From the 1880 Class Record, pp. 15-17.
With the approach of the great day of the bowl fight class jingoism reawakened, and when we assembled in chapel on the morning of that memorable battle there were few who did not proudly wear their old clothes. and many were in cardigan jackets and other rig conspicuously suited for the fray. A special bodyguard had been selected for the bowl man, that honor falling to Billy Patton, who still survives, notwithstanding the prolonged and desperate struggle of the Sophs to put him in their bowl and the tireless defense offered by his classmates. Attention was quickly centered upon the bowl itself, which proved to be a very strong one and strongly defended, so that despite the effective assistance of '78 we were unable to either break or capture it, and after an hour's furious tugging and hammering, the men of '79 at last gained the advantage of position in an angle between high buttresses of the college building so that we charged in vain upon their compact mass. Here they remained a long while, and finally, when both sides were well exhausted and ready for a truce, they were suffered to pass along the front of the college to the main entrance and handed their bowl through the window of the janitor's room. We had done all that could be done, but it was with bitterness profound that we saw the unbroken bowl secured at last where we had no chance to reach it, never again to appear until we found it hanging over the stage on '79's class day.
The connivance of the authorities in this purloining of a bowl which had been brought out to be fought for, and which we regarded as our proper trophy, always rankled in* our bosoms, for '79 could never have gotten away from the building with it, and the passing of it to the college authorities was understood by us to be a confession of a drawn battle.
And here some record should. be made of a bold plot for the recovery of that bowl, for though the project came to naught, its conception gives proof of the earnestness of this college play of ours, and helps the reader of to-day to smile back upon that other self who thus, gallantly and boylike, blundered into manhood.
A dark conspiracy was actually formed to seize that bowl as it hung before the crowded audience immediately above the heads of the men of '79 on the platform of the Y. M. C. A. Hall, at Fifteenth and Chestnut streets. There were a dozen of us in the plot, and each man had his station and his plan of action. The bowl was to be taken by one of several of our class who had seats in the little gallery above the plat- form from the front rail of which it was suspended. It would have been quickly passed to the rear and thrown from a stair window. Beneath on Sansom street, two swift runners were impatiently wait- ing. These were to make off with it. dodging through alleys, stores and houses, and selecting any one of a dozen plans of concealment and escape by which it seemed that pursuers might easily be baffled. just at the critical moment, however, the man who was about to reach for the bowl was quietly informed, by a gentleman with a star on his coat, that the police had discovered that something was up; and so the strong arm of the law balked what might have been a thrilling episode of our class history.
Our luck with our own bowl a year after the first bowl battle was not more brilliant. Whether because of its lack of strength or of care on the part of those who guarded it, the bowl that we prepared as Sophomores for the bowl man of '81 was broken by them and their friends of '79.