Husky Reed

When quaint Dexter Merriam Keezer became president of little Reed College (Portland, Ore.) five years ago, he ventured a purely academic joke: that Reed might hire a good football team and special professors to keep the players eligible. Early next morning players, coaches and professors began to arrive in droves to offer their services. Dazed President Keezer sent them away, decided not to trifle again with so serious a subject. Last week football came back to plague Mr. Keezer again.

A big problem at Reed, a progressive college that goes in heavily for the arts and social studies, is to get enough football players for a team. Reed has a normal annual football budget of about $100, charges nothing for admission to games. This fall, having decided that Reed football was becoming too dangerous, Mr. Keezer blew in $300 for shoulder pads, pants, etc. For the fun of it, two young facultymen--Biology Teacher William ("Bill") McElroy, lately a varsity end at Stanford, and Alfred ("Fritz") Hubbard, onetime Carnegie Fellow at Princeton--offered to coach. Result was an unusually big turnout for the team: 30 (including two Japanese) of Reed's 546 students. Except on rainy days (when less than a full team showed up), they practiced about an hour and a half a day. Because of lack of time, Coaches McElroy & Hub-bard showed their pupils how to score a touchdown but not how to kick a goal afterwards. Reed's team proceeded to whip Multnomah College (a Y. M. C. A. school) and Pacific College of Newberg, Ore. (a Quaker school once attended by Herbert Hoover), each by the margin of a point after touchdown (knowing nothing better to do, they passed). Then they licked a CCC team at Camp Goldendale. Wash. Last fortnight, having topped off their five-game season with a six-touchdown victory, they became, to the consternation of President Keezer and every self-respecting alumnus, one of the few unbeaten, untied college football teams in the U. S.

President Keezer retaliated by barring the team from all college laboratories and libraries for five days (one day for each victory). President & faculty also began to talk darkly of redeeming Reed's scholastic reputation by paying football players not to come to Reed. In his annual report to the trustees, President Keezer grumped: "I would be happier if football were abandoned entirely." Last straw was an attempt to arrange a "Brain Bowl" game between Reed and oft-trounced University of Chicago. President Keezer put a stop to that.

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