Santa Ana High School - Ariel Yearbook (Santa Ana, CA)

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THE ARIEL ' Gther fellows have done it. I can, said Andy quietly. But he waited, slightly undecided. That night there was an editorial in the Daily Palo Alto. It deplored the fact that there were sinewy, raw-boned freshmen who were not out helping the team. It appealed to class spirit and pointed a linger of scorn. In his mind Andy knew he was going to play, but he didn't confess it to himself. Then he sat another night on the bleachers. Not a whole prac- tice through. He could not. Many a time in Encina strenuous strain has nigh broke a heart string and the man who slept in the other bed knew nothing of it. Andy had threshed it out in the granary of his imagination while the moonbeams cast bright spots on the couch and floor. The father was no man of dreams and his passion was strong and hard. Rupture was certain to fol- low in the path of the son's heedlessness of parental convictions, and there would be trouble terrific. It would be terrific because Andy had all the devotion that a son may have for a father who has been at the same time friend and mighty good ideal. The father had harbored for half a decade the hope that his son might be a college man. The son was determined that there should be no college unless he took the most active and heaviest part of those things there going on that his physique and talents made possible. He relied on the future to square the parental dissatisfaction. But he had other things to contend against. There was money, and more than money was the imminent flunk. Here was the tangle and the Hail threshed trip-hammer fashion, but it threshed out. True that the danger was great, but freshman-like, he realized not its full significance. Youth is hopeful. Andy crawled quietly out of his bed and upon the cold stone of the window. He looked out over the oval in the moonlight as many another Encina man has done. He heard not the songs coming from way downe the Mayfield road. His eyes did not seek the glimmering light in a top floor on the Row. The bleachers loomed like a terraced multitude and in his imagination Andy huddled in shame-faced humiliation while the ball was being kicked around the field. This picture he seemed to see and his lips grew thin, his brain clearer. Then he went back to bed and to sleep. Andy had threshed the matter out. He had decided. The next day the football manager had a call from the big fresh- man. Likely material, the manager thought and gave him the best fit he had, a couple of last year's shoes, a pair of stockings with holes, a jer- sey that had served for a giant. But Andy did not mind misfits.

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T H E A R l E L That night he wrote his father a plain, curt letter, not impertinent but straightforward. He said that he intended to play football. 'KI have to play in order to feel right. If you were in my place you would play too, he wrote. He knew what the answer would be. Andy was in his room in Encina when a telegram was brought in. It read: Do not play football. None of it. I mean it? Andy read this to his room mate, Horace Healey, who was a junior in college. That ends it, I suppose, freshman, said Horace. Not by a long jump. I am going to play or quit college, was the response. 'iAre you crazy, freshman? How are you going to get along? It's not Worth the fight. Healey had come to college when there was an exceptionally large number of candidates for the freshman team. He had been dealt out a suit and a pair of shoes that were worn and torn and three sizes too large for him. He had to go against the system for trying out new men then in vogue. For over four weeks Healey went faithfully out to the side lines. He saw the same men called into line each night while he had not the slightest chance to show what there was in him. He saw a fra- ternity brother of the captain shoved in for tackle, a man Healey had out- played in a dozen different prep. school games. Then he turned in his baggy suit and dilapidated football shoes. Since then he had not been very strenuous in urging anyone to do athletics, especially if at a cost. By disposition, anyhow, he was what at college is known as a saur bawlf' Why, hang it, freshman, you don't know what there is in store for you. The old man means what he says and you can't expect to be half the college man you want to be if you have to put in all your time hashing and scrubbing windows. An athlete has a fierce time getting along here anyhow. The prof who yells the loudest the day of the game will soak you the hardest in his exes, and try to find liaws in your work so that he can stick you for an extra grind. Dugan in the engineering department looks like a good fellow, but wait till he gets wind of the fact that you are on the field. There will be special rules that you can't do surveying work any day but Saturdays. You will miss about half the preliminary games, and be lucky if you make the team. Then he will ring up the finale with a Hunk. I'd like to see you on the team. It would help you all through college, but a man cannot do everything. It is too much to risk-this working your way and athletics. A

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T H E A R I E L Then he sent a telegram to his father: I'm playing. He struck the Students' Employment Bureau for a job. The captain of the base- ball team heard about the resolution and handed him a job peeling potatoes in the basement of the Inn. That meant three hours of precious time a day, and all time is precious to a football man. It is not necessary to go into all the details of the next two months of Andy's life. He had hard things to do. Hard letters came to him and he had answers to write that came as near bringing tears to his eyes as anything could. Then there were hard things to be met on the campus. He lost his job at the Inn, he thought because he had no drag with the man who was then president of the club. Anyhow the man who took his place was a friend of the president and affiliated with him in one or two undergraduate organizations. Andy's room mate smiled and said, That is the way some people help an athlete out of a hole. But he was taken on at the Roble table. Miss Regan, the only girl he knew in the university, who was being rushed by two of the four sororities, seemed to be afraid that her old high school friend might rec- ognize her and when he leaned over her and ran off the bill of fare she did not seem to see him. Like many another freshman Miss Regan had failed to grasp Stanford ideals on her arrival beneath the Stanford arcades and like many another girl there came a time when she knew that many of the men of whom Stanford is proud slung hash for a liv- ing, and then she remembered her treatment of Andy with a quiver of conscience. Andy went into the freshman game at guard and played a strong game. Generally a man in the line has to play twice as hard as a back to receive bleacher and incidentally newspaper praise. But Andy played his game. The morning papers told how Stanford pulled a victory out of what was California's. There was a lot of how Smith went round the end for twenty yards, how a Sandow booted the pigskin over the tem- pestuous sea of struggling humanity to Higgins who fumbled, but the name of Andy Morton, right guard, was scarcely mentioned except when Harris of California went low into Morton for four yards, which Andy remembered with chagrin. i The Associated Press dispatches in the home paper, and later the San Francisco papers, were read by a Dr. Morton. There was a sigh of relief when he found no word concerning the death of his son Andy. In fact there was nothing to indicate that he had been carried off the field on a stretcher.