Today's Tidbit... Hanging Out With The Dummies

Some people enjoy hanging out with dummies, and others do not, but we should all remember that the boys at Harvard were the first football team to hang out with dummies. Amos Alonzo Stagg drilled his squad with a dummy when he was Yale's captain in 1892, but it appears that Harvard's captain, Arthur Cumnock, suspended a dummy in the air for the first time that season. Nowadays, tackling dummies are terrestrial objects, grounded, but early tackling dummies hung out, enjoying their air time.

Captains and coaches of the 1890s tried to simulate tackling by rigging up homemade frameworks from which they hung homemade dummies.

The 1896 version of the suspended tackling dummy. (‘Between the Goals,’ Waterloo Courier (IA), October 30, 1896)

The homemade versions stuck around for a while among those with shallow pockets. Still, Spalding commercialized the dummy business in 1899, offering cylindrical and human-shaped dummies and frameworks to hang them on.