Gertrude's Thing: A Winner

As a little diversion in the football quiz in the October issue, We offered a prize - two tickets to next year's Princeton game - to the reader who first identified the author of a somewhat arcane quotation and supplied a "worthy limerick" based on Dartmouth football lore.

The quotation went like this: "... And then and that is the most so they come down on all fours. . . . And then they all look at the big brown ball. It is a real Indian dance, and before they were so American, as they are now, they did not do it in that way, they did not do football in that way. It was an American thing, not football anybody's football, but the way, the American way, that they were doing that thing."

The author of that magnificent account, which was inspired by the proceedings of the 1935 Dartmouth-Yale game (the year Dartmouth broke the "Yale jinx"), was, of course, Gertrude Stein. And so said Philip Booth '47, of Castine, Maine.

Following the contest rules to the letter, Mr. Booth, the son of Professor Edmund Booth '18, went on: "I was a Hanover urchin at the time; I can remember Whitey Fuller '37 running down the Memorial Field stadium before almost anybody else came to. It all went something like this:

There was an old ref named FriesellWhose down-count favored Cornell;When he gave them the score,The Memorial roarAssigned him the Old Indian Yell."

Of course, the poetic allusion is to the famous Fifth Down game against Cornell, in 1940. So Mr. Booth was the winner. (About the same time his entry reached us, one of his poems - not the same one - appeared in The NewYorker. It was a banner week for Mr. Booth.)

Runners-up in our contest were Edward Gruen '31 and John Little '4O. Alas, there is no prize for second place, or third.