Today's Tidbit... There Was No Joy in Yaleville
Harvard and Yale will play for the 141st time this Saturday, but this story concerns their 70th meeting, played in New Haven in 1953. Not everyone around the country could make it there for the game, so they made do wherever they lived.
The Yale and Harvard grads living in Chicagoland in 1953 traveled and read out-of-town newspapers, national magazines, and the alumni magazines of the day. Still, they would have hoped for some coverage of the upcoming Harvard-Yale game in the Chicago newspapers. Yet, a search of Chicago newspapers in the week leading up to the game turned up no preview articles about The Game, at least, until Saturday. That morning, the Chicago Tribune reported on Yale’s 33-13 win in the freshmen game and previewed the varsity match.
Harvard entered the game at 5-2, led by Single Wing tailback and hockey and baseball star Richard Clasby. Yale ran the T behind a line that averaged 206 pounds, earning a 5-1-2 record. The Chicago Tribune listed Yale as a 6-point favorite in the game, mainly because the Bulldogs beat Princeton 6-0 and Harvard lost to the Tigers 26-24.
In 1953, there was only one televised college football game most Saturdays, and that day’s pick was the USC-UCLA game, not the Harvard-Yale game.
However, if you were a Yale graduate living in the Chicago area in 1953, you could monitor the contest by joining other sons of Yale at the broadcast party hosted at the Saddle & Cycle Club on Chicago’s near north side. The club was an old school club founded during the original bicycle fad in 1895, located on Lake Michigan.
As the postcard invitation noted, the invitees included alumni, wives, and girlfriends, so it was an opportunity to reunite with old chums, meet new ones, and generally enjoy the most crucial game of the football season.
While many attendees mingled and enjoyed pregame snacks, the younger folks in the sporting set played a touch football game that kicked off at 11:00 Central. Lunch came at noon, with the game beginning at 12:30. Whether via shortwave or another arrangement, attendees listened to the game audio, feeling many of the same emotions as they had when sitting in the Yale Bowl.
Although the Harvard-Yale previews always bring a heavy dose of nostalgia, this contest was extra special because a pregame ceremony honored Pudge Heffelfinger for his induction into the National Football Foundation Hall of Fame as part of the inaugural class in 1951.
While most expected a tight game, things did not go well for Yale. A 20-yard Yale punt gave Harvard a short field in the second quarter, leading to their first score on a reverse from the 22. In the third quarter, Yale drove to Harvard’s 6-yard line, suggesting the tide had turned, but they hit a brick wall on two runs up the middle, took a sack, and then fumbled while attempting a fourth-down pass.
If you are the sort that believes in momentum, you would have thought the worm turned, since Harvard next took the ball 85 yards on the ground, capped by a 35-yard touchdown sprint to give themselves a 13-0 lead, which they maintained for the remainder of the game. Of course, that was not the outcome desired by the Yalies at the Saddle and Cycle Club.
The Harvard win in the 70th meeting with Yale gave the Crimson their first win in New Haven since 1940, and it also produced the first triple tie among Harvard, Yale, and Princeton since 1921. The following year, the three aligned with five other Eastern schools to form the Ivy League and played their first conference football season in 1956.
Postscript:
The story originally said the teams play in Fenway in 2025 rather than in 2026.
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The contrast betwen national coverage and local media blackout is facinating. In 1953, alums in Chicagoland relied on word of mouth and weekend papers while the game itself was happening in real time. It's a reminder of how geografically fragmented sports culture was back then, when even a rivalry as storied as Harvard-Yale could go unreported in major markets.