Category Archives: Sports History

Joseph Lynch and Williston Basketball

by Richard Teller '70, Archivist

March 27, 2015 Rick Teller '70 Leave a comment

Joseph Lynch '10 (1910 Log) — Joseph Lynch ’10 (1910 Log)

This is presented as an addendum to Doug Stark’s article on the History of Williston Basketball. Without question, our first “great” player was Joe Lynch, class of 1910, who was inducted into the Williston Northampton Athletic Hall of Fame on June 7, 2014. These remarks were delivered at that event.

I’m here to present Joseph Lynch, Williston Seminary class of 1910, for the Athletic Hall of Fame. Joe was an Irish kid from Holyoke, who attended Holyoke High School before enrolling in the Middle Class — what we would now call the 10th grade — at Williston. Other than that, we don’t know much about him. I’d like to say that he presented the prep school ideal of the scholar-athlete, but I’m afraid that his grades don’t bear that out. The archives actually have a paper that he wrote, about the financier Edward Harriman, that is reasonably literate and shows some insight. Other than that, there’s not much. His 1910 classmates elected him “Best Athlete,” as well as “Merriest,” “Biggest Rough-Houser,” and “Biggest Bluffer.” His yearbook notes that he was “a lover of nature,” and a member of the F. C. Fraternity, about which we know little, and something called the Vigilance Committee, about which our ignorance is probably a blessing.

Joseph Lynch excelled in sports. He played right guard on an intramural football team, but he was in his element in baseball and basketball. Joe was the first baseman on the Williston Nine for three reasonably successful years — although interestingly, Holy Cross turned him into a pitcher. And there is a suggestion that he struck out more often than his friends and teammates might have liked.

But in basketball, Joe Lynch was unstoppable. Standing six-foot-one, towering over his teammates in an era when kids were simply shorter than today, he was an ideal center. His long arms and quick feet made him a defensive monster. And he was a scoring machine. Over his career, he scored 394 points in 28 games. Before you exclaim, “but that’s nothing!”, remember that the game of basketball, invented only 17 years before Lynch arrived at Williston, was very different. Dribbling, for example, was rare; players moved the ball primarily by passing. Players thus tended to spread out more, playing what we would now call zones. Most shots came from a distance, so scores were lower — and of course, the three-point shot hadn’t even been dreamt of. Foul shots were rare, and the free-throw line was 20 feet from the basket. Even the metal hoop and net, which replaced a bottomless peach basket, had been introduced only as recently as 1906. Continue reading →

Posted in: Alumni & Alumnae, Sports History, Williston Seminary

Curveball

May 9, 2014 Rick Teller '70 2 Comments

The curveball was introduced to baseball in the early 1870s, and changed the face of the game. Pitchers, for the first time, threw strikes that moved across the plate and down, curving away from right-handed batters, frequently baffling hitters. But were the first curveballs thrown in a high school game thrown at Williston?

It’s a good story, related by none other than legendary Philadelphia Athletics manager Connie Mack. In his My 66 Years in the Big Leagues (Philadelphia: Winston, 1950), Mack recalls, “The first man to pitch a curve-ball game was Charles Hammond Avery, Yale 1871-75, popularly called Ham Avery, and the first curve-pitched college game was played between Yale and Harvard at Saratoga, New York, June 14, 1874, the week of the college boat races. Avery pitched for Yale and won by the score of 4-0, the first shutout ever scored against Harvard.”

Mack cites as his source of information his lifelong friend, Frank Blair, Williston Seminary class of 1876, Amherst 1880. The two had grown up together in North Brookfield, Mass. Mack continues, “In his first year at Williston Academy [sic], in 1873, one of Blair’s chums was Charles Francis Carter, a left fielder who went to Yale in 1874, and the following year played on Avery’s famous Yale team. Stories began to drift back to Williston that Avery was a wonder, for he had introduced something new into baseball—a curve ball that was puzzling batters and was proving very difficult to hit.”

“One day in 1876 Blair was examining the condition of the diamond on the [Williston] campus. He spied Carter coming up the street from the station. Carter spotted Blair at the same moment, and vaulting the fence, shouted to him, ‘I can pitch curves! Avery taught me!'”

