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POLITICAL NOTE: Yale’s Pudge

4 minute read
TIME

When Walter William Heffelfinger, son of a Minneapolis boot & shoe manufacturer, presented himself as a freshman at Yale in the fall of 1888, football coaches eyed him approvingly. His, they quickly saw, was the strapping physique to crash through any resistance to victory. Last week Walter William Heffelfinger prepared to present himself to the voters of Minneapolis as a candidate for Congress in the Fifth Minnesota District at a special election to succeed Representative Walter Hughes Newton, resigned. Time had changed the Heffelfinger physique but little. At Yale he had learned how to win. In Minneapolis he was confident of the election results.

Football in 1888 was largely a matter of brute force. Even the flying wedge and tandem formations had yet to make their approved appearance. Without open play, the ball started from the rush-line and went forward as far as the combined strength of the beefy rushers could carry it.

Nicknamed “Pudge,” hefty Heffelfinger that first year trotted out on the gridiron to do what the coaches expected of him. No empty-headed bruiser, he made a place for himself in the Varsity rush-line. (In those days there were no prissy eligibility rules; a man could play from his first to his last college year—and even after.) Sweating and grunting Rusher Heffelfinger helped to roll Yale over Princeton 10 to 0. The next year his team crushed Harvard and the third year overcame Princeton again.

But it was the fourth year (1891) that “Pudge” Heffelfinger made his name a Yale football tradition. The Spring before he had been graduated by Sheffield Scientific School. He was then 23 years old, weighed 204 pounds, was 6 ft. 2¾ in. tall and wore a size 10 shoe. His biceps measured 15â…“in. and he had an inflated chest expansion of 44 4/5 in. He had rowed on the Varsity crew, had been chosen his class president and its most popular member and had written a graduation thesis on the manufacture of boots & shoes.

As a “Postgraduate,” he went back into Yale’s rush-line and for that season became the darling of every Yale football enthusiast. With Rusher Heffelfinger at left of centre and Rusher Stanford Newel Morison (also of Minneapolis) at right of centre, that Yale team plowed a wide furrow through its adversaries from which grew a harvest of lasting football fame. Rushers Heffelfinger and Morison, though, had helpful teammates: John Augustus Hartwell (now a famed Manhattan surgeon) in the line; Thomas Lee McClung (onetime [1909-1912] Treasurer of the U. S.) and Vance Criswell McCormick (Democratic National Committee Chair-man in Wilson’s 1916 campaign) in the backfield. And on the substitutes’ bench sat Thomas Cochran (Morgan partner and Director of General Electric) and Ralph Delahay Paine (author of College Years, The Head Coach, The Stroke Oar, Campus Days, et al.).

Rusher Heffelfinger returned to Minneapolis where he set himself up in real estate and insurance, married, reared a family of two daughters and a son. When he was 59, he played in a Yale-Harvard alumni football game, the score of which was suppressed.

In Minnesota “Pudge” Heffelfinger turned, at first, to politics as an avocation.* He began by attending Republican National Conventions as a delegate first in 1904 to help nominate his friend Theodore Roosevelt, again in 1908 to nominate Taft and again in 1912 when he was made Assistant Sergeant-at-Arms. In 1924 he was chosen Hennepin County (Minneapolis) Commissioner, was re-elected in 1928.

For ten years Minneapolis was represented in the national House by Congressman Newton. President Hoover appointed Mr. Newton to his secretariat. The Newton resignation from the House was recently forwarded to Governor Theodore Christiansen of Minnesota. Minneapolis last week prepared to choose his successor.

In Washington, hopeful of Rusher Heffelfinger’s success at the polls, were his great and good Yale friends, Secretary of State Stimson (1888) and Republican House Leader Tilson (1891), who fondly recall that their college was founded for service “to Church and State.”

*His brother Frank heads F. H. Peavey & Co., world’s largest grain elevator system.

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