From the 1912 Class Record, pp. 141-146.
SCRAPS--we went through all of them without losing a man. Victories? Non veni, non vedi, non vici! Which is merely the Latin for a hard luck story-but then we fought because we liked it, and the constant recurrence of that word "if" in our bellicose vocabulary just kept triumphs out of our reach.
We still contend that we won the- Poster fight. Why, there was not enough of that Sophomore gonfalon on the back door of College Hall, when we got through, to make a cigarette paper, but they gave the Sophs a victory just the same.
From a sentimental standpoint they earned it. We remember the Juniors mustering us up at "Pop" Eagans' and down at "Pat's, and what a horde of Colossi we had! Nineteen-Eleven had spared no paste in giving their emblem prominence about the campus. Moreover, said emblem was ungentlemanly; threatened us with immersion in the frog pond and denied us the privilege of affecting flamboyant haberdashery. Consequently, we were peeved, and, about 11 o'clock in the evening before our first day at Pennsylvania, when the intrepid Sophs were cringing about their defi in the rear of College Hall, congratulating themselves that there would be no fight, we made a flank attack and the battle was on.
Our first impact sent several of the 1911 Cyclops into the world of oblivion, and when our reserve squad, headed by "Shoey" and Findeisen, threw its fifteen thousand avoirdupois into the breach, the ambulances over at the Hospital started to clang, and Pennsylvanian reporters began to look for dead and wounded.
For two hours we pounded, hammered, wrestled, jostled and bruised those Sophs. Time and again one of our men would clamber over their heads, rip off a portion of the offending poster, beat pedestrial tattoos on second-year crania and retire to the rear to let some one else take the encore.
Then, when we withdrew with the assurance that we had won, some kindly marshal found a fragment of a poster on the door and gave the decision to the Sophs. But the death toll revealed 'very plainly next day that those Sophs had taken an awful beating.
We did lose the campus fight. We expected to. The weird decision of the night before was rather discouraging, and, while the Sophs had sent out a frantic hurry call to their timorous members for aid and mustered about four hundred, our ranks were depleted to a bare hundred and fifty. Consequently we found it a little difficult to put a man over a phalanx that extended almost to College Hall in order that he might touch the Soph covered door of the Houston Club.
In the second half, however, we did manage to lay out enough Sophs to reach President Harry Musser, only to find that his trousers, the removal of which would have given us a win, had been chained, strapped and glued to his person, and we had to content ourselves with denuding those of his henchmen whose lesser foresight made their breeches quite approachable and easily removed.
After that victory the Sophs committed the grave error of fancying themselves unbeatable. It was then that the Push Ball fight was inaugurated to take the place of the Wall fight. We went into that scrap for blood. Time and again we trammeled those Sophs, beat them back to their own goal line, only to be met by a phalanx of Seniors, who turned the ball back the other way. Discouraged and outnumbered, with the score a tie at the end of the first half, we were finally scored on and the Sophs claimed anot her victory. But the list of injured again revealed that we had licked 'em.
Then came the Bowl fight. "Danny" Hutchinson was the man on whom we depended for a victory in the first half, and he really did get down as far as the fifteen-yard line, where, from some mysterious source, the Sophs recruited a very unsophomore-looking cohort. of reinforcements and the half ended a draw.
The second half was verily a farce. The way we marked those Sophs was a shame! And hands on the bowl! Had the marshals counted each Soph hand twice and our own at par 1/2, it is doubtful if the second year men could have won. And yet, by some ethereal mathematical formula the score stood 40-30, in favor of the Sophs after the final count--ye gods, what martyrdom!
But we weren't disheartened yet. After the football game we essayed a little fling at the enemy and managed to get the ball--and then at the May Days we went at them again, only to be flimmed out of the tug of war, and handed a few more marvelous decisions in the boxing and wrestling bouts. Fine record, wasn't it? But as "Horrie" Morris said, we were coming back next year to lick those Freshmen!"
And now do you want to hear about another Poster fight? How a bare hundred of us guarded that back door of College Hall against the onslaught of two hundred Freshmen and as many Juniors; how we filled the field with dead and dying, and how, when victory seemed ours, the Juniors trained a fire hose on us and our posters, precipitating us into that state of coma which is wont to characterize a drowned man, and washing our posters off the door; how Findeisen and Reath and a mere handful kept those howling Freshmen away from the door till midnight halted the scrap, while the rest of our number were starring in Morris chair roles about the lawn with several Juniors reclining on various portions of our anatomy! Of course we lost! Not a Freshman could show a piece of our poster after the fight, but that New York fire department entree would have been too much, had we all been members of the swimming team, and as we didn't waterproof our posters, they came off, too. "Sic semper tyrannis!"
We could give a detailed account of all our other engagements, but it would be tiresome. The Campus fight was decided a tie, but there wasn't a Freshman in the scraps who wasn't looking for new trousers after it was over. We ran away with the Push Ball fight, frustrated a puny attempt on the part of the Freshmen to decorate the campus with their literature, and got another draw in the Bowl fight, as an adjunct of which we had the honor of entertaining President Coryell of the Freshman Class in the-wild s of Jersey. At the May Days we "cleaned up" in the boxing and wrestling bouts, but lost the tug-of-war decision and the games by one point.
Oh, we have been some belligerent aggregation.
In dealing out word poems "in re scrapdom" it hardly behooves us to overlook that one little fling we had back in our Sophomore year when we congregated on Franklin Field and exhumed the effigies of four faculty "Squeers." A hundred of the more venomously inclined of our class assembled to witness the gruesome spectacle. The night was very dank and dark, and all that we needed was a few bats and a Cerberus or two, with a photograph of Pluto, to make the picture complete. Horrid shapes, shrieks, sights unholy--all the earmarks of that Stygian cave were on hand to give those leering effigies a torrid transportation over the Styx.
Horace P-u-g-h Fry was the first victim. "Dave" Reeder would never have graduated after the Cremation if Horace had had him in any of his classes. "Dave" was caustic, vitriolic, nay, scathing in his denunciation. Invective, irony, malediction, venom--Horace's helpless, inanimate proxy got them all, and the incendiaries applied the torch to his dangling carcass with all the fiendishness of a Nero.
Fred Koschwitz had a touching obituary on Claude Stonecliffe McGinness, and consigned that prince of "N-Givers" to the flames with gusto quite Mephistophelean. Old "Sol" Huebner received his quota of brimstone from "Al" Pryor, and while all three tyrants crackled and sputtered barbarian Sophs cavorted about, jabbing the sufferers playfully and calling down upon their heads anathemas most bitter. Ah, cruel and unappreciative students! And yet some of us would have Eked to have seen the original of one o f those effigies dangling in a 200-degree Fahrenheit atmosphere. And as we left the scene of the butchery some of us may have hoped that if Hades were our lot we might be allowed to heave the coal into the furnace that harbored Fry, Huebner and McGinness.