Gummere, William Stryker

Gummere, William Stryker 1870 (1852-1933), was captain of the Princeton team that met Rutgers in 1869 in the first intercollegiate football game played in America.

Gummere himself took greater pride in having been the first player to use the hook-slide in baseball -- in an exhibition game between Princeton and the Philadelphia Athletics in the spring of 1870. Gummere, a great center fielder, got to first on a base hit and started to steal second. On the way down he saw that the catcher's throw would get to the bag ahead of him. Knowing that the catcher always threw the ball shoulder high and that the second baseman, Al Reach (later a manufacturer of sporting goods), invariably turned around to tag the runner standing up, Gummere threw himself feet first at the bag and buried his face in his right arm for protection. When the second baseman turned to tag him, he discovered Gummere stretched out under his feet, safely out of reach.

``What kind of a damned fool trick is that?'' Reach demanded.

``That,'' said Gummere, smiling as he got up and dusted himself off, ``is a device to evade being put out when running bases.''

After graduating from Princeton in 1870 at the age of eighteen, Gummere studied law in his father's office in Trenton and was admitted to the bar in 1873. In the Class of 1870's twentieth reunion book, Gummere said he was a Republican. ``Consequently,'' he added, ``I have never held office. Republicans don't as a usual thing hold office in New Jersey.'' This pessimism proved premature. Five years later a Democratic governor appointed Gummere to the Supreme Court of New Jersey, and six years after that a Republican governor appointed him Chief Justice, a position he held until his death thirty-two years later. When he died at the age of 80, a Democratic governor, echoing the tributes of other judges, said that New Jersey had lost one of its greatest jurists and America one of its keenest legal minds, and that the ``treasure store of legal opinion'' that Gummere had left would be vital for generations ``long after most of us are forgotten.''

From Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion, copyright Princeton University Press (1978).