Atlanta Daily World

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 1933
BY LUCIUS JONES
TUSKEGEE INSTITUTE, Ala., Nov. 19.—Hold everything, hold everything, folks; the wires are burning up hard, this time, the hot copy comes directly from this rampaging Tuskegee campus.

The Tuskegee premises are in a lively stir. Teachers and students alike are all agog over the appearance here next Saturday night, November 25, of that colorful attraction, "The Green Pastures." Marc Connelly's clever Biblical tale, based on Roark Bradford's book, "Ol' Man Adam and His Chillun."

The picture play will be featured at Birmingham, Ala. next Friday night, coming to the Tuskegee campus the very next night.

Seats can be reserved for $2.00, while general admission will be $1.00.

A capacity crowd is a certainty, judging from the way the entire populace is worked up over the coming of the show.

Many Atlantans who missed the attraction when it played the Gate City a short while ago plan to see it the coming week end here. Among this particular class will be Dr. and Mrs. E. G. Bowden, and several others.

It's an eventful place, this Tuskegee campus, so unlike this summer when we passed through, at which time virtually all the students were off on their respective vacations. Now, it's a different tale.

The campus is full of life and both students and teachers are buoyant with the good ole Tuskegee spirit. It was six o'clock sharp Friday evening when your columnist breezed in among the Tuskegee colonists, among whom were the unusual horde of familiar faces.

Friday, among the many friends whose friendship were renewed were Nat Jackson, the nationally known tennis star, and his equally gifted brother, Franklyn; the McDuffie brothers of tennis fame; and, among the gridders, Ed Adams, Red Belcher, Bill Moberly, both McKinneys, Raymond Johnson, Oziah Johnson, Providence, Charles Smith, Greene, and many others.

Among the younger chaps were William Walcott, Jr., Ernest McCampbell, and the youthful Drye boys, sons of Captain Drye.

At Rockefeller Hall, our quarters, the first familiar face was that of the genial Mrs. A. D. Long, matron of the building.

Busy at work in the main administration building was the energetic figure of Capt. R. S. Dobbs, the little Napoleon.

Coach and Mrs. Cleve Abbott, we learned upon inquiry, were at home.

We had supper in the teachers' dining hall, in company with the South Carolina football party, that is, Coach and Mrs. R. A. Brooks, Coach and Mrs. Jewell, Dean Lewis, Coach Crawford, and Captain Broadriver Dawkins and his fiancee, Miss Stewart, all of Orangeburg, S. C.

Renewing an acquaintance with Coaches Brooks and Jewell and their wives was Miss Hay, one of the Tuskegee instructors.

Coach John L. Brown, as assistant to Coach Abbott and widely known S.I.A.A. grid official, greeted the party of us in the dining room and, despite an ailing ankle, seemed as jovial as ever. He confided that he would be unable to serve in any other capacity than that of head linesman in the Morehouse-Clark game, which you've already seen by now, because of that ailing member. Mr. Brown, it seems at the time we saw him Friday evening around supper hour, was being required to pack at once in order to make it to Atlanta for the said classic between the Maroon Tigers and Panthers.

Supper was fine, and it was with effervescent spirits that your Gate City society snooper ambled over to Rockefeller thereafter, tuning up for a prom on the campus—after which he decided he would sit around and await a wire from Coach Chicken Charlie Clark giving him the outcome of the game at LaGrange, Ga. between the LaGrange High gridmen and the Ramblers from David T. Howard High.

As he retired, Lucius thought to himself that Saturday morning, calculated to usher onto the Tuskegee campus the faces of several Atlantans in the person of Ike Roberts, who was a Friday afternoon official in the Florida-Benedict game at Tallahassee, Fla., and of Chicken Charlie and Mrs. Clarke, should afford a real treat.

SATURDAY MORNING HAD THOSE PRE-GAME THRILLS!

And come Saturday morn at breakfast, it did—which, one would guess, that character is the pre-game chatter cloaked akin to an epochal gridiron battle was in the air.

The Tuskegee students were cocksure that their boys were going to win.

Huge parties of Bama State students poured in at all hours of the day, with their own team in Xenia, Ohio battling Wilberforce.

Betters cropped up on all sides, but they got nowhere at all, for, it seems, all the money in sight was that of a Crimson and Gold hue.

In one instance did we hear of a bet materializing. In that case, we understand a Tuskegee student, hailing from some point in South Carolina, risked two dollars on his faith in the "ole boys from back home."

Other than this, few thrills came from the betting phase of the pre-game din.

By game time, the Tuskegee campus had all the pomp and pageantry of Los Angeles during the 1932 Olympiad, only on a smaller scale, perhaps.

Crimson and gold banners and pennants, badges, and other insignia were everywhere in evidence.

Tuskegee's 54-piece band was very much at work and it played those stirring, yea compelling football songs, more or less, and formed the famous "T" during the intermission between the first and second halves of the big game!

Alumni Bowl, that historic saucer in which past years saw the fall of such great grid machines as Bluefield, Wiley, and Prairie View and a deadlock with the great Green Wave from Wilberforce had all the vivacity of human beings that are associated with the Roman Coliseum during the time of the original Olympic games and the stirring bull fights.

The setting reminded one very much of those jammed amphitheaters of old.

It was with difficulty that we swallowed as we watched, inhaled, yes, absorbed the bigness of the gargantuan moment!

Ike Roberts likes to tell of the moments of his life that brought him his biggest thrills.

That one, Saturday just before the kick-off of the Tuskegee-South Carolina blood battle for first place in the conference grid race, was certainly one of ours!

It was stupendous.

When the end of this grid campaign has been reached, the grid addicts all over the sector will be forced to admit that 1933 has been one of the truly big years in Southern football.

In so many ways, the real glamour of colored collegiate football has been lifted to an unprecedented peak, in the fancy and esteem of a hungry, pigskin-devouring public.

Nothing beats or approaches the truly unfathomable thrill of inhaling all the mad excitement and thrills of a feverish battle on the cleated sod.