Ivy League football is a preoccupation in Timothy Spears’s family history. His grandfather Clarence “Doc” Spears was an All-American guard at Dartmouth in the early twentieth century, played on the Canton Bulldogs with Jim Thorpe, became a College Hall of Fame coach, and, as the legend goes, discovered Bronko Nagurski while driving through the backcountry of Minnesota. His father, Robert Spears, captained Yale’s 1951 team and was drafted by the Chicago Bears in 1952. By the time Timothy went to Yale in the mid‐1970s, it was more than talent or enthusiasm that prompted him to play football there. Spirals tracks the relationship between college football and higher education through the lens of one family’s involvement in the sport. Ranging over almost a century of football history, Spears describes the different ways in which his grandfather, father, and he played the game and engaged with its educational dimensions as the sport was passed from father to son. This intergenerational history attempts to uncover what the males in Spears’s family learned from playing football and how the game’s educational importance shifted over time within higher education. While Spears chose an academic life after college, he understood later, with the decline of his parents, how much football stayed with him and shaped his family’s history. With a voice that is part memoirist, part scholar, part athlete, as well as father and son, Spears discerns how football is embedded in our culture and came to be the fabric and common language of his family.
Ivy League football is a preoccupation in Timothy Spears’s family history. His grandfather Clarence “Doc” Spears was an All-American guard at Dartmouth in the early twentieth century, played on the Canton Bulldogs with Jim Thorpe, became a College Hall of Fame coach, and, as the legend goes, discovered Bronko Nagurski while driving through the backcountry of Minnesota. His father, Robert Spears, captained Yale’s 1951 team and was drafted by the Chicago Bears in 1952. By the time Timothy went to Yale in the mid?1970s, it was more than talent or enthusiasm that prompted him to play football there. Spirals tracks the relationship between college football and higher education through the lens of one family’s involvement in the sport. Ranging over almost a century of football history, Spears describes the different ways in which his grandfather, father, and he played the game and engaged with its educational dimensions as the sport was passed from father to son. This intergenerational history attempts to uncover what the males in Spears’s family learned from playing football and how the game’s educational importance shifted over time within higher education. While Spears chose an academic life after college, he understood later, with the decline of his parents, how much football stayed with him and shaped his family’s history. With a voice that is part memoirist, part scholar, part athlete, as well as father and son, Spears discerns how football is embedded in our culture and came to be the fabric and common language of his family.
Drawing on sources such as diaries, advice manuals and autobiographies, this work shows how travelling salesmen from the early-18th century to the 1920s shaped the customs of life on the road and helped to develop the modern consumer culture in the United States.
Part I examines the ethos of self-making and boosterism that has defined the city since its settlement in the 1830s, and argues that these energies formed the context for hinterland migration during the nineteenth century and beyond. Part 2 highlights the emotional and cultural foraces that continued to tie many migrants to the hinterland even after their arrival in Chicago. Part 3 looks at Chicago's ethnic communities through the eyes of hinterland migrants, underscoring the cultural authority of these native-born newcomers in mediating the assimilation of foreign immigrants. Chapter 6 focuses on the work of Jane Addams and Chapter 7 considers how Chicago's multiethnic community is portrayed in Edith Wyatt's and Elia Peattie's fiction and in Carl Sandburg's poetry.
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