100 years ago in The Record

Saturday, Sept. 29, 1917

RPI opens its 1917 football season with a 20- 0 loss to Williams College in Williamstown MA, the Sunday Budget reports.

“Although outweighed and outplayed the Troy team put up a scrappy fight,” the Budget sportswriter reports. Nevertheless, Williams “had little trouble in plowing down the field and held fast against the attacks of the Engineers.”

The game is close for most of the first half, until Williams recovers their own fumble and runs it in for their first touchdown. A missed extra point leaves the score 6- 0 at halftime.

Williams blows the game open with two third- quarter touchdowns, while RPI can’t get beyond the Williams 40 in the second half. In an odd detail, the first and third quarters run fifteen minutes apiece, but the second and fourth quarters run twelve.

Letter from the front

Carroll E. Scott of Lansingburgh enlisted in the Engineers’ Reserve when the U. S. declared war on Germany earlier this year. He’s now “Somewhere in France” as a sergeant in the Fourteenth Reserve Engineers. His August 27 letter to Helen D. Loucks appears in today’s Record.

“The rain is coming down on our iron roof and rapidly changing the soil into a sea of mud,” Scottr writes, “We have a hard floor build six inches from the ground. We are sleeping on cots with three blankets and a poncho ( the waterproof affair which serves as a cloak in inclement weather and a bed sack at night). The nights are very cold and during the day we do not feel the perspiration at all.”

Scott made his way to France via Salem NH and Great Britain. “The word ‘ beautiful’ cannot do justice to the country places in the interior of England,” he writes.

“Everywhere we received the same enthusiastic reception. People of all ages flocked to the cars while we stopped at the station to get a look at the ‘ Sammies,’ and ran out of their homes to wave and cheer as they passed the first armed troops of a foreign nation that had crossed England for centuries.”

On August 26 “we had an extraordinary experience when some of us went to get a look at Fritz. This is the colloquial name for the German soldier…. We hiked two miles through the labyrinth of trenches to a point nearest the first- line trenches where Fritz lives, 400 yards away. It is not a place where one sticks the head over the parapet.”

Scott’s steel helmet came in handy, he jokes, when a fellow American started throwing shoes at him as he composed his letter on a noisy typewriter.