“I remember the Indian game in ’96.  The score in the first half was 6 to 0, in favor of the Indians.  I believe they had beaten Harvard and Penn, and tied Yale.  There wasn’t a word said in the club house when the team came off the field, but each man was digging in his locker for a special pair of shoes, which we had prepared for Yale.  Naturally I was very bitter and refused to speak to any one.  Then I heard the quiet, confident voice talking to Johnny Baird, who had his locker next to mine.  I can’t remember all he said, but this is the gist of his conversation: 

“’Johnny, you’re backing up the center.  Why can’t you make that line into a fighting unit?  Tell ’em their grandfathers licked a hundred better Indians than these fellows are, and it’s up to them to show they haven’t back-bred.’

“Johnny Baird carried out these orders, and the score, 22 to 6, favoring Princeton, showed the result.

“Once more Johnny Poe’s brains lifted Princeton out of a hole.  I could mention many cases where Johnny has helped Princetonians, but they are personal and could not be published.

“I can only say, that when I lost Johnny Poe, I lost one who can never be replaced, and I feel like a traitor because I was not beside him when he fell.”

* * * * *

Rinehart tells how he tried to get even with Sam Boyle.

“I went into professional football, after leaving Lafayette,” says Rinehart.  “I joined the Greensburg Athletic Club team at Greensburg, Pennsylvania, solely for the purpose of getting back at Sam Boyle, formerly of the University of Penn.  He was playing on the Pittsburgh Athletic Club.”

When I asked Rinehart why he wanted to get square with Sam Boyle, he said: 

“For the reason that Sam, during the Penn-Lafayette contest in ’97, had acted in a very unsportsmanlike manner and kept telling his associates to kill the Lafayette men and not to forget what Lafayette did to them last year, and a lot more, but possibly it was fortunate for Sam that he did not play in our Greensburg-Pittsburgh Athletic Club game.  I was ready to square myself for Lafayette.”

A lot of good football stories have been going the rounds, some old, some new, but none of them better than the one Barkie Donald, afterward a member of the Harvard Advisory Football Committee, tells on himself, in a game that Harvard played against the Carlisle Indians in 1896.

It was the first time Harvard and Carlisle had met—­Harvard winning—­4 to 0—­and Donald played tackle against Bemus Pierce.

Donald, none too gentle a player, for he had to fight every day against Bert Waters, then a coach, knew how to use his arms against the Indian, and also when charging, how to do a little execution with his elbows and the open hand, just as the play was coming off.  He was playing legitimately under the old game.  He roughed it with the big Indian and caught him hard several times, but finally Bemus Pierce had something to say.