St Edwards University - Tower Yearbook (Austin, TX)

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4 ST. EDWARD’S ECHO | lege was baseball. We played some football by way of a | change; a hybrid sort of affair, partly Rugby and partly the game as played today, and it excited but a languid f) interest. With baseball it was entirely different. Almost every student played and was the member of some team or ' other. In those days there was no athletic council, no athletic director or coach, and as for dietine—if we got | hold of some corned beef and cabbage, or pork and beans, we felt fully equipped to tackle any team that had the temerity to meet us. We bought our own bats and balls and suits; and the College authorities did not, and were not expected to contribute to the upkeep of the team. They lent us their enthusiastic moral support. The banner team of those years was composed of Krause and Long for the battery; Emil Coombs on first; Mark Tinsley on second; Pat Smith on third; Joe Byrne - at short; with Raggio, Malloy, and McCarty in the field. We went into training in September and did not come out until the closing exercises in June. Krause, our slabs- man, was a husky German. His gifts as a ball player were gratuitously bestowed on him by nature, and he was entitled to no credit whatever. He knew practically | nothing of the trick of throwing a curve ball, but his speed was terrific, and his endurance without limit. He | was afflicted with labor-phobia of both mental and phys- | ical variety, and was never known to practice, or in fact, do anything else he could avoid; and it was quite the usual thing that he had to be hunted up and dragged on the field just before the game started. We made no ex- tended journeys to meet opposing teams in those days. The limit of our faring was the City of Austin, where we met the best material to be found there. T recall the names of some of the boys who attended the College about the time when Father Hurth was president. Frank Crain and Tobe Wood, now prominent attorneys of Victoria; Dave Shawl, Frank Hervey, Santos Benavi- des of Laredo; Will Hicks and Pat Coombs of Browns- ville, Arthur and Will McAtee of Houston, John Spell- » % 7 i ys man, Jim Whelan, Gus Brass, John Flanagan, Langdon Harris, George Signaigo, now a prominent merchant of Dallas. The College always maintained a corps of able, scho- larly teachers, who were a credit to themselves as well as the institution in which they worked. Brother Kil- lian was the teacher of mathematics, bookkeeping and penmanship. He would tolerate no foolishness in the class room; he had a dour and crusty manner; but those who did their work conscientiously and tried to meet the requirements of their studies soon discovered that his seeming grouchiness was only a cloak to cover a sym- pathetic and kindly disposition. In addition to being well qualified as a preceptor in mathematics and pen- manship he was—and this appealed more strongly to me—a wonderfully fine field shot, and I had with him many enjoyable tramps after quail and doves. Brother Stanislaus, among other classes, taught rhe- toric and shorthand. Using the Isaac Pittman system as a basis he made many useful and helpful changes and abbreviations, until the result might almost as well have been called the Stanislaus as the Pittman. His method of teaching was one of moral suasion, rather than of foree, and was eminently successful. Being guileless himself, he suspected no wrong-doing or evil intention in others, and the boy who failed to make progress under his tutelage, and who did not improve morally as well as mentally by association with him, was indeed beyond hope. He took great pride in his old students, and was constantly referring to some one or other of them who had attained prominence in the world. Some of the other instructors whom I recall were Fa- ther Schier, who served as President for a short time, and for a longer period as Vice-President. Mr. Black and Mr. Pinnell were seminarians who were afterwards ordained. Father Olmert taught Christian doctrine and German. One of his favorite indoor sports was the writing of Ger- man poetry, which it fell to my lot to recite at several of the commencement exercises. Apparently St. Edward’s once had a tennis team. Does any- one know who the men are and in what year the picture was taken? SS EES

