Friday, October 15, 2010

Faculty Athletes of Yesteryear

In the March 15, 1933 Stylus there is a fascinating article about two faculty of the day and their athletic careers. They were Charles Cooper,  director of student teaching and the campus school, and Alfred Thompson, the "principal" or president of the school.

Charles Cooper had played baseball at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania where he played on the baseball team with fellow student Christy Mathewson, who later became a  famed pitcher with the NY Giants in the "dead ball" era. Cooper also played football in an era when the game was even more physically dangerous and challenging than now, and the article noted that he still carried scars from a game with the "Indians," that is the team from the Carlisle Indian School (think Jim Thorpe...)

Alfred Thompson was a lineman on the Yale football team in the 1880s in the infamous era of the "flying wedge," when injuries to players were common and they were even several fatalities. Thompson was also on the Yale rowing team, and coached the football team at Brockport in the years before  WWI., at which time declining male student numbers and controversy over the violence of the game led to football being abandoned, not to resume until the late 1940s.

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