Nebraska versus Rutgers in The New York Times, November 3, 1920

You can read a facsimile of the entire article about the first and only meeting between the Cornhuskers and Scarlet Knights in New York City on 11/2/1920 by clicking here, but I'm sure these first paragraphs will hook you.

NEBRASKA'S SPEED HUMBLES RUTGERS

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Cornhuskers' Lightning Grid-

iron Tactics Sweep Them to

Victory by 28 to 0.

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FUMBLES PLAYED PART

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Sanford's Pupil's Err at Critical Times--Crowd of 15,000 Watches Battle at Polo Grounds.

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They grow something besides corn out on the prairies of Nebraska. An avalanche of football warriors descended yesterday upon the unsuspecting Rutgers eleven at the Polo Grounds, a great, husky, fearless mass of gridiron terrors, coached by a square-jawed individual named Henry Schulte, and, when they had finished with George Foster Sanford’s cripples, the score stood 28 to 0.

A crowd of more than 15,000 brought umbrellas and raincoats to the baseball lot after they had attended to their civic duty of voting [in the 1920 election between Harding/Coolidge and Cox/FDR], and for the rest of the afternoon, wondered if all western elevens were of the same breed. If so, their advice to Eastern graduate managers is to dispense with intersectional football games [until joining the Big Ten in 2014]. New York won't see any faster or harder football all the rest of this season. Yesterday's first period left the spectators breathless, and what Nebraska's gatling-gun hammering must have done to Rutgers was evident in the second quarter when the cornhuskers pushed across the first two of their touchdowns.

Read the rest here.

Rule #12, or Training Camp for the Rest of Us

The players have been training hard for a while now but our training camp, as fans, is much easier. Your whole playbook fits into this one short blog post.
We have many fewer rules than the Freshmen of the Class of 1923 had in the Rutgers College Handbook Volume XXVI, 1919-1920 , but rule number 12 from that little book should be considered as true now as it was then (see the full Freshman Regulations with Beat Visitor's 2009 annotations by clicking here):

12. Failure to know the songs and yells before the
first football game will be detrimental to your health.

The first football game of the year against the Cincinnati Bearcats is less than two weeks away, and here are The Four Absolutely Necessary Songs and Yells at Rutgers Stadium:
1) R ... U ... R ... U ... etc. This one is idiot proof. If someone yells R at anytime on game day, you yell U. If you're on the bus from the parking lot at the RAC and someone yells R, you yell U (especially if there are fans with the opposing team's colors on board). If a handful of people on the opposite side of the Stadium yell R and point in your direction, you -- and all your neighbors -- yell U as loudly a possible. Like I said, idiot proof. But there are always some idiots who feel they are above yelling at a football game (they should reminded of Rule #12). If you and some of your leather-lunged friends are feeling ambitious, you can yell R yourself and start a chant in the parking lot or on a refreshment line or while walking into the mens' room. The line of fellow Scarlet Knights at the urinals with their backs to you are under an obligation to reply.
2) First Down! Touchdown! Go RU! After every Rutgers first down, you will hear the familiar voice of Joe Nolan proclaim over the loudspeakers : "And THAT is a Rutgers FIRST DOWN!" Your duty as a fan is to scream that along with him and point emphatically in the direction the Knights are traveling when you get to the words "first down." The band will immediately start to play a fanfare (a tune that will become very familiar with repetition as the Scarlet Knights march up and down the field at will). After the first repetition of the fanfare, you yell HEY. The second repetition will be in a higher key, you yell HEY at the end. The third, still higher, repetition of the theme will be followed by HEY, First Down! Touchdown! Go RU!. Like I said, you'll get a lot of practice in the first game. If you're in one of those sections where your neighbors like to sit quietly, and they give you a look, you can give them a look back, or make copies of Rule #12 to hand out in your section.
3) Here's the reason we come to the games rather than sitting at home listening to the radio: R U rah rah! R U rah rah! / Hoo-rah Hoo-rah Rutgers rah! / Upstream Red Team / Red Team Upstream / Rah Rah Rutgers Rah! Like the first down chant, this will become very familiar with repetition. You get a chance to practice once with the band as they play "The Bells Must Ring" before the National Anthem before the game, and then you will chant it over and over again after every Rutgers touchdown or field goal (you can see it in action at the 2:19 mark in this video -- you will also hear where to add "Fight Fight Fight" in "The Bells Must Ring".)
4) On the Banks of the Old Raritan. You have no excuse not to sing along with your beautiful Alma Mater (the nation's best Alma Mater) at the beginning of the game with the band (and sometimes glee club) and at the end of the game with the team. Not only do you only need to know the first verse, but the words are usually projected on the scoreboard and zippers. If your neighbors don't sing, you know which rule they are violating. Also, note in the illustration up above that there is also a page for the Class of 1923 entitled "A Word to the Wise." Note the second piece of advice: "While 'On the Banks' is being sung all Rutgers men rise and uncover." In other words, don't sit down and put your cap on after the National Anthem, you have another song to sing (we'll assume that you already sang The Star-Spangled Banner with feeling and are in the mood to sing some more).

Tomorrow's Fan Lesson: Something New for the New Stadium, "The Rolling R!"

Cannon Fodder

Here's the random literary reference of the day to Rutgers football (in the 1920's) from the new book of short stories from the late John Updike; the book is My Father's Tears, the story is "The Laughter of the Gods", and the quote's from pages 80-81:

His father had come to college on a football scholarship [...] Photographs survived, of him crouching purposefully in the unpadded leather helmet of the time. Under the folded sweater there was a game program that included Agricola's schedule; the team had played, amazingly, Cornell and Columbia and Rutgers. The little college had been overmatched -- cannon fodder.

