The History of Letterman Jackets and Sweaters

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The tradition of wearing the varsity letter, a letterman jacket, or a varsity sweater is one that, in many places, still carries on to this modern day. It is so common in Americana we may take it for granted, but this badge of honor has a long and storied tradition. Our friend Timothy P Brown digs through the archives to find out where and why this exchange started and by whom in this weekly visit by the Football Archaeologist.

This piece originated with an article Tidbit that Tim wrote titled: Honoring Letter Sweaters and Jackets.

-Transcribed Tribute to Sweaters and Letterman Jackets with Timothy Brown

Hello, my football friends. This is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome once again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And we are at that mark of the week.

It's Tuesday. It's footballarchaeology.com day. And we have the author and the creator of footballarchaeology.com, Timothy P. Brown, here to talk about another great tidbit he had coming from January. And Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Hey, Darin. Good to see you again and chat and looking forward to, you can't see, but I'm wearing a sweater and a jacket with my, you know, with my letter, letter sweater, and letter jacket from back in the day.

I've got those on right now and am wearing them proudly because I used to throw the ball over the mountain, if you weren't aware of that before. Okay, Uncle Rico. I'll get you that Napoleon Dynamite reference there.

But Tim, that's a good segue into your tidbit we're going to talk about today and it's titled Sweaters and Jackets. So this is a lot to do with the attire of the, of people playing football back in the day. So we're interested to hear what you have to say.

Yeah. You know, so I think some of the most fascinating things about football are the equipment and the gear. And part of what's fun about it is just that, in many cases, there are images that exist.

These are images of games or the team pictures that were posed in some photographer's office. And one of the things I really enjoy are, are the old catalogs. You know, one of the things I collect are old sporting catalogs.

And so you see those peppered, you know, maybe once a week, once every two weeks, I've got something in my tidbits that includes an image from a catalog. So, so, you know, I think most people are aware that the, you know, if you're a fan of football history, that football, that in the early days, players often wore fairly heavy sweater, you know, pretty significant, you know, big, big yarn, big threads, big yarn, heavy sweater. And oftentimes, it had the school letter on the front.

So if you were, you had a big Y in front, if you were Harvard, you had a H in front. And, you know, so whatever else, you know, whatever other letters that are out there. So that's very common.

And so one of the traditions that began, and this is, you know, 18, late 1880s, early 1890s was, you know, back then, if you look at most teams schedules, like Harvard and Yale, they kind of like, similar to what happens now, but they kind of filled their early schedule by playing what they would have thought of as minor opponents. And then they kind of saved their best game and their best plays and their best players for the big games at the end of the season. So if you were on the team and you played, and if you played for Harvard, you played against Yale, or you played against Princeton, and at the end of the year, got to keep the sweater that you wore in the game, which had the big H on the front of it.

And so that became a tradition. So, you know, I mean, I'm old enough to remember the days when there were no, you know, you couldn't go to the local mall and buy athletic gear. And there was no internet either.

So, you know, you couldn't, you couldn't. So athletic gear and team gear simply were not available. And so if you were able to get your hands on team-issued clothing from a college team, whether you played on the damn thing or not, that was pretty cool stuff, you know, because, you know, you could strut your stuff, you were, you had this pretty neat team gear walking around.

And people who knew that you had this, that you had gotten that gear. So it was the same thing with these guys. You know, they walked around campus, and everybody knew that if you wore this particular sweater, you would have played in one of the games. And in fact, early on, a lot of the team, a lot of the colleges would, if the, if the Y was a certain shape, or had certain flushes for football, the basketball team, or the crew team, or who, whatever else, especially the teams that considered minor sports, they didn't get to wear exactly the same Y or the same H, they had to wear some, they got something else, or these smaller letters.

And so, you know, it was just this whole thing. The football guys got to wear the football sweaters, so anyway, that all worked fine for, you know, maybe a decade or two.

And then it got, and then it became a thing where, obviously, football gear started changing. But also, you know, it's like nobody wanted to, you know, you couldn't wear the big heavy wool sweater all year round. So they started wearing, they started modifying the letter sweaters to become something that you might wear at an appropriate, you know, appropriately in some kind of social occasion.

So it was lighter, it was cotton, it had pockets, it had buttons, it was a cardigan, whatever, right? So it was just that they started making these sweaters be more into a true award in a separate piece of gear or apparel than the actual piece that you'd worn on the field. And then, you know, they also started doing charms and blankets and all kinds of stuff.

But, you know, basically, by the 1920s, they moved to a lot of the sweaters that had an emblem. So, if you were the Tigers, you might have a patch near one of the pockets. There was a type that had the head of a tiger. If you were the Lions or whatever, you know, whatever team you were, the Trojans, you had some kind of patch in addition to, you know, the letter sweater or the letters.

And then they also, it was in that kind of time period where they also had numerals, you know, so like by 1905, I think it was Harvard that had the first numerals. But that was if you were if you played as a freshman, you were on the freshman team, and you were on the night, you know, the team that was going to graduate in 1908, then you got, you could get a sweater and wear just your numerals on the sweater, right? No letter yet, just the numerals, which I think everybody, you know, is familiar with from the high school days. But so anyways, that kind of stuff just went on.

