Last page of the alumni letter, showing Poe Field
Benny Friedman endorsed/signed products are exceedingly rare and these wonderful cleats are the only ones we've come across in seventeen years. Quality built shoes in great condition. Athco stands for Athletic Shoe Company of Chicago, Illinois. The owner of these shoes, R. Hass carved his name into the soles. The shoes appear to be size 12/13.
“The day of the armor helmet in football is over”. Headline from the March 23. 1903, Boston Journal
I came across this helmet at the May 2017 Brimfield, purchasing it and subsequently selling it to another collector (Ed Turner) that afternoon ,with a gentleman’s agreement that when he scaled back his extensive antique helmet collection he would sell the helmet back to me. Good to his word, he brought the helmet with him to this year’s May Brimfield and I bought it back.
When the Intercollegiate Football Rules Association met in March of 1903, it decided that the hard leather head piece, as worn during the past few years by many players on the gridiron, must be either modified so to lose its capacity of injuring an opponent or must be altogether eliminated. “It has been believed that many of the injuries received in football were due to the use of heavily protecting armor, particularly the head guards, which had grown so hard and unyielding as to give plenty of cause for this supposition”.
These “helmets made of hard sole leather have been used in mass plays as battering rams to butt down opponents…the committee believes this new rule will abolish that feature from the intercollegiate game and restore it to the old Rugby system of open play.”
The actual rule to be passed was not yet known. John C. Bell (U Penn), a member of the committee was quoted after this meeting as saying “What other changes will follow in the way of modifying football armor of all sort I do not know. No rule on the question has been adopted nor do I trust one will be at this meeting”. The committee was made up of John Bell (U. Penn.), Walter Camp (Yale), J. Burchard Fine (Princeton), Professor L.M. Dennis (Cornell), Paul Dashiell (Lehigh and Annapolis) and Robert Wrenn (Harvard).
It would have been at this time this helmet would have been produced, to satisfy the intent of what the initial suggested rule would address, a modification to prevent contact with sole leather, in this case by incorporating a felt/wool ring on the top of the helmet.
When the rules committee issued the final rule, a few short months later, it read “If head protectors are worn , no sole leather, papier mache, or other hard or unyielding material shall be used in their construction…” .
To conform to this rule, which specified that no sole leather whatsoever could be used in the manufacture of helmets, Spalding could not market this helmet, and came out with the pneumatic helmet (No. 70) as well a less expensive line of helmets they termed “Gray” head harnesses, made of soft leather (No.45) or canvas (No. 55).
This helmet is based on a helmet design that differs slightly from the Spalding No.60 (that was currently Spalding’s top of the line helmet), based on G.L. Pierce’s Head Harness Patent pictured below.
The helmet is embossed with “The Spalding” on both ear flaps, the designation reserved for its top of the line products.
This helmet is an absolute rarity, previously unknown to our hobby, being the only known example.
This post and the post to follow will feature two of the rarest examples of football headgear. It took us close to two decades to locate an example of a rugby football pill-box cap, the subject of this post, and the only other example we know of is in the National Football Museum, Manchester, England, dating from the same years.
This cap is an 1871-1872
Manchester Football Club Member’s Pillbox Rugby Cap. A hooped pillbox style
cap, labelled by the manufacturer thought to be Christys Hat of London or
Carver & Company of Bristol, and "confidently dated" by the club.
In an excellent state of preservation.
This cap was
‘deaccessioned’ from the prestigious Manchester Rugby Football Club collection along
with a number of other early and rare caps and jerseys. Most of the 1870s
and 1880s caps and jerseys from their collection belonged to known players or
were from notable competitions, and have “been in the possession of the
Manchester club for generations”.
“The founders of the
Manchester Football Club (Rugby Football) can justly be described as the
pioneers of the Rugby game, not only in Lancashire but also in the North Of
England”. Its chief founder was Richard Sykes (a onetime Captain of football at
Rugby School) who had been arranging Rugby games back into the 1850s. The MFC was officially founded in 1860.
These caps are
incredibly rare, even in England, and the limited number of those from the
early days of the sport in this country, from the 1870s up through the
early/mid 1880s, imported or manufactured here, appear to be nonexistent at
this point. Outside of museum collections this is the only football
pillbox cap we know of.
