny in a super-prominent place at the school. They also need to name a major building after him—if possible.

For a long time, I have seen it said that Jackie Robinson was UCLA’s first four-sport letterman. I’ve never seen any real evidence to support the claim that he was the first, and even as I sit here typing this, I don’t know what that claim is based upon.  I am not challenging the claim, mind you. But for someone (in this case, many people) to simply state that it is so, is not very convincing. At the very least, anyone making the claim should be expected to provide details on a few earlier people who almost were the first—like people who lettered in three sports.

But okay, on the UCLA Athletics website, we find the following:  “Jackie Robinson, UCLA’s first four-sport letterwinner . . . .” A quick glance at a few such statements does not appear to say that he received letters in four sports during one academic year. I don’t know for certain whether he did that, or not.

I’m pretty sure he did.

The UCLA site just mentioned shows Jackie’s participation as follows:

Robinson was a four-sport letterwinner, starring in Westwood on the football team (1939, 1940), on the basketball team (1940, 1941), with the track and field team (1940) and as a baseball player (1940).

I assume that he lettered for each sport for the dates mentioned, and not for other dates.

Based on that:

Jackie lettered in football as follows: junior year and senior year.

He also lettered in basketball in his junior and senior years.

For track and field, we just have the year, 1940. We know this was Jackie’s junior year, since the Daily Bruin for June 29, 1940 (on the archive.org site) discusses Jackie on the track team.

For baseball, we just have the year, 1940. His participation in that sport is shown in the 1940 yearbook (on the archive.org site), so that was his junior year.

So, based on superficial research, Jackie lettered in football and basketball both years (junior and senior). And he lettered in track and baseball in his junior year. This shows that he did letter in the four sports during one academic year.

But wait! On a different page of the same website, we find the following, with reference to Burnett Haralson, who was a student at UCLA beginning in the 1919-1920 academic year: “He was UCLA’s first ever athlete to earn 4 varsity letters in the sport of track and field, football, basketball & baseball.”  [I have supplied a comma after the word “football.”]

It cannot be that both of those statements are accurate—the one re Jackie being first and the one re Burnett being first. Haralson lettered in football for four seasons (1919, 1920, 1922, and 1923), and I believe that I mentioned on this blog that he was the first person to letter four seasons in football—but I guess this is treating his 1919 numerals (in football) as a letter. That seems fair, since during the 1919 season, there was no separate freshman team, though the team was made up almost exclusively of freshmen.

Regarding Burnett Haralson, I don’t know off hand which years he lettered in which sports. He was a key player on the UCLA football and track teams. The 1920 yearbook (via the Hathi Trust Digital Library) shows Haralson lettering in football and track. He also participated in basketball (he’s in a team photo), baseball, and boxing. I believe that Haralson was only a freshman during the 1919-1920 academic year, so he probably didn’t technically “letter” that year, though I assume he received numerals instead (the number 23).

I’m pretty sure (but not positive) that I’ve never seen evidence of Haralson lettering in four sports during one academic year. I’m not even sure I have seen evidence that he lettered in four sports, though I am not questioning that. Sometimes, it is very difficult to determine whether or not a person lettered in a sport. This is particularly true if a sport’s seas ends after the deadline for the yearbook.

A long time ago, I did spend a moderate amount of time trying to figure out whether there were any four-sport UCLA lettermen before Jackie Robinson—not exhaustively by any means—and found none. The whole “lettering” process comes with some problems. It seems likely to me that, regardless of lettering, most of the UCLA athletes of the 1939-1940 era were “better” than the athletes of the early 1920s. And the athletes of today are probably “better” than the majority of the athletes of 1939-1940. But I would assume that today the athletes tend to specialize, and I wonder who is the most recent four-sport letterman at UCLA!

—Tom Sawyer

August 29, 2020

Movie actress Mary Carlisle visits UCLA, 1935 . . .

A long time ago, I mentioned that movie star Mary Carlisle visited the UCLA football team back in 1935. The results of the visit were predictable and entertaining. In short, Mary outshined the football stars, who, I think we can say, fawned over her. And who can blame them? No one!

The October 22, 1935, California Daily Bruin shows an image of Mary Carlisle with Coach Bill Spaulding and several members of the UCLA football team. That can be seen on the Internet Archive website.

Here is a cropped version of that image. I have adjusted it somewhat, but you can look at the “original” version at the link above. Both versions are pretty bad!

Of course, the guy on the left is the head coach, Bill Spaulding. The man holding Mary’s left arm is, according to the caption, Chuck Cheshire, who was one of UCLA’s star players.

