Silhouette

An old gentleman named Francis Woodman has a pleasant routine three days of every week. He comes from his home in Jamaica Plain, and walks slowly from the Yard to Soldiers Field, admiring the changes that time has imprinted on the undergraduate and the view. For Mr. Woodman was a Senior here when Saturday football games were played on Jarvis Field and the best rooms were in Grays and Matthews. Many years have passed since 1888, and now he has come back after retirement to watch football practices, attend Sunday chapel, and at least partially relive the unworried college days of the gay, mustachioed Eighties.

Woodman makes a point of keeping posted on what is currently happening at Harvard, but he still loves to talk of the old days. "My profile used to be Greek," he says, "but now it's Roman. A Princeton man broke my nose." This accident happened not in malice, but in a football game; Woodman played tackle on the Varsity in 1887, and owns the distinction of having kicked twenty field goals in what was, at least quantitatively, Harvard's greatest victory, a 154-0 smearing of Exeter Academy. Captain of the Freshman crew, he decided to switch to football when his grandfather, who wielded the family stick, said he'd have to choose between the two. He remembers his crew days with the greatest of pleasure, and tells how once, when the crew was not rowing up to par, he let forth a yolley of curses at them. "I was one of those Puritanical, goody-goody Boston boys," he recounts, so the crew had never before heard him swear, and Charles Francis Adams, the stroke, turned around and said, "Damn it, Woody. How in Hell can we row if you swear?"

After Harvard, where he says he concentrated in "fun and football," Woodman worked as agent for an English publishing house for a few years, and then after a year's sojourn in Europe, went to teach at the Morristown School in New Jersey, where he held "not a chair, but a settee," and afterwards became headmaster. In 1905 he wrote to his Class Secretary, "We are living the simple life, and are trying to teach the rising generation how to live it. My experiences have all been concerned with the training of the American boy, a very fine species of a distinctly wild animal. Our menagerie is up on the hills just outside Morristown, N.J." In 1916 President Eliot advised him to carry on giving advice to parents, but for a consideration. "A very upright man," muses Woodman on Eliot. "Never leaned on anything or anyone." At all events, he set up private offices as a vocational adviser in New York, and stayed there until his retirement in 1941.

Woodman's chief interests nowadays are Harvard and football. He is contemplating a book on old-time football, and also hopes to publish various sketches and reminiscences of his life. About Harvard he is enthusiastic, and being broached on the subject, will tell you forcefully, "Harvard is in every way superior to what it was in the gay Eighties, and the student body seems much more earnest than in my days;" but he won't stay talking to you long, for there's plenty for a man to do in Cambridge these days.