During football's first one hundred years, fans going to away games often traveled by special trains to the destination city and back. That was the case in 1930 when Loyola Chicago's football fans made plans to entrain for a Friday night game at St. Lous U.
Loyola Chicago and SLU were among the dozen Catholic universities in the Midwest whose fans, including most campus priests, hoped they could recreate the magic captured by Notre Dame and Knute Rockne, then in his last season in South Bend. Instead, most schools played something approximating today's G5 or FCS levels, with half their games against one another, the rest with schools whose alums had more challenging paths to heaven.
The Loyola Chicago Ramblers, led by first-year coach and dentist Dr. Ed Norton, had a 2-3 record entering the SLU game with wins over Carroll and Coe.
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