The caption credits the Los Angeles Times for the photograph, so the Times may have run a story on her visit.

Mary Carlisle (name is misspelled in the caption, by the way) appeared in many movies. Imdb gives Mary 65 credits as an actress. A few of those movies dated from the 1940s, and one from the 1920s, but sixty or so were from the 1930s.

I did some internet research in old movie magazines (on the Lantern site, which includes digital versions of many movie magazines). Here is a link:  Lantern.

Based on that, it seems that Mary appeared in  several football movies, including (among others) Saturday’s Millions (1933), Hold ‘Em Navy (1937), and Touchdown, Army (1938). None of those named are close in time to her visit to UCLA.

The only one I know of that touches on football and appeared fairly close in time to Mary’s UCLA visit was Superspeed (also seen as Super-Speed). Football only plays a minor part in the movie, but Mary might have been visiting the football team to help promote that movie.

Here is a two-page spread that included a “fictionization” of the movie story, from Silver Screen, November 1935, from the Lantern site.

The guys in the light jeerseys are wearing friction-strip style jerseys, similar to some of UCLA’s early 1930s uniforms, but I believe they are not identical to any of UCLA’s jerseys. A section of the above image follows:

And here we clearer image of little Mary from the lower-left corner:

As I understand it, the movie was mainly a speed-boat movie—hence the nautical background.

—Tom Sawyer

August 29, 2020

The Hiatus: Why football was abandoned at the Los Angeles State Normal School after the 1899 football season, until it was resumed for the 1915 football season—Part 2

This is Part 2 of a discussion I began in October of 2018, regarding the long gap after 1899, during which the Los Angeles State Normal School did not field football teams.

The violence inherent in the game as it was played around that turn of the century has been written about in many places, and it resulted, directly or indirectly, in some schools giving up football and switching to rugby, and which led, over time, to the evolution of the game of football, through rules changes, into one that probably reduced the deaths and serious injuries.

I’m sure that a lot of you are aware that the Cal-Stanford “Big Game” during the period 1906-1914 was a rugby game. Ouch.

It’s hard to see nowadays how anyone would have thought that rugby could be a replacement for football.

I have said above and elsewhere on this blog that the Los Angeles Normal School’s first football seasons were 1898 and 1899.

In Part 1, I outlined what appeared to me to be three principal reasons for the gap. In this and future posts, I hope to go through all three of those circumstances in detail. In this post, I will deal with what was certainly an important factor, the first of the three items.

First, the school president’s opposition to athletics in general and football in particular.

In mid-1903, a major controversy arose in connection with the Los Angeles State Normal School. The dispute was precipitated by the release of three teachers by the school’s president, E.T. Pierce. Under the circumstances, that event brought to the forefront significant dissatisfaction with Pierce on the part of the school’s alumni, as well as many of the faculty and students.

The controversy was discussed in the course of a dozen or so articles in the Los Angeles Herald during the period June 28, 1903, through July 15, 1903.

In the course of the articles, many accusations against Pierce (and his wife, who was also employed by the school) were reported upon. These were repeatedly boiled down to “fussiness” and “inefficiency.” In the end, Pierce and his spouse resigned, but the board of trustees preferred that Pierce delay his resignation for a year (and that Mrs. Pierce delay hers for two months). The findings of the trustees were rather mild with respect to the Pierces. From what I have seen, many of the faculty and students did not get along well with Pierce.

It is all an interesting saga, but it mainly has little to do with the Los Angeles State Normal School’s football programs—with one major exception. One of the points of controversy was that Pierce did not support the idea of athletics at the school. In one of the articles in the series of articles mentioned above (June 28, 1903), it was stated:

It is an open secret that Principal Pierce of the Los Angeles state normal school has never been much of a champion of athletics. He has discouraged, rather than encouraged, base ball, foot ball and even basket ball. The lives of normal school base ball and foot ball clubs have been short, and not even sweet.

The boys at the normal wouldn’t have felt half so bad if the principal had given them some sort of reason for prohibiting or discouraging sports on the school premises. Because he advanced no reason it made them feel that the edict was all the more unjust and uncalled for. According to an alumnus even basket ball was stopped and the field contests with the high school and university teams, which used to be so popular, are no longer enjoyed, at least not by the normalites. Even singing in the gymnasium before and after class time has been prohibited by the principal and if the boys wish to give vent to their vocal cords they must seek the seclusion of their homes or the echoing Third street tunnel.

Governor Pardee has made known to Principal Pierce his desire to encourage in every way the enrollment of young men in the school and Mr. Pierce has been given to understand that his policy in regard to athletics will have to be changed materially in the future. This, however, is only one of several reforms which the principal is likely to be called upon to Institute before long.