As early as 1871, Peck
& Snyder of New York advertised in “The Book of Rules of the Game of Foot
Ball” the importing of Rugby and English Match Balls, Association balls as well
as football pants, shirts, caps and belts.
A scarce and most
important example.
Examples of such
football pillbox caps:
The 1878 Brown football
team (it’s first team), photo in “Evertrue: The History of Brown Football”,
2003, pg 2.
See the Antiquefootball.com
write up on “The Football Cap”, from March 9, 2020.
Harpers Weekly,
Illustration “Football-Collared”, December 1, 1883.
Illustrated England v.
Scotland, 1872, from Sporting Dramatic News, 1875
Also see a cropped section
of a c. 1870 CDV, which I bid on and lost, copied off the internet and pictured
below.
Last weekend I was just over the border in Connecticut and found this Harvard class of 1886 football team photo, presumably taken in 1882. It's a really nice early photo that draws you in. Framed in a much better than average frame, having a birdseye maple central band. The mat has been damaged and pieced together on the right side. Very early Harvard football photos are a passion of ours and are very difficult to come by.
Kimball (Marcus Morton), far right in the middle, went on to play for the University team in 1883 and in 1884, when he was captain. His left arm rests on Adams (George Casper), who played for the University eleven in 1882, 1883 and 1886.
Adams was named as ‘field coach’ for Harvard from 1890 -1892, sharing coaching duties with George Stewart, ’84. Before Harvard, Adams attended and played football at Adams Academy, and was a great grandson of president John Quincy Adams. I have a late 1870s photo of an Adams Academy football team that I believe has Adams in it, however players are unidentified and at present this is just conjecture. I may be able to clear this up with a trip to the Quincy Historical Society which retains many records and photos (including sports photos with identified players) from the Adams Academy, which closed in 1908
The team roster includes Adams, Haughton, Dewey, Hartley, Vogel, Burnett, Woodbury, Clark, Phillips, Kimball, Beck, Austin, Littauer as a substitute, Guild , the manager.
The ’86 Freshman’s teams record in 1882:
‘86 v. Roxbury Latin, won by ‘86
’86 v. Exeter, won by ‘86
’86 v. Andover, won by Andover
’86 v. Yale, Tie game (Dec. 02)
Another source has them playing five games, without listing the individual contests, ending with a record of 3-2-1.
The ’86 freshman challenged Dartmouth to a game, but this was “respectfully declined”.
This is a Pach Bro’s photo. Pach was based in New York City and travelled to college towns somewhat seasonally to take yearbook, class and sports photographs. They were generally the photographer of choice for senior classes at Yale, Harvard and Princeton, but college classes would vote on who they wanted to be their photographer. For example, Pach was chosen by Yale’s class of ’82, while the ’82 Sheffield School at Yale chose Notman as their photographer.
All of these footballs were found together during a home inspection, in the crawlspace of a Hyde Park Chicago home, where they had lay hidden for 70 plus years.
I have nicknamed this collection, somewhat in jest, in the manner used with recently discovered and significant old collections of baseball cards that come to auction. Encapsulated cards are labelled with names like the “Black Swamp Find” or the “Lucky 7 Find”, and so on. We don’t collect baseball or any type of sports cards, so we don’t know if they are just having fun or take this somewhat seriously.
Well, “The Floorboard Hoard” seems appropriate for these balls. And now that it’s in print it is a done deal.
The 1912 team was coached by Amos Alonzo Stagg and they ended their season with a 6 -1 record.
This ball is pictured in “Antique Sports Uniforms and Equipment, 1840 – 1940, Baseball – Football – Basketball, 2008, page 91. It has an embossed Spalding seal on one of its panels and embossed patent number and date by the laces. Ex Dan Hauser collection.
By the mid 1850s the daguerreotype was being displaced by the ambrotype, somewhat cheaper and easier to produce. The ambrotype created the image on glass as opposed to the earlier daguerreotype which used silver coated copper plates. The image is crystal clear. The cheeks are hand tinted.
