Interesting photo p/u - May 24th 1944 Fire

[CarltonHendricks]

Every memento burned up, from Hobey Baker 1914’s hockey stick to the round football from the Yale-Princeton game in 1873. Also lost were 14 athletic murals that a noted artist had spent two-and-a-half years painting and a 2,500-volume library of sports and medicine, assembled over a lifetime by a retired staff member.





http://paw.princeton.edu/issues/2014...that-was-then/
Picked up this interesting 1935 photo today of the Princeton Trophy Room...which burned down on May 24, 1944...So it's a rare glimps of these murals which were destroyed in the fire. I was about an hour from Princeton last summer of 2013 and was considering driving there to see their trophy room...but when I read it burned in 1944 there was no need

[Jay Wolt]

Never knew it existed & then to read it was destroyed 70 years ago, what a shame!

[canjond]

Pretty funny that a "Yale" man has tripped during the handoff!

[CarltonHendricks]

http://paw.princeton.edu/issues/2014/07/09/sections/letters/9240/index.xml
Wow what a loss that fire was…I don’t know of any sports murals like these from that era, anywhere in the world. According to the story below taken from the January 8th 1932 Princeton Alumni Weekly the plans called for a space of 120 feet by 14 feet…and it makes mention of a border. Just eyeballing the photo…based on relation to the size of the doors…I’d say the borders were about a foot wide…and the murals look around 10 feet tall. Very interesting is a July 9th 2014 letter from a 1946 Princeton grad, Bernard Ryan Jr., who gives his first hand recollection of the fire, see link above

It’s interesting the artist made changes recommended by the captains and coaches of the sports “In a number of cases specific changes of form and technique were recommended by the captains and coaches were adopted by Mr. Yarrow.”





http://paw.princeton.edu/issues/2014...that-was-then/
And the murals weren’t the only things lost…the May 14th 2014 Princeton Alumni Weekly story, link above, mentions a “round football from the Yale-Princeton game in 1873”…I wrote about how football evolved from soccer to rugby to American football in this link from when I toured the Yale trophy room in 2011…and the ball I featured was from the 1876 Yale Princeton game…but the round 1873 ball mentioned was from when the soccer style game was being played…What an incredible impossible to replace artifact of American football to be lost forever!!! Above is a photo of the 1875 Princeton team in which the round ball featured in the front would have been the same type that was destroyed in the fire.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobey_Baker
And the 1914 Hobey Baker hockey stick was another unreplaceable link to Princeton’s past…I looked up Hobey Baker who I knew nothing about and he was an institution…died in WW1 testing out a bomber plane…see wiki link above…