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64 FALL 2011 . S T. LAWRENCE UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE
F R O M T H E VA N C E A R C H I V E S
Football game programs aren’t what they used to be, as this
one from the November 8, 1941, home game against Clark-
son attests. Two big diferences: Clarkson hasn’t felded a
football team in years; and the program, a 24-page “Ofcial Foot-
ball Magazine,” cost a dime.
Certain content would not appear today, for example the essays
“Ofcials Are Not as Dumb as Tey Look,” and “Campus Fash-
ions for 1941” (“For the short or chubby girl, high fashion this
season ofers the waistcoat and the vest.”).
And then there are the advertisements, which bespeak an era
long gone, a month before Pearl Harbor. Ads for a steam laun-
dry and two coal companies surround a full-color centerfold—the
only color inside the program—for Chesterfeld cigarettes (“Tey
Satisfy”), over which are printed the team rosters. Local business
ads present an eclectic array of phone numbers, from a single digit
(“7” for Newman’s Dry Goods Store) to random combinations of
letters and numbers (“10-F-13” for Sykes Farms Dairy.)
Along more serious lines, the program contains a moving tribute
to John A. Burger ’40, a football player who died in a 1941 na-
val training accident. A year-by-year history of the SLU-Clarkson
football rivalry indicates that it began in 1899 and that going into
the 1941 tilt “the Larries” led the series, 14-9-2.
Were these “the good old days”?
—NSB