From their founding, the Massachusetts communities of Leominster and Fitchburg have shared the same river. More than that, they have long shared a special football competition that has sometimes spilled beyond the field. In A Game That Forged Rivals, author and historian Mark Bodanza captures the human drama of one of the nation's oldest football rivalries; the high schools of Leominster and Fitchburg have met on the gridiron for 114 years.
This long-standing competition has weathered many challenges, including major developments in the sport, wars, economic turmoil, an epidemic, and technological and social change not imagined when the teams first met in 1894. Through all the years and contests, thousands of athletes have competed for pride and a belief that this game was the pinnacle of their football days. A Game That Forged Rivals shares the stories, dramatic clashes, and challenges that tested these young men both on and off the field.
Compiled from newspaper articles, school yearbooks, game programs, eyewitness accounts, letters, photos, and archival records, A Game That Forged Rivals not only chronicles the development of football from its earliest days, but also tells the story of two communities that saw, in football, a way to grasp civic pride.
A Game That Forged Rivals
How Competition between Two New England High Schools Created One of the Greatest Traditions in FootballBy Mark C. BodanzaiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2009 Mark C. Bodanza
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4401-5648-9Contents
Preface............................................................................................ixAcknowledgments....................................................................................xiIntroduction.......................................................................................xiii1. The Nation, 1894................................................................................12. The Birth and Development of Intercollegiate Football through the Mid-1890s.....................73. Leominster and Fitchburg at the Nineteenth Century's Close......................................134. The 1890s Bring Football to Leominster and Fitchburg............................................185. The First Game between Rivals, October 20, 1894?................................................236. The Rivalry Gains Its Footing...................................................................307. The Rivalry Sputters as the Twentieth Century Dawns.............................................778. Football's Greatest Crisis......................................................................899. A Year of Triumphs and Tragedy, 1918............................................................10110. Doyle Field : Leominster's Time of Achievement and Loss........................................11211. Noteworthy Seasons and Games to Remember.......................................................132Afterword..........................................................................................153Table of Games.....................................................................................157Bibliography.......................................................................................161Index..............................................................................................167
Chapter One
The Nation, 1894
It was a pivotal year for America. It was a time of historic importance for football, especially in the New England communities of Leominster and Fitchburg.
In 1894, football held the imagination of the nation's youth while hard economic times took hold of the nation. How high-school-age boys perceived the economic concerns of their parents is merely speculation. Whatever they thought, the country reeled and convulsed from an economic downturn and the political upheaval that always follows a time of great uncertainty. The panic, which had its start in 1893, was a profound economic depression rooted in an overexpansion by the railroads and exacerbated by overextended financing. The federal government issued two large bond offerings in an attempt to alleviate the drain on the treasury. Populist political candidates questioned the power of monopolistic corporations, and striking workers sought more equitable wages. President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, was blamed for the turmoil. America's industrial muscle spasmed and newspaper headlines captured the somber story.
Before the air turned cool and schools reopened for the new academic year, summer simmered with anticipation of the fall elections. In June of 1894, populist politicians and "Silver Democrats" convened in Omaha, Nebraska to advance a policy of silver and paper money. Silver and paper currency, as opposed to gold, was championed as the money of the common man. Labor and debt-laden farmers saw relief in an expansion of the currency that silver and paper money represented. Simply put, the Silver Democrats wanted the government to print more money to ease the repayment of debt and expand the availability of credit. Republicans, business, and eastern financiers clung to the principle of a sound currency backed by gold, the international standard of trade. William Jennings Bryan, the editor of the Omaha World-Herald, addressed the silver convention. Bryan ran for president in 1896 and two additional times, each time on a silver platform and each time unsuccessfully.
Before the midterm elections of 1894, more than six hundred banks and more than twenty-two thousand miles of railroads were in receivership. A quarter of the nation's heavy industrial capacity lay idle. When the unhappy electorate was heard, Republicans made historic gains in both houses of Congress. The Democrats and their president, Grover Cleveland, absorbed the ire of voters concerned about the direction of the American economy while Leominster boys rustled autumn leaves on their way to football practice during the fall of 1894.
In spite of the nation's difficulties, Leominster's industry weathered the economic downturn with a remarkable measure of resiliency. Piano-case companies were founded: Richardson Piano Case Company in 1891 and the Wellington Piano Case Company in 1895. These companies joined previously established firms in an industry that grew and prospered until the Great Depression came and family entertainment was more likely to include a gathering around the radio than the parlor piano. While Leominster's industry chocked smoke and steam into the October dusk, the town's earliest football players hustled to practice at the old militia training field, Carter Park. Leominster's first town center and proving ground once again welcomed a squad of young men ready to hone their skills on the brisk autumn evenings of 1894. Afternoons were reserved for after-school jobs in factories, which several of the high school players had to attend before gridiron maneuvers could be practiced and daydreams of football glory turned to reality.
