About this time I began to realize that Billy McGibbon had given me a correct line on Charlie de Saulles and Billy Dibble.  These two players worked wonderfully well together, and were an effective scoring machine with the assistance of Doc MacNider and Dave Davis.

During these days at Lawrenceville Owen Johnson gathered the material for those interesting stories in which he used his old schoolmates for the characters.  The thin disguise of Doc Macnooder does not, however, conceal Doc MacNider from his old schoolboy friends.  The same is true of the slightly changed names of Garry Cochran, Turk Righter, Charlie de Saulles and Billy Dibble.

Charlie de Saulles, after graduation, went to Yale and continued his wonderful, spectacular career on the gridiron.  We will spend an afternoon with him on the Yale field later.

Billy Dibble went to Williams and played a marvelous game until he was injured, early in his freshman year.  It was during those days that I met Garry Cochran, Sport Armstrong and other Princeton coaches for the first time.  They used to come over to assist in coaching our team.  Our regular coaches at Lawrenceville were Walter B. Street, who had been a famous football star years before at Williams, and William J. George, renowned in Princeton’s football history as a center-rush.  I cannot praise the work of these men too highly.  They were thoroughbreds in every sense of the word.

It was one of the old traditions of Lawrenceville football to have a game every year with Pennington Seminary.  What man is there who attended either school who does not recall the spirit of those old-time contests?

The Hill School was another of our football rivals.  The trip to Pottstown, Pa., was an event eagerly looked forward to—­so also was the Hill School’s return game at Lawrenceville.  The rivalry between the two schools was keen.

Everything possible was done at the Hill School to make our visit a pleasant one.  The score of 28 to 0, by which Lawrenceville won the game that year, made it especially pleasant.

As I recall that trip, two men stand out in my memory.  One was John Meigs, the Head Master.  The other was Mike Sweeney, the Trainer and Athletic Director.  They were the two central figures of Hill School traditions.

Interest in football was emphasized at that time by the approaching game with Andover at Lawrenceville.  This was the first time that these two teams had ever played.  Andover was probably more renowned in football annals than any school Lawrenceville had played up to this time.  The Lawrenceville coaches realized that the game would be a strenuous one.  After a conference, the two coaches decided that it would be wise to see Andover play at Andover the week before we were to play them.  Accordingly, Mr. George went to Andover, and when he returned, he gathered the team around him in one of the recitation halls and described carefully the offense and defense of our coming opponents.  He also demonstrated with checkers what each man did in every play and placed emphasis on the work of Eddie Holt, who was acting captain of the Andover team.  To represent Holt’s giant build he placed one checker on top of another, saying, as I remember, with great seriousness: