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When the football season is over, Howard Jones leads an easy life. He is a partner and stockholder in his father's paper firm of Harding, Jones & Co., but he takes no active part in its affairs. He goes fishing in the Sierras, gives talks at business men's meetings, plays golf and bridge. Dressed in golf trousers, an old sweater and a grey hat pulled far down on his grooved and sunburned face, he potters about the North Hollywood bungalow where he lives with his wife, son, and four-year-old daughter Carolyn, who sprawls about in a specially monstrous sandbox. The role of football wizard is, on the whole, superior to any other in professional sport. Coaches get higher salaries than any other professionals except a few baseball players. Their earning capacity is not determined by their age. They work only in the autumn and mostly in the afternoon. If they are successful, they are rewarded by fame, authority and opportunities to act in cinema. When Howard Jones began his career, such was not the case. Coaches were likely to be underpaid alumni. Their duties were menial. They had few assistants. None of them received adulation for possessing masterminds. First and greatest mastermind of football was, of course, the late Knute Rockne. Any player on a Rockne team was considered a miniature master mind; to have played on a Notre Dame team was qualification to be either a professional player or a $3,000-a-year coach.
With football's post-War inflation, foothall coaches reached their present pinnacle of importance. There are now some 3,000 well-paid, highly respected football coaches in the U. S. The principal disadvantage in the profession of football wizard is its uncertainty. If a team stops winning its games consistently, its coach stops receiving a wizard's salary. There are a few football coaches in the U. S. who have overcome this handicap sufficiently to make their reputations for wizardry, like Howard Jones's, secure.
Amos Alonzo Stagg, 70, of Chicago is the oldest football wizard in the U. S. He has coached 41 Chicago teams. He invented the shift, which Knute Rockne later improved and popularized. When he went to Yale he planned to enter the ministry. His interest in football defeated his interest in theology in 1889, when Yale made 698 points to 0 for its opponents. Amos Alonzo Stagg played end, made Walter Camp's first All-American. He went to Chicago to be Director of Athletics at $2,500 a year in 1892. Last month Chicago's trustees voted to have Coach Stagg obey a University regulation and retire at 70, at the end of this year. He demurred. Coach Stagg's 40-year record: won 253; lost 104; tied 28.