The American economy would not begin its recovery until 1896, when the election of Republican President William McKinley and the Klondike gold rush helped restore America's confidence. A heady self-assurance, magnified by an attitude that envisioned great possibilities, would ignite a decade of rapid economic expansion once the American economy got back on its feet.
Leominster
The late nineteenth century was a period of dramatic population growth. The 1890 census recorded an American population that had nearly doubled since the start of the Civil War in 1861. A significant portion of this growth was the result of immigration from northern European nations. The fabric of Leominster's 1894 football team was in part woven with the sons of immigrants seeking social inclusion by way of a sport that was no less finished in its development than the assimilation of the human waves arriving at the shore. Mark O'Toole, who would anchor Leominster's line at right tackle during the fall of 1894, was born in Leominster on September 29, 1878. His father, recently arrived from Ireland, sought a promise of opportunity that could not be fulfilled in his native land. Patrick O'Toole was a comb maker living and working in Leominster's Morse Hollow, a neighborhood centered near the intersection of Exchange Street, Birch Street, and the Monoosnock Brook, that employed, housed, and fed more than a hundred comb makers in factories, homes, and a store built by the Morse family. Many of the workers in the factories of Morse Hollow were Irish immigrants. Even today, descendants of those newcomers still live in the homes their fathers built with a gritty determination, hard work, and sacrifice.
Life in New England, especially for the foreign born, was hard in the nineteenth century. Patrick O'Toole died prematurely on December 9, 1887, leaving his widow, Mary (Daley) O'Toole, who was pregnant with their fifth child. Patrick, thirty-nine years old at the time of his death, never realized the dreams he had for his young family. The youngest O'Toole, Ann Frances, was born less than five weeks after her father's death. Mark O'Toole, who was nine at the time of his father's passing, and his four younger sisters grew up with their widowed mother in the family home at 1 Cherry Street. From that address, Mark O'Toole would attend Field High School, form aspirations, and keep faith in possibilities that America never fully revealed to his father. He and four succeeding generations of his family journeyed America's unfolding experience residing in but three homes no farther apart than the length of a football field.
Fitchburg
Fitchburg's depot, from which its football team would depart on October 20, 1894 for a fateful journey to Leominster, was a bustling center, processing passengers and freight on an impressive succession of trains. The rail, as much as the river, transformed Fitchburg from the "turkey hills" of Lunenburg's northwestern hinterland to a center of population and industry. A casual notice in the Fitchburg Sentinel was a harbinger of what lay ahead. "The citizens of Fitchburg who feel an interest in the subject of a railroad from this place to the City of Boston are requested to meet at the Town Hall on Friday evening, Nov 19, 1841, at half-past six o'clock, to adopt such measures as they may think proper."
Five decades of rail, river, and entrepreneurial ingenuity brought breathtaking industrial advances to Fitchburg. The nation celebrated the Columbian Exposition, or Chicago's World Fair, in 1893, commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's voyage to the new world. The largest exhibit among the greatest technological displays of the age belonged to Fitchburg's Simonds Saw and Steel Company. Fitchburg's population grew dramatically to keep pace with the demand for labor created by industrial growth. It began modestly when the foreign-born population rose from 1,500 to more than 2,500 on the eve of Fitchburg's graduation to city status in 1872. Between 1890 and 1895, the floodgate was opened. The population rose from 22,037 to 26,409. More than nine thousand of the new total were of foreign birth.
Fitchburg was a diverse place under construction in the later decades of the nineteenth century. Rollstone Hill, shadowing Fitchburg's center, yielded the granite to be cut into architectural elements for new buildings and curbing for streets. The Fitchburg Depot, with its majestic clock tower rising some 128 feet, was trimmed with Fitchburg granite. Artisans as well as laborers were in demand. Henry Godbeer was a stone mason who, along with his wife Sarah, immigrated to Fitchburg in 1871. The Godbeers had five children; two, John and Elizabeth, had been born in Artherington, Devonshire, England. The Godbeers settled in West Fitchburg briefly, where their third child, George Henry Godbeer, was born in 1872. The youngest children, Edith and Clifford, were born in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, where the family resided for more than a decade before returning to Fitchburg in 1886.
Upon his return to Fitchburg, Henry Godbeer established the Henry Godbeer Granite Company and a quarry on Rollstone Hill. All of the Godbeer boys tried their hand at the demanding and physical work of their father. Only one brother, John, stayed in the trade and he maintained the granite company well into the twentieth century. George left the family business at age nineteen in 1891 and launched a seventy-year career as a reporter and editor of the Fitchburg Sentinel. The youngest brother, Clifford, pursued a career with the railroads. One thing the brothers shared was a deep interest in sports, especially football. The youngest brother, Clifford F. Godbeer, enrolled at Fitchburg High School in the fall of 1892. When the trolley car left the depot carrying the Fitchburg High School football team to Leominster in October of 1894, one of the teammates was Clifford Godbeer.
Playing American football was not central to the vision of the families of Mark O'Toole and Clifford Godbeer; however, in the dimming light of a Saturday afternoon in October of 1894, these two young men met at Leominster's driving park for a football game. The game they played that autumn day was not much older than the young men themselves. Football was a developing sport that in some way mirrored the changes in American society.
