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This year's will be the first International team since 1909 to go into action without the iron-wristed centaur-rider, Devereux Milburn. The polo feudality that was once built around Milburn now centres about Hitchcock. More, it centres about three Hitchcocks—the son who is captain, the father whose duties on the Defense Committee are to see that the ponies are properly trained and stabled; and the mother, polo's matriarch, the captain's teacher, a word from whom at the dinner table might well settle a point in strategy, even a contested place on the team.
Mrs. Thomas Hitchcock Sr. was Louise Eustis of New Orleans. Her husband, third son of a Thomas Hitchcock who worked on the editorial staff of the New York Sun under Charles Dana, was one of the young Newport sports of 1886 who organized and played on the first U. S. international team. She started her son Thomas playing as soon as he was old enough to swing a mallet. She helped young Douglas Burden and Cornelius Vanderbilt ("Sonny") Whitney to learn the game too.
This trio were original Meadow Larks, as Meadow Brook's younger generation has since been called. They started playing in 1910.
Mr. & Mrs. Hitchcock, F. S. Skiddy von Stade Sr. and other fathers and an occasional mother played against the Meadow-Larks. Thomas Hitchcock Jr. grew up and went to War. For a while there were no Meadow Larks. Then the second Hitchcock boy, Francis ("Frankie"), was big enough to start.* When he was going to school in Aiken, S. C. his mother sent him mallets and balls enough for two teams. They played on bicycles on a red clay field. Later Frankie had a hard fall that ended his riding for the time, but the boys who had played with him, still trained by Mrs. Hitchcock, developed into the Old Aiken team which last year carried off the Junior championship, the Westbury Challenge Cup and the Herbert Memorial trophy.
Boys are always playing polo on the Hitchcock field. Even during the juvenile depopulation that falls upon Long Island in August because mothers mysteriously believe this to be an unhealthy season, young candidates for next year's Meadow Lark Club are being watched by Mrs. Hitchcock and coached by a onetime British cavalry sergeant named Gaylord. On the present squad, potential internationalists of the future, are Skiddy von Stade Jr., Julian Peabody Jr. (a Hitchcock grandson), Devereux Milburn Jr., Jack Milburn, David Dows Jr., Jimmy Curtis, Marshall Field Jr., Coolidge Chapin, Charlie von Stade, Jack Windmill, Nelson Brown, Scott Truesdale and the Gerry twins. On the international squad itself are six onetime Meadow Larks: J. C. Rathborne, Stewart Iglehart, J. P. Mills, Pete Bostwick, Winston Guest, Earle Hopping. Mrs. Hitchcock cannot play this year because she broke her arm last fall in a Virginia hunt but she perches on the fence almost every day to watch and coach her present crop of youngsters.