And then eventually, in the 1930s, we got to the point where, really, I don't think for any particular reason, but then the sporting manufacturers who were very happy to sell as many damn sweaters as they could, they started selling jackets as well. So they designed these jackets. And the early ones didn't really look like the, you know, kind of leather-sleeved.

And I don't even know what wool, I guess was, you know, the, you know, kind of the, I don't know, you know, well, the traditional leather jacket, right? Right. I think it's wool on the mid part and the midsection. Yeah, yeah.

And so, so anyways, I mean, they started selling those in the, well, they started marketing them in the early 30s. And then they became popular. And for a while, they were satin.

And, you know, so anyways, it's just one of those things where the jackets basically kind of replace a sweater. Now, when I was in high school, there were still guys who would, who had, you know, we had this thing called the Cardinal Club. So it was like the Letterman Society or whatever.

And so there were still guys who would buy the Letterman sweaters and wear them periodically. But it was pretty very much, you know, I don't think of it in my classroom, but there were, you know, some of the older guys who did. So, I mean, it was just one of those things that faded out.

But almost everybody wore a leather jacket, you know. And then it became a thing where, you know, the marching band has them. And, you know, it's become this much more democratic sort of thing instead of being this elite award only for the football players.

And everybody else has something less than that. Now, it's become much more of a widespread award, which I just, I just find, you know, whatever, I find that kind of interesting. Yeah, that makes me think of a story I heard with Amos Alonzo Stagg, the great coach at the University of Chicago.

And he would give out the blanket as you talked about earlier, that had, I guess, a C on it for Chicago to the seniors that played in whatever the big game was. One of the things that he would tell them, and I guess he practiced this, was if somebody would go professional, which he was dead set against professional football. If one of his former players would go and play professional football, he would ask them for the blanket back. That was sort of their punishment.

And, you know, I was reading it somewhere, there are people that like dreaded it, didn't want to lose their damn blanket, because it was just such a discrediting, dishonorable thing to do to coach Stagg that they wouldn't play pro football and, you know, first probably made more money at being a banker or something than playing football back then anyway. But it's amazing how those live on their own. So I think he established blank, and in most schools, there are still schools that award blankets today.

And that was a separate kind of an award because anybody, any fool, could win a letter for one season. The blanket was for somebody who earned three letters, or, you know, he had won the award three or four times. And yeah, so I mean, he started that in like 1902 or something.

I've got the program from the 1911 Order of the Sea ceremony at UChicago. So that was, I think, the eighth one at the time. So it's, yeah, I mean, it's funny. There are just as many things as a guy like Stagg came up with and innovated on the field.

He also did some things off the field like, you know, blankets and the first Letterman Society, which effectively was what the Order of the Sea was. Hmm. Fascinating stuff.

It's a great part of the game that that's off the field. But it's, you know, very interesting, indeed, to look at. And very, have you seen any of these like old sweaters, like in anybody's collections or anything that some of these from 100 years ago, or like this 1910 when you get pictured? So, you know, there are some folks that I, you know, our friends correspond with, and we train information.

And yeah, so some have those old items. And it's, I mean, they are very rare. They're different, especially since it's one thing to have an old sweater and not to make fun of an Otterbein or somebody like that.

But, you know, there are lots of small liberal arts schools all over the country, so that's cool. And a lot of people would love to have an old sweater like that in their collection. But if you have a Harvard or Yale or somebody like that, you know, that's a big-time deal.

Those are thousands of dollars for items like that. You know, so easy. So it just depends on the condition and, you know, provenance, all those kinds of things.

So it's, they can be very, very valuable. Hmm. I bet they are.

Especially if you keep them away from the moss for over a century, that's a, that's always a good thing too. To keep the value. I only have them in pictures.

I do not. The closest thing I've ever come to is like going to the pro football hall of fame and seeing, you know, the 1920s, you know, like Red Grange or somebody from the Canton Bulldogs, sweaters there, you know, so that you're talking 10, 20 years earlier and what you're talking about. So, I can't even imagine that.

So, hey, great, great stuff as always, Tim. You know, the listeners would probably love to enjoy these tidbits every day as well. Maybe you could give them some information to share the tidbits with them as well.

Yeah, sure. So the best way to, to get the tidbit every day is to follow me on or subscribe to my, to footballarchaeology.com. If you do, you'll get a tidbit at seven o'clock East every day by email. So it'll have the contents of the, of the, the story there.

So, you know, send out two to three times a month, send out kind of longer form articles as well as each week I send out a link to this, to our podcast. And then, you know, alternatively, you can follow me on, on Twitter. Football Archaeology is my, is my name or at F-O-F Strife.

So either way, whatever works for you. But if you subscribe, at least you know that you're going to get it and you can pile them up, read them on the weekend when you, when you've got more time. Good, good deal.

Multiple ways to get the tidbits and hopefully everybody will take advantage of that and read Tim's work each and every day. Cause it's very interesting stuff. And the pictures are just out of this world.

Some of these images, like the one from this catalog from 1910 that we talked about today with the sweaters pictured in it, are pictures worth a thousand words and definitely are, in these cases, with the tidbits. So Tim, thank you very much for joining us, and we will talk to you again next week. Thank you, sir.

And we'll look forward to next Tuesday.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.