From the same paper, same date, comes the following direct quotation of California’s Governor Pardee:

That is about all I am aware of concerning Pierce’s discouragement of athletics at the Los Angeles State Normal School. It is dangerous to rely on this type of newspaper quotation, in part because it names no specific sources and lacks specifics. But if this accurately expresses Pierce’s view, it would not have been an attitude unique to him. In early 1899, Carleton M. Ritter, who was president at the State Normal School, Chico, suspended fifteen or so (most accounts seem to mention fifteen) members of the school football team for traveling to Red Bluff and there playing a football game. Here is an example of some of the coverage. This is from the San Francisco Call, January 10, 1899:

According to the Los Angeles Herald of the same date, a petition was signed by many of the students of the Chico school:

I think we all can agree that Professor Ritter was more fun than a barrel of monkeys. Equally cold was an editorial in the Bakersfield Californian, as reported in The Record-Union, Sacramento, January 27, 1899:

I don’t know what the outcome of this tempest was. The students may have been a little pushy, but something tells me that banishing the students from the teaching profession would have been a little like using a fire hose to extinguish a match.

The foregoing quotations from 1903, and all of the foregoing images, are from the California Digital Newspaper Collection website, which is an undertaking of the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research (CBSR) at the University of California, Riverside.

—Tom Sawyer

August 14, 2020

 

Comments on other UCLA-related memorabilia

As I was working on the preceding post, I got to thinking of some “later” UCLA-related memorabilia I have. (In the post preceding the most recent one, I talked a bit about my little collection of UCLA-related and State Normal School related things I have.)

Largely because Kenny Washington (likely UCLA’s greatest football star) played football at UCLA during the 1936, 1937, 1938, and 1939 seasons (1936 as a freshman), I have also been quite interested in that era.

I do have an inscribed photo of Kenny Washington.

I also have one of Mladin Zarubica’s letterman sweaters, as well as a scrapbook covering part of Zarubica’s UCLA career.

(Additionally, I have other items relating to that era.)

—Tom Sawyer

August 10, 2020

Don’t things like this bother you? A book’s description of UCLA’s TD-pass attempt late in the 1939 USC-UCLA game . . .

I was looking at a 2016 book called Lost Champions, by Gretchen Atwood. The author spends a lot of time on the December 9, 1939, game between USC and UCLA. Remember the play where the UCLA guys took a vote, and decided to go for a touchdown instead of a field goal?

Here’s part of what Lost Champions says regarding that play:

The pass reached MacPherson’s fingertips just as Robertson crashed into him, knocking the ball to the ground.

A video posted by USC Athletics (LINK) shows the Atwood description to be highly inaccurate. Here are cropped images from that video:

[UCLA guy (MacPherson) is in dark jersey. USC guy (Robertson) is in light jersey.]

You can easily see that MacPherson is nowhere near the ball when Robertson knocks it down.

—Tom Sawyer

August 9, 2020

Thinking about UCLA football memorabilia . . . like, really old stuff . . .

UCLA football history is only one of my interests. I have so many different interests that it is hard, if not impossible, to stay constantly active in every subject I like. And when there was a long break in posts here, it is largely explained by my pursuit of other interests.

I have actually put together a few collections of items in those other fields. Those other areas include (among other things) old magic books (sleight-of-hand and so forth), card-game booklets published by Charles Goodall and Son, the artist Frank Godwin, and other subjects. In those last two fields specified, I have blogs that are probably far more extensive than this blog here. As a collector, I naturally have been interested in collecting things relating to early UCLA. My UCLA collection is not very extensive, in part because it is kind of hard to find things relating to the early days of the school.

The main thing that seems to be found for sale often are early editions of The Southern Campus.  I have not been too obsessed with collecting those, in part because all of the early yearbooks can be viewed online.

But I do have several examples. Several years ago, I found an example of the first The Southern Campus, the one from 1920. I didn’t hesitate to buy that, and I am glad I did.  It is the only 1920 copy I have ever seen for sale.

I’ll mention an example of something I missed out on, because of my hesitation. There was a dealer on eBay who had listed Charles Finn’s “23” numeral that he was awarded for his participation on the 1919 S.B.U.C. football team. I think it was about 8 inches in height and made of felt. It had an S.B. in the middle (or SB). Colors were blue and gold (or yellow).

