Not So Long Ago
WHEN THE OLD timers start to pick their All-America teams, their first premise invariably is that the new generation has softened up considerably. The old boys could take it. They played the game for all it was worth, whatever it might be, and stood for no nonsense from anybody. Our fathers, and no doubt their fathers before them, felt that the college life of their sons had become a molly-coddle's existence; that the softness of luxury had supplanted the rugged virtues of their own hard-bitten era. And now we, who are close to a generation's span from our own matriculation at Hanover, cast an occasional disparaging glance at the easy decadence that our mind's eye pictures up there today. So here goes, by way of reassurance, for an All-America selection of the hard guys of the 1916-1920 period.
To qualify for this team you have to be tough. Mentally hardboiled, at any rate. The requirement is a combination of qualities: sophistication, a flair for the stinging phrase, wisdom beyond the ordinary. You must have held, in your upper-class days, the complete, abject submission of the fawning freshmen and the respect, whether grudging or not, of your peers.
The captain of the team is the one and only Fat Hardie. There was a man with the stulf of the pioneer in him; a natural born politician, smooth in the crises, always one jump ahead of the other fellow. His "Have a cigar?" struck terror in your soul. You didn't dare take it and you didn't dare not. Fat's idea of heaven was a dark, smoke-filled room, with a keg of beer in the corner, and a steak "inches thick" on the table.
Ax Warden—a man of action, terse, decisive, commanding. Dartmouth heelers jumped when he glared at them shouting for copy. Ax brought with him from Montana the combined traits of frontiersman and star reporter. He set the undergraduate standard for aggressive, dominating, sees-all-knows-all journalism.
Bob Proctor—lip curler extraordinary. Bob could and did wither anything in his path with a biting shaft of irony. Talented beyond all measure, keen as a razor edge, a human dynamo in a thousand different fields of activity, he had no patience whatever with stupidity or laziness or the drawbacks of immaturity.
Johnny Moore—the most picturesque character on the campus. Even his long list of escapades could not keep pace with the reputation that his massive frame and his inarticulate passion wrought for him. With one sinister, foreboding glance he could inspire terror, the while his jaw contorted with the struggle for the exact word that would demolish an antagonist.
But, like all brands of all-star teams, a man's own choice is the only one that will satisfy him. This one . could draw nominations by the score. Ken Spalding had the proper iconoclastic temper; Pete Potter and Spence Snedecor had a dash of it, too. Then there were the smooth boys—Ed Lindsay, Jim Reber, Bunny Harvey and the rest—contemptuous of campus politics and of youthful crudities, properly poised intellectually, but a bit too well polished around the edges to be first-rate material for our present purpose. Nels Smith ought to be counted in the running and Jim Davis; possibly Sherm Adams and Warrie Gault.
These were the lads who polled the majority of votes for class "snootiest" or "most sarcastic" or whatever it was we balloted for, come senior year. It might have been the part of wisdom to write in the same names for "most likely to succeed."
