Netters:
Though it has no direct connection with our sport, I thought some of
you might enjoy the recent resurrection of one of NJ's oldest (and funniest)
sports legends. Its (fictional) setting is a town very much involved in our
state HS track history: Plainfield, home of Milton Campbell and John
Marshall, among others.
Ithappened back in the 1930s. a New York stockbroker, who was a
fervent follower of college football scores, got hooked on the name Slippery
Rock State Teachers, which, despite the unusual name, is, of course, an
actual school in western Pennsylvania.
He asked a friend how these scores got into the columns of the NY
Times and NY Herald-Tribune/ (Being a stockbroker, he paid little attention
to the other five or six papers in NYC at that time) Did they send reporters
to al; these games. No, he was told, somebody called them in. Thus was born
the short-lived Plainfield Teahcre sCollege
The next week, Neubauer called in a score, naturally a winning one,
to the Tribune. When it was accepted there, he then called the Times and,
when he opened his Sunday papers, there was the score in both
This led to a six-week odyssey which saw Plainfield knock off one
team after another. After a week or two, scores were not enough. he invented
a coach, naturally with the nickname "Pop." He created a Chinese running
back, sending in a photo of his laundryman's son. And, when asked one week
for a lineup, he quickly came up with 11 names, using relative's monickers
for most of them.
It was all too much. A Tribune reporter decided to inveastigate this
previously unheard-of college. It was, after all just a short trip from NYC
on the Jersey Central, He discovered, of course, that no one in Plainfield
had ever heard of the school. (New Jersey then had teachers colleges in
Jersey City, Newark, Montclair and Trenton, none of them fielding football
teams since their student bodies were largely female.)
The Tribune took it in good humor, reporting the hoax. The Timies simply
ignored the whole thing as if it had never happened.
I was also a close follower of the football results at that time and
can dimly recalled the Plainfield results appearing in the Tribune (Since
the Times had no comic strips, I never saw it.)
Ed Grant
.