The 1919 team was comprised mainly of freshmen. The freshmen (who “lettered”) received numerals, and the non-freshmen received actual letters. The numerals represent the year of the expected graduation class. This is all pretty standard and probably continued into the 1970s or whenever freshmen generally became eligible to play on varsity teams. In this case, the Southern Branch probably should have given the freshmen letters, but they didn’t.

When I finally got around to buying the item, it turned out that the item had gone missing.

Another cool item that was on eBay was an S.B.U.C. program, for a game against Caltech, to be played on Moore Field. It was priced at $800 or so, and there was no way that I would have purchased that. I think it may have had a “best offer” component, but for some reason I never made an offer, maybe because I figured that what I would have offered would have seemed too low. I believe the program called the opponent Cal-Tek (or the like), which was an alternative nickname for the school typically known today as Caltech. One of the school’s websites shows that the name California Institute of Technology was adopted February 10, 1920. The same site shows that before that, it was called Throop, for short, though there were various official names.

If you are interested in Throop, there are quite a few references to the school in the course of this blog.

As I have mentioned before on this blog, I have a lot of material relating to A.J. Sturzenegger.  Most of it relates to UCLA, but some of it predates his relationship with UCLA. I think I have about five notebooks loaded with play diagrams and whatnot, and a lot of other material.

I have a number of southern California high-school yearbooks.  I have blogged about a lot of that stuff. Includes in those yearbooks are signatures of  one or two people connected with athletics at UCLA or the Los Angeles State Normal School. I’m talking about yearbooks from the around 1915 or so.

I’ve also found a number of photographs of the university (Southern Branch) when it was located on Vermont Avenue. Mainly those are snapshots from around 1920.

Also, I have a cool old calendar, with great images of the Vermont Avenue campus. Without digging it out, I think it’s from around 1924 or so.

I also have an original photo of Fred Cozens, the coach of the 1919 Southern Branch football team. I suppose one might call him the head coach, since he did have help from a couple of other people. I believe that the Cozens photograph came from Charlie Finn’s scrapbook.

Incidentally, Andy Smith came down to LA from Cal for several days in 1919, to help out. As I wrote in a different post:

And by the way, Smith came to Los Angeles to assist in getting the Southern Branch started on the right foot, part of the thinking apparently being that this would place transfer students (to Berkeley) on a more equal footing with the other players up there. This is explored in some detail in The Cub Californian of that era (viewable on archive.org).

I also have other things, including a stray issue of The Cub Californian, as well as a bound volume of The Normal Outlook, including two years (1915-1916, and 1916-1917), and so on.

—Tom Sawyer

August 9, 2020

Oh, no! Wikipedia is another who thinks USC was the national champion in 1939!

I was looking at the Wikipedia article on Kenny Washington tonight, and I noticed this howler:

The Bruins played eventual conference and national champion USC to a 0-0 tie with the 1940 Rose Bowl on the line.

Link.

Tellingly, there is no citation for this absurd statement. I have explored this topic in a different post, so I won’t bother going into it again here.

As to the conference championship, I find that situation quite confusing. I’ve probably discussed this elsewhere on this blog, but no harm bringing it up again.

According to Wikipedia, USC’s conference record in 1939 was 5-0-2.

Okay, and also according to Wikipedia, UCLA’s record was 5-0-3.

Try as I might with my little UCLA-educated brain, I cannot figure out on what basis 5-0-2 is better than 5-0-3.

I wonder what the formula was that the Pacific Coast Conference used. They must have had one.

—Tom Sawyer

09 16 19

The100th anniversary of UCLA’s first football game approaches! First game was October 3, 1919!

In the course of this blog, I have discussed in some depth the weakness of UCLA’s claim that the school dates from 1919. The date relied on should probably be much earlier, since UCLA was a continuation of the Southern Branch, which in turn was a continuation of the Los Angeles State Normal School.

You MIGHT (but I hope you won’t) say, “Well, it doesn’t make any difference for football purposes, since the 1919 game was the first, no matter how you slice it.” If you have been reading this blog, you know that football was played when the school was the Los Angeles State Normal School, and at least one player played under both banners.

But okay, lets’s pretend that UCLA’s first season was 1919. That means that a hundred football-seasons have gone by ALREADY! We are in the 101th season. This probably places the UCLA publicity-machine in a difficult spot. They might want to do something like put a little “100” on each helmet.  But then people would say, “Cool, your 100th football season!” And then the PR people would have to say, “Uh, well, no, that was last year.”

Or they could put “101” on the helmets, but that would just leave people scratching their heads.

What they maybe should have done was put “100” on the helmets last year.

But NO! When you field a team that does almost nothing but lose, such gestures come across as worse than pathetic.

—Tom Sawyer

9 10 19