Higher & Faster

In Iowa City, Jimmy Owen of the University of Iowa ran a world's record 60 yd. in 6.1 sec.

In Madison, Wis., an 18-year-old high-school boy named Robert Packard twice equalled the old record, 6.2 sec.

In Kansas City, Glenn Cunningham, world's No. 1 miler, won a 1,000-yd. race from Elton Brown of the Kansas City Athletic Club.

To Manhattan, 28 colleges sent contestants to compete for the intercollegiate championships in the climactic meet of the indoor track and field season. Manhattan College won, 26 1/2 points to Harvard's 16 1/2. Henry Dreyer of Rhode Island State beat all indoor and outdoor records by throwing a 35-lb. weight 56 ft. 9 in. Keith Brown of Yale won the high-jump championship at 6 ft. 4 in., moved over to the pole-vault runway and beat his own intercollegiate record by sailing over the crossbar at 14 ft. 3 1/4 in.

Tall, mild-mannered Keith Brown, who hopes to clear 14 ft. 6 in. before he graduates next June, is the latest addition to an extraordinary line of Yale pole-vaulters who, starting with Thomas Shearman in 1888, have since won the intercollegiate championship 20 times. Recent Yale pole-vaulters, like Sabin Carr, Olympic champion in 1928, and his contemporary Fred Sturdy, owe their success less to the New Haven climate than to the most famed of all the vaulters who preceded them, Alfred Carlton Gilbert, Olympic champion in 1908. Gilbert's study of pole-vaulting over 30 years has raised the sport to the level of a precise and dangerous science.

Gilbert's vaulting career began when he pulled a cedar rail off a farmer's fence near his Idaho home, whittled it into a vaulting pole. At Yale, in 1907, he discovered the fact that bamboo poles had more spring, less chance of breaking off in a point than spruce. He became the first man to clear the alarming height of 13 ft. (unofficially). When he returned from the Olympic Games in London, Vaulter Gilbert brought back 50 bamboo poles which cost $1.25 each and sold them for $25 each. After this venture he went into the magic business, manufacturing sets of card tricks, false hats for jugglers and accessories for vaudeville magicians. Presently A. C. Gilbert thought up the idea of a child's construction toy which he called Erector; his company now sells 350,000 sets a year. At Yale, where he is on the Board of Athletic Control, A. C. Gilbert still has time to see that the vaulters get the best possible coaching and equipment. His New Haven home, in addition to his own works on handkerchief tricks, fun with magnets, what to do with chemicals, contains all books ever published about pole-vaulting, a comprehensive cinema library of pole-vaulters in slow motion.

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