Agricola is a fictional Pennsylvania Lutheran college, but maybe in 80 or 90 years the descendants of some plucky players from Texas Southern or Florida International will be making the same discovery that grandpa had once, amazingly, faced the mighty Scarlet Knights.

Note to Tom Savage : 21st-century Freshmen have it way too easy at Rutgers

Like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five, I feel like I've become unstuck in time. While every other college football blog in the universe is writing about the potential high-school recruits who may or may not be contributing to their teams in two to five years, I find myself looking back to the mid-19th century, or the early 20th. Maybe I just feel that all Rutgers fans should be aware of their very long and very rich history; maybe I feel that there will be enough material about the present and future to write about once the games actually begin on Labor Day; maybe it's just that summer can be a time for nostalgia (especially on a day like today, when I'm off from work for the Fourth and it's pouring rain outside for what seems like the 40th consecutive day).

Yesterday while searching for old pictures of the Stadium, I ran into this great storehouse of scanned Rutgersiana, including the picture of the freshmen and the pages reproduced and retyped here. Click on any of these images to enlarge, but be sure to visit the original source at http://kenlew.com/collections/, if only to find a postcard of your old dorm or frat house, or the 1885 lyrics to On the Banks of the Old Raritan.

Freshman Regulations [with annotations for the uninitiated added by BeatVisitor.com], from the Rutgers College Handbook Volume XXVI, 1919-1920 for incoming members of the class of 1923

1. No Freshman shall wear the Scarlet until the right is earned on a varsity team. [this seems at variance with the current universal admonition to Wear Red to the Game]
2. Keep out of gin mills and pool parlors. [proving once again that rules are, and always have been, meant to be broken]
3. Don't smoke on the campus. Smoke only corncob pipes. [but only smoke them off campus? I'm confused already.]
4. Don't be outside the campus unaccompanied by an upper classman after 8 p. m. [during which the upper classman can smoke anything he wants, but you can only smoke your tobacco, or whatever, out of the corncob conveyance prescribed in rule #3]
5. Freshmen shall wear the regulation cap or toque. [no change here; though I'm not sure how you can wear the regulation Block R cap and not wear Scarlet (cf. rule #1 above)]
6. Wear no white ducks or flannels until after Exhibition Drill. [this rule should be no problem at all for Tom Savage's incoming class of 2013]
7. Enter and leave the Chapel only by the right hand door, and the dining room only by the left hand door. [feel free to write this on the back of your hand before entering either.]
8. Wear no numerals or letters from other institutions. [this applies even if your high-school girlfriend told you that the the baby blue of your UNC Tarheel gear brought out the color of your eyes!]
9. Don't chip. [wtf? Can any members of the class of 1923 clarify what this means? We don't want any members of the class of '13 breaking rules that they don't understand.]
10. Keep off the north side of Neilson Campus. [of course! Anyone who knows what's good for them has always known this!]
11. Wear only a green necktie. [preferably as a headband, but we're still not sure how Rule #11 coordinates or clashes with the 21st-century Wear Red to the Game rule.]
12. Failure to know the songs and yells before the first football game will be detrimental to your health. [emphasis added! This is truer now than ever, or should be.]
13. Freshman must carry matches. [see rule #3. While you can't smoke on campus as a Freshman, all Sophomores and upper classmen are smoking like chimneys and constantly running out of matches, which you are required to supply on demand. Reminds me that when I was 15, I had a friend whose mother made him carry cigarettes and matches when we went into Philadelphia, "...in case a bum asked for one," but that's off the topic of these rules, which are finishing with the most important one: a rule to last us past our college years and for the rest of our lives ...]
14. Be courteous to the faculty and have a cheery "Hello" for every fellow you meet. [Amen.]

Have fun on the banks Class of 2013! Go Knights!

Fashionable Flappers Love the Scarlet Knights

Everybody knows (or should know) that the last great economic crisis to hit the world is traditionally dated to the stock market crash that took place on Black Thursday, October 24, Black Monday, October 28, and Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929.
So, which magazine was lying around on the credenzas, sideboards, and davenports of America's fashionable parlors as the tickertape machines spewed out the news of losses? In many of those rooms of the newly poor, it was probably this October 25, 1929 issue of Life with the caption "I'd die for dear old Rutgers!"

Maybe she's just cold (note that she's wearing her boyfriend's letter sweater around her neck, not a scarlet scarf), and maybe she's thinking about what to do with her risky portfolio of investments, or the fact that her Stutz Bearcat is burning oil, but I know that look, and I get the idea that she's worried about more important things. I get the idea from the look on her face that her beloved men in scarlet are not in the process of winning.

(1929 record (5-4-0): 9/28 Providence W 17-0; 10/5 Delaware W 19-0; 10/12 at Holy Cross L 3-20; 10/19 St. John's (MD) W 14-7; 10/26 Catholic Univ. L 10-14; 11/2 Ursinus W 19-13; 11/9 at Lafayette L 6-20; 11/16 Lehigh W 14-0; 11/23 NYU L 7-20)

I found this picture of the Life cover here, but does anyone know where you can get this as a poster?

I also think that we need to start dressing better for our modern games. Maybe at Homecoming we can all start wearing blazers and scarlet ties and dresses and heels. (Or not.)

Rutgers Cheerleader of the Month

Click here for more information about Harold "Scrappy" Lambert (1901-1987), a cheerleader for the Scarlet Knights as well as the pianist for the Rutgers Jazz Bandits in the 1920's before becoming a pop singer and radio personality in the 1930's.

Upstream Red Team!