Historic Hood River
1910 Football Squad
10-6-2021
Notes
Here’s a nice seasonal image to get you thinking about autumn. This is a page from the Arline Moore photo album which we believe she put together in the 1940s or 50s. Presumably Max Moore was on the team, but i don’t see him here. Perhaps he took the picture.
Note the simple goalpost and those “nose protectors” hanging around some of their necks which seem uniquely designed to break facial bones while protecting the nose.
L.E.
Walter Camp of Yale, known as the Father of American Football, sort of invented this game around 1880. Professional football was established in 1920 so it seems Hood River was right in the early mix of getting a football program established.
Without TV, you wonder how these kids were able to get a concept of how the game was played.
Buck Parker
It seem likely that there were a lot of local variations on the rules in those days.
ArthurB
Yes Buck, like my rule that if you hit the uprights on a field goal you get 5 points instead of 3.
But in all seriousness, this was a time of evolution for football. The forward pass had recently been introduced because there were so many fatalities in college games. They wanted to make it less of a rugby scrum. I think they also changed the field dimensions for the same reason.
Jeffrey W Bryant
Too bad the picture doesn’t list the players or school. Assuming this is Hood River, the Class of 1910 included the following boys: Herbert Phillips, Ray Nicholson, John Copper, Sherman Buck, Steve Eby, Merrill Gessling, Roger Moe, Harry Clapp, Walter Kresse, Will Cass, and Chester Huggins. The Class of 1911 included: Donald Onthank, Fred Bell, Forrest Moe, Wyeth Allen, Lynn Young, Earle Spaulding, and Lester Murphy.
ArthurB
Jeffrey, I’m not sure this is a school team. Max Moore wasn’t a student at this time, and the album shows there were active Heights and Downtown baseball teams at the time. I think this was an adult intramural squad.