Conway's Boys

The coach watched the big, clumsy kid flounder until he couldn't stand it any longer. He yanked him out of a freshman game a few weeks ago. "Your name's Conway, isn't it?" he asked. The kid's lip trembled. "Yes, sir," he replied. Said the coach: "Well, you're not playing like a

Conway, and if you don't do better you'll be the first Conway I ever saw sitting on the bench."

That would be calamitous. For 15 years at University School, a private prep school in a Cleveland suburb, the team had never been without a Conway, and every Conway had been a star. Tommy, 15, felt ashamed of himself. If he flopped, what would he say to his nine brothers?

There was Jerry, 17, slick halfback who was running opposing tacklers dizzy. He is co-captain and star of the current University School team. Jim, 19, was playing football at Williams, and Bill, 21, was captain of this year's Yale team. Yale's Coach Herman Hickman rates Bill, a 195-lb. center, the equal of any center he coached at West Point during the war. Then there was Bob (ex-Dartmouth jayvee), Jack (ex-Georgetown), Tim (ex-Williams), Bud (ex-Yale jayvee), and Mary, who married Tom Conley, the captain of the 1930 Notre Dame team.

Tutors for Tommy. When he heard of Tommy's troubles, Jerry said: "I'll talk to him." He did that night at the family dinner table with two younger Conways--Terry and Neil--kibitzing. He ticked off Tommy's weaknesses: slow getaways, too much use of elbows, getting sucked out of position. "You got to get smarter," Jerry pounded home. Tim Sr., an Irishman who believes that athletics is the best thing that can happen to a boy, admitted that Tommy was lackadaisical. Under that kind of tutoring, Tommy soon perked up and played better.

With 13 kids (only two of them girls), Timothy Conway is in the right business --retail food and groceries. Says he: "I'm in favor of feeding 'em plenty." A 15-lb. roast on Sunday is the usual thing, and there are 35-lb. turkeys at Thanksgiving. The Conway home is equipped with restaurant-size utensils, and when the kids were younger, the staggering meals were staggered: pre-school-age kids ate dinner in the kitchen at 6; elementary-school-agers in the breakfast room at 6:30, and the big kids with dad and mother in the dining room at 7 (Mrs. Conway died last August).

Summers, the clan moves to their 122-acre farm, where a hilltop had been leveled to make an athletic field. To this day, Tim Sr. has trouble calling off the names of his offspring, usually ends any listing by saying: "Now, hold on--have I got them all?"

Once, when an internal revenue man came around to question him, suspicious of the number of exemptions he claimed, Papa Conway discovered that he had forgotten one; instead of paying more, he got a credit.

Touchdowns by Jerry. Last week, while one brother was playing at Williams and another at Yale, young Jerry was having a field day. Dad and seven other Conways (including Tommy) watched him break loose on a 50-yard touchdown run against Nichols School. That wasn't all: three times more he carried the ball across the goal line, as University School won, 32-0. A long-jointed broken field runner who used his blockers well, Jerry has scored 17 touchdowns this season, to lead all of the Cleveland area schoolboys. In the family, he is regarded as the best of all the Conways. He will head for Yale next year.

Says Jerry: "Dad doesn't insist we all must be world beaters. The only thing he lays on the line without any ifs is we've got to play hard. And he lets us know that if our marks fall we're out of football. None of us could stand that."

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