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CHAPTER 9: Thanksgiving 1939
- University of Arkansas Press
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CHAPTER 9 Thanksgiving 1939 Ringers and Ambition For Long Island University students and even the sports fans of Brooklyn, the days leading up to Thanksgiving Day 1939 were unusual. People were more excited about an upcoming LIU football game than they were about the beginning of basketball season.1 The basketball Blackbirds, still riding the emotional high of their 1939 NIT championship win the previous March over Loyola of Chicago, were preparing to open the season with a game against their alumni. The football Blackbirds, playing their first season on the gridiron following the elimination of the sport after the 1931 season, were taking a surprisingly good 5-2 record into their Thanksgiving Day game at Ebbets Field against Catholic University of Washington, D.C. Bee was the head coach of both teams, and he was the head coach of both football and basketball simultaneously. When basketball practice began in late October, Bee had the squad drill on outside playground courts at Manhattan Beach, where the football team practiced, so that he could keep his eye on both teams at once.2 Between games on that 141 Thanksgiving Day, he was to be honored at a banquet in the Hotel St. George.3 Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Brooklyn Borough president Raymond V. Ingersoll, Brooklyn Dodgers president Larry MacPhail, and Potsy Clark, coach of the professional Brooklyn Dodgers football team, were scheduled to attend.4 The Brooklyn Rotary Club and LIU alumni, sponsors of the event, were making every effort to ensure that the affair was a social happening that reflected the best of the borough. “Brooklyn debutantes and their escorts” were to be part of the ceremony honoring Bee, and the director of music at the hotel’s Bossert 61 Room in Brooklyn Heights was “working on several tunes “ he intended to perform at the affair. Bee and LIU sports were poised, as a headline in the Brooklyn Eagle proclaimed, to “go places.”5 Basketball had already achieved big-time status, and Bee was now harboring ambitions to move his fledgling football program into the commercialized mainstream of American intercollegiate sports. If there is a single day that encapsulates how athletically versatile Bee was, how determined he was to win at any cost, and what he meant to the university, it was Thanksgiving Day 1939. Except for his work as a writer, all the key elements of Bee’s life, the good and the bad, were on display that day in Brooklyn. In the 1998 updated version of Bee’s first Chip Hilton book, Touchdown Pass, his daughter, Cynthia Bee Farley, and her husband, Randy Farley, coeditors of the re-released series, made a significant change to the tenth question in Petey Jackson’s “Sports Quiz.” In the 1948 original, Bee had Petey Jackson, master soda jerk at the Valley Falls Sugar Bowl, list this as his final quiz question: “When was the spiral punt first used?”6 Fifty years later the question was changed to this: “Who coached football against Catholic University in the afternoon and then coached his basketball team that night in Madison Square Garden?”7 Chip’s Valley Falls High teammate Biggie Cohen became the quiz winner by correctly answering six of the ten questions . (The answer to the first spiral punt question, by the 142 Bee at Long Island University [3.87.133.69] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:01 GMT) way, was Moffatt of Princeton in 1881.) But Biggie got the answer to question ten wrong:“Coach Henry Rockwell! HA!”8 The correct answer is Clair Bee, although Biggie should receive at least partial credit because Henry Rockwell, coach of all sports at Valley Falls High, was Bee’s alter ego. The point, however, is that Bee would have been too clever a writer to have inserted himself so blatantly into his Chip Hilton story. The Farleys, on the other hand, thought of the updated versions of the Hilton series as an homage to Cynthia’s late father. Including a question about Bee’s dual role as football and basketball coach was calculated to show his versatility and to emphasize to a new audience of readers who likely had no knowledge of Bee’s coaching career just how accomplished he was. The updated stories, in other words, became as much about Chip’s creator as they were about Chip. But maybe that was always the case. Moreover, the football-basketball doubleheader cited in the more contemporary question happens to reference one of the most...