“With that, Carter took a baseball from his pocket, laid aside his overcoat, and began to show [Blair] how the mystery was performed. Carter, having passed on the instructions to Blair, picked up his overcoat and started for the train back to New Haven. He had seemingly accomplished his mission! Blair was eager to pass on the secret to the Williston pitcher. The result? Williston [Seminary] placed on the diamond the first curve pitcher used in any prep school in the United States.” Continue reading →

Posted in: Memoirs, Sports History, Williston Seminary

Critical Mass

By Wentworth Durgin '68

December 12, 2013 Rick Teller '70 2 Comments

Most recently Worthy Durgin headed community foundations in Greensboro and Cary, North Carolina. Now retired, he is “immersed in spiritual quest and writing.” A couple of years back, he sent Richard Gregory several perceptive vignettes of Williston life back in the sixties. Dick, who has contributed several memoirs of his own, shared Worthy’s words with the Archives. My thanks for Worth’s permission to publish this! — RT

The old gym was an outgrown, but proud building. The basketball court was directly above the swimming pool. During wrestling matches, when our senior heavyweight wrestler, who was deaf, wrestled, all the students there would jump and stomp in cadence so that he could feel our support, since he could not hear our cheers. The void of the pool beneath the floor amplified the waves of exhortation. (The common effect of this cacaphony, coupled with the knowledge that if this strong guy could not hear the cheers, he likely could not hear a potential injury-saving whistle either, led to many an expression of relief on opposing wrestlers’ faces, once they had been pinned.) Often this was the deciding match in a meet. But we could never carry the big guy off the mat on our shoulders — he was huge, and flaunting victory was not his style.

Continue reading →

Posted in: Alumni & Alumnae, Guest Bloggers, Memoirs, Sports History, Student Life, Williston Academy

Track and the Camera

May 16, 2013 Rick Teller '70 2 Comments

Photo by Rachel Deena ’13. Click images to enlarge.

Preparation for the inauguration of the Williston Northampton Athletic Hall of Fame — whose first class will be enshrined on Reunion Weekend, June 6-8 — has involved looking at a great many photographs. I hadn’t thought about this much before, but it has recently occurred to me that some sports are more photogenic than others. Before I sink my own ship by suggesting that, for example, all field hockey photos look the same (they don’t!), or that golf images tend to be ruined by golfer’s outfits (can I get back to you?), let me go out on a limb and suggest that one of the sports that has produced an awful lot of really exciting photography over the years at Williston is Track and Field.

Golf, late 1930s. Those checked trousers and two-tone shoes have never gone out of style. (William Rittase)

There are undoubtedly reasons for this, some of which, truthfully, may reflect this writer’s prejudices. I mean, preferences. So we won’t delve too deeply into the psycho-sociological issues of why, for example, from the photographer’s point of view, helmets and sticks can both be dealt with, but not usually at the same time.

OK, let’s be serious. Is it that track and field athletes, perhaps more than any others, achieve pinnacles of effort and passion that are concentrated in the briefest of durations, perhaps a few seconds, perhaps even less? Yes, this happens in other sports, but I submit — without meaning to diminish any athlete’s accomplishment — that most of the time the brilliant goal-out-of-nowhere, the impossible catch, is reactive. For the track and field athlete, successful execution is entirely studied. And the great jump, the winning acceleration derives from someplace deep within the athlete’s psyche, a place where the soul is quite alone, where all that remains is abandonment to the moment.

Or perhaps this is nonsense. But the camera has captured some extraordinary track and field moments. The older images on this page are the work of William Rittase (1894-1968), a Philadelphia-based photographer who specialized in industrial images, but who did some very special catalog work at both Williston and Northampton School in the 1930s and ’40s. His photos are even more remarkable when one considers that he favored a large-format camera that was not conducive to “action” photography at all.

As many are aware, there is a photographic tradition at Williston Northampton. Bob Couch ’50 mentored student photographers beginning in the 1960s and began to teach photo courses in the ’70s. That program is now in the capable hands of Edward Hing ’77, himself a Couch protégé. We offer seven different photography and film courses plus evening lecture programs that bring world-class photographers and photojournalists to campus. And wherever one looks on campus, there are talented kids with cameras looking back. We’re proud to feature some of their work here as well.