Rowing and Track Athletics (extract)

The Organization of the Clubs 263 championship and won out. The Merion men repeated the beating in 1885 and 1886, and finally the old Olympic Club, recognizing that discretion was the better part of valor, absorbed the new organization and elected Mr. Harrison, who was at the head of it, president of the combined or– ganization. With the coalition of these two clubs and the appearance in the following year of Victor H. Schifferstein, the sprinter and jumper, and quite the most unusual athlete that the far West had yet produced, a new and lively interest in track athletics spread along the coast. Small clubs began to spring up, and although they were destined to give way eventually to the growing interest in college athletics, Berkeley was still an infant and Stanford yet unborn, and the time far distant when a team of undergraduates from the coast should contest with the college teams of the East, and when California collegians should be winners at Mott Haven. Oregon and Wash– ington followed California, and there were pres– ently cinder paths at Seattle and Portland, and plenty of good men to run on them. Of the clubs of the far Northwest the Multonomah of Portland was and is the be t-known and strong– est. Owing, doubtless, to the fact that social lines are less rigidly determined in that part of the country, the coast athletic clubs have pre– served this prestige more successfully than those