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48 g¢ ST. EDWARD'S ECHO 4 VOLUME VII APRIL, 1926 NUMBER 7 Early Days at St. Edward’s By Joe P. Byrne, ’91 I have been flattered by a request to write a short sketch of events that transpired within my memory and ken during the infaney of St. Edward’s. Be it under- stood at the outset, however, that I possess no medals won in memory contests; nor have I any great amount of patience with those persons of a meticulous turn, who are constantly catching you up on this slight omission or that inept or unguarded stateinent. My earliest recollections of St. Edward’s go back to about 1878, at a time when it was not even an academy, being merely a day-school, the entire membership con- sisting of Bib Stovall, Felix Smith, Ed and Joe Johnson, and four members of the tribe of Byrne. The prefect of discipline, athletic director, preceptor in reading, writ- ing, and arithmetic, as well as President of the school, was the Rev. Father DeMurrs, a pious and kindly old French priest, with a disposition entirely too mild to cope with the bunch of young savages who fell under his charge. Those were stirring days in Texas, and the deeds of Frank and Jesse James, Cole Younger and Sam Bass had a much stronger appeal for the average boy than had the accomplishments of Noah Webster, or Sam Johnson, and truth compels the statement that the bunch attending Father DeMurrs’ class was not above the average. It would be flattery to give them even such a high grade. If that good old priest is not at present wearing an cter- nal crown, it is certainly due to no lack of effort on the part of his pupils. A short while after the advent of Father DeMurrs, Father Shea came, and relieved him of the burden of the class-room. Father Shea’s tenure was a brief year, or perhaps two would cover the period of his stay at the school. The location of the school at that time, and for several years thereafter was at the farm. Father Shea was re- placed by Father Robinson, a scholarly man of magnet- ic and lovable personality. By this time, about 1880 or 1881, the school had grown to the estate of an academy. Several frame buildings were erected, and facilities in- stalled for accommodating boaders, and the foundation laid for the flourishing University of today. The student body, exclusive of day students, numbered something like twelve or fifteen. The names of those I now recall are Hamilton and Walter Reilly, Tom and Ed Smith, Charles Clappert, John Wolf, Jerry Sheehan, Hugh Haynie, Neal Begley, Pete Baker and John Byrne. It was not so many years prior to that time that the Tndians made an attack on Baker’s people in San Saba I feel safe in the statement that the Indians would have earned the County, and killed ov wounded his sister. undying gratitude of Father Robinson if they had scalped Pete and about eight or ten of his fellow students before they lrad been wished off on him. In those days, and for many years subsequent, it was considered the right and proper thing, when a boy was too hard-boiled for any other school, to send him to a Catholic institution. Let it not for a moment be inferred that that was the reason for the presence at St. Hdward’s of the devoted ecieven set out above. Brother Max was prefect of discipline during the presi- dency, or part of it, of Father Robinson. He was a sim- ple, goodhearted old soul, a farmer by training and pro- fession, and as ill-fitted to fill the position to which he was called as it is possible to imagine. As a side-line he planted a vegetable garden, and among other things that seemed to thrive therein to an astonishing degree was a patch of carrots, in which he took great pride. Some one of the students, with more time on his hands than he needed for his lessons, in a spirit of boyish lev- ity, loosened one of the pickets, so that an old sow and a bunch of shoats got in, and when they retired the car- rots went with them. Brother Max, being unequal to his task, was relieved of his duties as prefect by Brother Sixtus. The boys then discovered how foolish they had been, and what a mis- take it had been to force Brother Max to quit; for Bro- ther Sixtus would take no nonsense from them, and he made them understand that the office of prefect of dis- cipline was not instituted for their amusement. During this time I was an attendant at the school as a day stu- dent, along with Jeff Todd, Jim Brodie, Brooks Blocker and my brother, Bernard, our home being about a mile east of the school. My parents removed to the City in 1883 and I lost touch with the College for several years. When we returned to the country the College had moved to its present site, and splendid stone buildings had replaced the wooden ones which served at the farm. I resumed attendance in 1889 and continued till the end of June 1891. During most of that time Father (afterwards Bishop) Hurth was Presi- dent. He was a man of splendid executive ability and the College made wonderful progress under his guidance. The main, in fact practically the only, sport at the Col-

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50 Before the administration building’s embers were cool a crew began to rebuild the structure, and by the fall of 1903 it was restored. Nineteen years later, in 1922, it was damaged by flying debris hurled by a tornado that splintered a nearby dormitory, obliter- ated a gymnasium, leveled the school’s power plant, and made a ruin of its “natatorium,” one of the few indoor swimming pools in the state. Students resumed classes in Old Main the next day. It was at this time that St. Edward’s enjoyed its brief fling with the glories of college football with At the right the walls of the Main Building are being reconstructed around the main entrance, the back stairwell, and the northwest stone col- umn, the only parts of the original admin- istration building salvageable after the fire. All the walls that the picture on page 47 shows still stand- ing immediately after the fire had to be torn down before reconstruction could begin. Notice that a second front entrance east of the present one was lost in rebuilding Old Main. Above is Holy Cross Hall after the 1922 tornado. which her flashier northern sister would become so closely identified. In the 20s St. Ed’s licked Baylor, Rice, Tulsa, Louisiana, and Tennessee in football. The coach was Jack Meagher, hand-picked by Knute Rockne to coach the St. Edward’s Saints. Rockne had been to the St. Edward’s campus in 1920 to head a coaches clinic and he recommended Meagher, one of his former Fighting Irishmen, to train the team. St. Edward’s College, which was to advertise itself proudly later in the decade as “The Notre Dame of the Southwest,” had launched the 1920s with a patchwork schedule and a former Carlisle all- American as coach. Capt. W. J. Gardner was hired off the foothbal staff of the University of North Dakota in th summer of 1920 to direct the gridiron fortunes of St Edward’s. With Gary Lacy the quarterback and star of the team, Gardner guided his first and as it turned ow only club to a 7-2 season. The Saints launched the campaign with a 4-0 win over Austin High. St Edward’s drubbed West Texas Military Academy 88-0, but fell to San Marcos Baptist Academy and the San Antonio Knights of Columbus. High point of the season was a 24-14 victory over Dallas University. The Statesman reported in its, edition of Sunday, Noy. 21, 1920: “Playing a brand of football that is seldom |. equalled by teams of academy standing, the St. Edward’s College aggregation dressed the Dallas University squad down to the tune of 24 to 14 ina. lively contest at Clark Field Saturday afternoon.” For reasons not widely publicized, possibly because a Notre Dame alumnus became available, Gardner did not return for the following season and Meagher took over as “Physical director and coach in all branches.” Meagher directed his first of eight St. Edward’s teams to a 3-4-1 season, then came back with an 8-2 club in 1922. In 1923, the school hit its football peak for the decade. The Saints skipped through an 8-0 season that included surprise wins over Phillips University of Enid, Oklahoma, and Tulsa University.