Football History

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Eddie Dooley was many things, including a journalist and a politician: A sports reporter and columnist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. He also had some radio broadcasts that Football Archaeology covers in the gist of the feature story.

Here are some other accomplishments of Dooley that led to his popular name in the gridiron realm of the era:

-Edwin Dooley: A Dartmouth College football star and All-American quarterback nicknamed "Death Dooley" for his killer instinct on the field. He later served as a successful businessman and public servant.

-Eddie Dooley (football coach): Head coach for the University of Kansas football team from 2009 to 2011.

-Transcribed Conversation with Timothy Brown on Eddie Dooley

Hello, my football friends; this is Darin Hayes of PigskinDispatch.com. Welcome again to The Pig Pen, your portal to positive football history. And welcome to another Tuesday where we get to talk to Timothy P. Brown of FootballArcheology.com about one of his famous tidbits, some daily little factoids of football that make you think and appreciate the days gone by in the realm of the gridiron. So, Tim, welcome back to The Pig Pen.

Thank you, Darin. I look forward to chatting again today and seeing what we come up with.

Yeah, Tim, I want to attend one of the entertaining ones. It takes you back to a different marketing era and using football. You titled this tidbit back in September 2022.

Can you believe it's been that long since you wrote this? It's called Eddie Dooley's 1936 All-America Team Contest. So why don't you explain to us what that is and what Eddie Dooley was doing? Yeah, so I think anybody who reads or listens regularly probably knows that I collect old.

Well, they're composite schedules, but, you know, they're these little giveaways that used to be available. They're just like the little pocket card schedules we get today. But they were available at least from the 20s and probably a little bit earlier than that.

And I'm talking 1920s, not, you know, 2020s. So, you know, it would have listed all the games, and for every team that's in the play, it would have listed their schedule for the year. And then it would have just little things about, you know, the teams they expected to be, you know, great teams this year and who the All-Americans were last year, things like that.

These were just little things you carried around. And, you know, they didn't have the Internet then, so you wanted to see who's playing this coming Saturday.

Boom, you looked at the schedule. And so this particular one was put out by Royal Typewriters. So, you know, if you went into a typewriter store, you could potentially pick up one of these little booklets.

Then, their star was a guy named Eddie Dooley. So he was a quarterback at Dartmouth in the 20s, then became a newspaperman, and then became a radio announcer. So he had a syndicated radio show that basically ran on Thursday nights where he would make predictions about that Saturday's game.

And then, on Saturday, Saturday evening, he was based out of New York. So Saturday evening, he's running through the scores, who won the big games, and that kind of stuff. And I'm sure at the time, the West Coast fans got all PO'd because they may not have finished their game yet.

So he couldn't report on him. And, you know, so they felt like they were getting shat upon East. But anyway, strikes again.

Yeah. East Coast bias back in 1936. So.

So anyways, so so this is a 1936 season. And so one of the things they did, you know, I mean, it's no different than what we do today to try to engage our our followers or to try to. And, you know, if you're selling something, you're trying to get people involved in the brand.

And so what they did was in the booklet, there was a little form that you could fill out at the end of the season that where you'd list the what you basically what you try to do is Eddie was going to name an All-American team. Then, you submitted your list of names for the All-American team. And there was a seventy-five-dollar third-place prize. There was a hundred-dollar second place and a five-hundred-dollar first-place prize.

So for whoever could. Come the closest to matching Eddie's All-American. So, you know, it turned out that Eddie's All-American team.

Kind of had East Coast bias, so there were four Ivy Leaguers, some of whom I'm sure made sense, including one who won the Heisman Trophy, Larry Kelly. And, you know, there were still five guys from New York and further to the Northeast who made this team. So he wasn't quite as bad as what Walter Camp did, where almost everybody was.

From the Ivy League. Yeah. I mean, Camp one year had all eleven Yale players.

Right. The first, second, or third All-American team, but they were good. So anyway.

So he held this contest, and then it turned out that this was my favorite. Just there were guys, and I forget, you know, I don't really care about them who were first and second place. But third place was Mrs. Eva Lou Edwards of Hammond, Louisiana. So she picked up seventy-five bucks for coming in third place.

That's like a week's payback, then to seventy-five dollars. I still have a chump change. That's good.

Good money. Yeah. That was some serious cash.

Then, each of the players who were named to Eddie's All-American team got a Royal typewriter, too. So nice. I mean, that would be like, you know, it's like getting a computer or whatever today.

One of the other fun little things about that was that Eddie, the guy who came in third in the Heisman that year, named him to the team. And I don't know how you pronounce his name, but Ray Buivid, Buivid, something like that. It's B-U-I-V-I-D.

And he played for Marquette. So, it's not a school that we associate with, you know, football All-Americans. And he's in the Midwest.

How do you make that team? Yeah, well, he made it. But he did. You know, he came in third in the Heisman.

So he was nationally recognized, and Marquette played in the Cotton Bowl that year. You know, so they were, you know, considered a pretty top team. And so that was Marquette's first and only football bowl that they played in.

And then, you know, they eventually dropped football in, like, 1960. But so, you know, this Eddie Dooley was, you know, he was like it, you know, he would have been whatever the Kirk Herbstreit or somebody like that of his age, you know, nationally prominent guy. And then, you know, he announced for a number of years.

And then eventually he ended up getting into politics and he served three terms in Congress. So I forget exactly which state he served with, but or for. But so anyways, you know, even back then, former football players or coaches or whomever or media stars, you know, got themselves elected to Congress.

So, some things never change. Yeah. And you have a great image of Eddie. It must be in one of the promo ads on the football archaeology dot com story on this.

And folks, you can follow that in the show notes of this podcast. Go right to Tim's site to see this. And Eddie has a great face for television.

He probably would have been great at the television, too, because he just has that look, you know, the hair's, you know, perfectly parted, and you sort of got the shit-eating grin on his face, and he's ready to go and talk some football. So he's got me pumped up. So a great story.

Love it. I love the typewriters. Eddie would have played.

I'm just thinking about that. Eddie would have played for Jess Hawley because Hawley was the coach at Dartmouth at the time. And he was, you know, I mean, they had a really good team.

They were national champions. He's six, you know, and Hawley had coached Iowa before before Dartmouth. So he was.

Now, like I said, he's kind of a Herb Street only is probably a better quarterback in college, you know, but that's kind of the nature of the person, you know, the the media star that he was. Yeah, you could tell he's got a little bit of personality to him, I guess, is what I was trying to say in the image of him, too. So great, great stuff.

You know, you have these things from your collection, and you share and dig up the story and the research. And you do this, you know, on a daily basis, which is amazing and a real tribute to what you're doing and for your tidbits. People love to read this stuff and love to hear you when you come on the show, and you get great responses from it.

But maybe you could share with the audience how they, too, can enjoy your tidbits on a daily basis. Yeah, so the easiest thing is just to go to footballarchaeology.com and subscribe. You know, there are a bunch of different ways you can subscribe there.

It's free. You can also do paid subscriptions, which is perfectly OK with me. But, you know, it's available to you.

And if you don't want to get the email every day, which, you know, just ensures you're going to get it. You can also just follow me on Twitter, where I reach about three people every day. Or, you know, that's not true, folks.

He has good following on Twitter. Yeah, but only three of them see it every day. But anyway, that's another story.

And then I'm also on the Substack app because that's where I publish and then threads, you know, or just bookmark the site and pop in whenever you're in the mood for old-time football stuff. Well, excellent job as always, and we really appreciate you sharing with us each week of some of your great stories. And we would love to share with you again next Tuesday.

Very good. Look forward to it.

Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.