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
Southern Branch, University of California—and the Los Angeles State Normal School! Unofficial notes on the early days of UCLA! The blog also deals with later UCLA history to some degree, and it emphasizes athletics, especially football! 