1898 Cornell Telegram / Paul Dashiell

These guys really didn’t like Paul Dashiell.

This telegram was to Hiram Tuller, the manager of the 1898 Cornell varsity football team from E.W. (Ernest Wilson) Huffcut, law professor and president of the Cornell Athletic Association. The telegram mentions that “White”, Captain A.E.  Whiting, wants a final answer to whether Cornell will refuse to play their annual Thanksgiving day game against the University of Pennsylvania if Paul Dashiell is to be the Umpire.

They did end up playing the game, which was two days later, and Dashiell was the umpire (interesting note – William Henry Lewis was the timekeeper for the game).  The game was played under horrid conditions, during a storm with several inches of mud covering the field and freezing temperatures. Casper Whitney was quoted as saying that these conditions “combined to make it a day of utmost severity on the players, the hardest in my recollection”.  During intermission the Penn players changed from their wet uniforms into dry ones. Coach Woodruff of Penn said that he “attributes Pennsylvania’s victory more to this fact than to any other one particular thing” and that “if the men had not been able to change their suits they would have been unable to finish the game. Some of the men were so cold they were almost helpless”.

Pennsylvania won the game, played in Philadelphia, 12 to 6.

Dashiell was considered by most the premier umpire in the East (Everts Wrenn being "the West's greatest umpire")  and was sought after for the more important and larger football games of this period. He was known for coaching at Navy, first as an assistant for just over a decade (under Josh Hartwell in 1893) and then as head coach for several years after that. He was also known for his work on the Intercollegiate Football Rules Committee, serving with the likes of Bell, Moffat, Walter Camp and others, which made him uniquely qualified to umpire.

In 1902, controversies involving Dashiell arose and he was accused of biased decisions and the failure to make calls. This was of particular note in the press for the Yale - Princeton game of that year. As one midwestern  newspaper put it,  "umpire Dashiell seems to have become blind in some of those numerous eyes the eastern critics credited him with". Also this same year Cornell made it known that Paul Dashiell will not be allowed to umpire any more games in which the Ithicans take part. It appears Cornell had had its issues with Dashiell as far back as 1896.

The Harvard –Yale game of 1905 had its share of brutality. The difference now was that President Roosevelt was taking notice. Dashiell was umpiring that contest and refused to penalize James Quill of Yale for blatant unnecessary roughness and slugging.  Dashiell was called on the carpet by Roosevelt who said to coach Reid of Harvard that he was not sure Dashiell was the kind of man that should be teaching the cadets at 
Annapolis . Dashiell was never to officiate another Harvard – Yale game and Roosevelt now had a man under his thumb on the rules committee to help reform the game.