Rowing and Track Athletics (extract)

Track Athletics ing tone of the institution, are sons of farmers– plain, industrious fellows, who are working their way through college, and who, at the time of the regatta, are swinging the scythe in the hay-fields or handling the compass and chain on the rail– road. Be ides, though they are poor, they are proud, and would regard it as beneath the dignity of a free-born Vermonter to expose their muscle in public, like gladiators in the amphitheatre, for Mrs. Morrisey and other high-born dames to bet on. If you will get up a contest in some honest and useful work, and will insure us against the intrusion of gamblers and blacklegs, we will en– gage to be 'represented.' Meanwhile, we must answer your petition as to why we were not repre– sented at Saratoga by pleading that we are too busy, too poor, and too proud." Sentiments such as these would have found an echo, we venture to say, in many of the smaller colleges of the Middle West during the seventies and eighties; but the new order of things had come to stay, and as the larger state universities grew in importance and popularity, and such institutions as Michigan and Wisconsin began to take on more of the frivoli– ties and social complexities of the East, athletics - and track athletics along with football and baseball- began to play an aggressive role in college life. The Middle West was about twenty years behind the East in beginning intercolle-