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The sports-page public of the U. S. knows by this time that Harvard's Barry Wood is tall (6 ft. 1 in.), slim (173 lb.), a Phi Beta Kappa. He has dark hair, dark eyes, looks like his father, a Harvard 1902 Boston cotton broker and Harvard trustee who likes squash, tennis, golf. Like many of Harvard's famed athletes—Ben and Bill Ticknor, Charlie Cunningham, recent Hallowells and Saltonstalls—Barry Wood was schooled at Milton, where his football coach was onetime Harvard Quarterback Charlie Buell. A year out West made him rugged enough for college football, which he says he plays because enough hard exercise makes it easier to study. Other games which he plays for the same reason are tennis, baseball, hockey. In tennis, he was good enough to play No. 1 on the Harvard team, to run John Doeg to five sets in the 1930 National Championship tournament. Baseball he plays less expertly than his other games but Harvard's Coach Fred Mitchell, when told last year that Wood might not have time to practice with the team, said: "Tell him just to come down for the games. . . . He doesn't need to practice." Wood has a chance this year to pass one record for Harvard athletes— for collecting more major sport letters (13) than any other Harvard athlete in history, and to tie another—for finishing his course (if he gets four A's this year) with a record of 16 A's, one B. This year he won the $750 Francis Burr scholarship which goes to Harvard's best student athlete. He tried to persuade authorities to give the money to someone else. When they refused, Wood took the scholarship, gave it to a student athlete who needed it.
No college socialite, Wood's best friends are other Harvard athletes—Mays, Record, Crickard and Charles Cunningham, his roommate, who is the football centre and hockey captain. A conscientious rather than brilliant student, Wood has a schedule that allows him no time for campus "activities." Nonetheless, he is president of the Student Council. Quiet and solemnly modest, he has no fondness for newspaper publicity. Particularly embarrassing to him was last week's sequel to the Harvard-Dartmouth game.
Radio announcer of that game for Columbia Broadcasting Co. was staccato Edward ("Ted") Husing. Sharing with many football experts an impression that Wood's strategies were not such as could be expected from a Phi Beta Kappa quarterback, Announcer Husing described his play as "putrid." Harvard men wrote letters of protest. Other listeners thought it a particularly flagrant example of two failings common among sports announcers —using words without knowing what they mean, criticizing instead of reporting. Harvard's Athletic Director William Bingham wrote to President William Paley of Columbia Broadcasting Co. to say that Announcer Husing might never again broadcast games at Soldiers Field. Announcer Husing's account of the Harvard-Army game had sounded crabbed to Harvardmen. Coach Casey had refused to show Husing diagrams of Harvard plays or let him watch practice. The Harvard-Yale game will be broadcast by Ralph ("Gil") Gilroy, a South Bostonian whom Harvardmen well remember as a hard- boiled Princeton halfback (1921-22).