American sport, in general, was influenced by democratic, industrial, and social changes affecting the nation. The more genteel and rural pleasures of hunting and fishing were not available to an increasingly urban workforce. Yet these urban masses had a thirst for entertainment and sports that provided an outlet for the expression of manliness and strength. Young men, college-bound or not, sought self-improvement that included mental advancement and courage. The football field became a place where young men would come of age and prove some of the most basic qualities that earn a man respect: strength, bravery, and, most importantly, placing team above self. In this milieu, American football was born and reared.
Chapter Two
The Birth and Development of Intercollegiate Football through the Mid-1890s
Although the first professional football game was played at Latrobe, Pennsylvania on August 31, 1895, the sport was essentially an intercollegiate one in 1894. By the mid-1890s, American football owed its popularity to fabled rivalries and clashes between football college grid powers. And popular it was; in fact, intercollegiate football was more popular than college baseball by the 1890s. In his 1896 book Football, Walter Camp, the father of the American game, wrote:
This volume is published in the hope that it may aid in the development of American football, and more especially that it may encourage a scientific study of the game. The great popularity of this sport is not without its reasonable warrant. It calls out not merely the qualities which make the soldier-bravery, endurance, obedience, self-control-but equally that mental acumen which makes the successful man in any of the affairs of life-perception, discrimination, and judgment. To the casual observer, football doubtless presents merely the spectacle of vigorous physical exercise. But a deeper insight will discover the steady development of those other qualities which make the complete man-quick determination, instant obedience, self-reliance, physical bravery. The great lesson of the game may be put into a single line: it teaches that brains will always win over muscle! It is not drawback to the game that its object is a simple one; when you tell the spectator that each side is trying to reach the opponent's goal, you have stated all that need be said. It is similarly no drawback to its popularity that professional football is unknown in America. But the great merit of this sport is its practically unlimited field of tactical development. The fascinating study of new movements and combinations is never exhausted. It is this tactical possibility which has elevated football in popular esteem above all other sports. The cause of its attractiveness has its parallel in war. No pages of war history are so interesting to the student as the stirring descriptions of battles in which, by superior direction, a comparatively small body of soldiers has routed a force of twice its strength. It is on these high lines that the American game of football may be developed. It is in the hope that they may aid that development that the authors print this volume. September, 1896.
American football's evolution is traced to 1876 when Harvard and Yale substituted rugby union rules for the Association game, a soccer-style version of football. Both games had British roots. Britons had been kicking at inflated animal bladders for centuries. Tradition has it that men of colonial New England entertained themselves after Thanksgiving dinner with a game that involved kicking at an inflated pig's bladder.
As the legend is told, in the year 1823, student William Ellis exhilarated spectators at Rugby College England when he tired of kicking at the ball, picked it up and ran with it, in clear violation of the rules. While some scholars dispute that this was the origin of rugby, the college from which the sport takes its name maintains a plaque commemorating the event.
Rugby's popularity in America was owing to the same excitement and rugged style of play produced by a player running with the ball. In rugby, play commences with a "scrum" or "scrummage." Teams gather around the ball, arms and bodies interlocked, and kick at the ball until it is freed from the pack. Once the ball comes out, it is seized by a halfback who in turn passes it to a three-quarter who runs with or kicks the ball.
Almost immediately, American players began to modify play, and more particularly, the operation of the "scrum." Players began to let the opponents do the kicking and instead concentrated on waiting for the opportune moment before kicking the ball to their outlet teammates. As more teams and players became adept at this practice, teams began to roll the ball sidewise between their lines until one of the players could snap the ball back with his toe to his outlet. From these changes came the regularized "snap-back" or center and quarterback.
By 1884, the scrum was replaced by the "line of scrimmage" and a system of three downs to make five yards or lose ten. The rugby rule that prohibited interference (blocking) in front of the ball carrier, not often observed or enforced, was formally repealed by rule in 1888.
Still, some antecedents from rugby continued in American football of the mid-1890s. The quarterback, or the first player to touch the snap from the snapback or center, could not run with the ball until the ball was first handled by another player. The center continued to be referred to as the "snap back," and that player could continue to snap the ball back by his toe as well as the more modern technique of snapping the ball back by means of a pass from his hands.
Much of American's football development during the last two decades of the nineteenth century was the work of Walter Camp, universally referred to as the "father of American football." Camp played for Yale and later coached the team to a number of national championships. He was largely responsible for the adoption of rules that moved American football away from rugby and toward the team-oriented sport that more closely resembles what we today know as football. To be sure, many rule changes loomed, not the least of which was the adoption of the forward pass; however, Camp was clearly the pioneer most responsible for American football. Camp wrote in his 1896 book Football, "Coaching football team is the most engrossing thing in the world. It is playing chess with human pawns."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Game That Forged Rivalsby Mark C. Bodanza Copyright © 2009 by Mark C. Bodanza. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
