Alfred Eaton at the 1917 Yale-Princeton Game at Princeton

THE JOHN O'HARA SOCIETY

From the Terrace: Alfred and his mistress Norma Budd fought and broke up and she wrote him "I do not wish to see you for a long, long time." Alfred, miserable, goes to the game:

   "Alfred saw Norma from a distance at the Yale game; only briefly, and she did not see him. She was in a foursome who were hurrying down the hill to the new Palmer Stadium, obviously having had lunch at one of the clubs. The men were older, in their thirties or even in their forties, and as they approached the Stadium they veered to the left and the Yale side. One of the men, the man Alfred first saw with Norma, wore a long raccoon coat; the other wore a greatcoat and motoring gauntlets. They were talking amiably among themselves, and Alfred saw the men and the girls change partners, so that he was unable to determine which man was for Norma, which for the other girl (who appeared to be older than Norma). In Alfred's mind there was no doubt that one of the men was the one that possessed the power to hurt her, but to the same degree there was no doubt that she was enjoying herself and suffering nothing. Yale, which had not been favored, won the game 13-7, thanks largely to Coach Shevlin and his Minnesota shift, a tricky bit of business that Shevlin had introduced at New Haven when he was brought in toward the end of the season. But the advantages of the new technique went largely unobserved by Alfred, who tried throughout the game to pick out the foursome on the opposite side of the field. The campus and the team had been so confident of winning that the defeat put the undergraduates in a mood that somewhat corresponded to the mood that Alfred suffered for his own reason."