Good Value

TigerBlog mentioned yesterday that Matt Evans won the 1999 Roper Trophy as Princeton's outstanding senior male athlete. 

He received an email yesterday asking what about Brian Earl. The correct answer to the 1999 Roper Trophy is that there were three winners: Evans, Earl and Jeff Halpern. 

Two of them are now coaches. Earl is the head coach of the Cornell men's basketball team. Halpern is an assistant coach with the Tampa Bay Lightning, and in fact he just won a Stanley Cup with the team.

Now that he's cleared that up, TB can tell you about something interesting that he read yesterday that he did not know about as it relates to Presidential elections.

This was in relation to the election of ’20. In this case, that would be 1920. 

Actually, it was two interesting facts about that election.

First, it was Warren Harding against James Cox, and both candidates were from Ohio. Harding was a Senator, and Cox was the state's Governor.

How many times has that happened? 

Well, if the question is when there was another time when two people ran against each other who were both from the same state and at the time of the election were both holding major offices (governor, senator, even member of the House of Representatives), then the answer is never.

If the question is how many times have two people run against each other when they both had their legal address in the same state, well, that answer is four, including in 2016. The others were in 1904 (President Theodore Roosevelt defeated Alton Parker, who was the Chief Judge of the New York State Court of Appeals) and 1944 (when President Franklin Roosevelt defeated New York Governor Thomas Dewey).

There was also 1860, when Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas were both from Illinois, but Douglas was not a major party candidate.

So there you have it.

The other thing that TB learned was in that 1920 election, Warren Harding won by the largest percentage of the popular vote over his opponent than any other candidate ever. Harding, it turns out, had 26.2 percent more of the popular vote – aided by the fact that women could vote for the first time – than Cox, a figure that nobody has bettered since.

Warren Harding. And you thought he was only famous for the Teapot Dome scandal. And from the affair he had with the woman who had his child, something that TB didn't know about until he watched "Boardwalk Empire."

That election was, of course, 100 years ago. Well, almost 100 years ago. Actually it was 100 years ago this coming Nov. 2.

You know what was exactly 100 years ago today? 

There were two interesting items in the Daily Princetonian of Oct. 14, 1920. Hey, this is what historians like TigerBlog do for fun. They check out old newspapers from 100 years ago.

The first was a story about how men's soccer season tickets were on sale. The cost to watch the 1920 Tigers? It was $1. That's for the entire season ticket, not per game.

TB has no idea how many games the 1920 Tigers played. The first year of men's soccer at Princeton was 1906, but the archives only have year-by-year results beginning in 1938. 

Of course, while $1 doesn't seem like a whole lot, keep in mind that 1) that's the equivalent of $13.60 today and 2) modern-day men's soccer games at Princeton are free. 

The other story TB saw in the paper from 100 years ago was about transportation to the upcoming Harvard football game. The story said that Princeton fans could take a train to New York City and then a boat to Boston.

How much? That would be $13.56 for the round-trip, which was overnight both ways. That cost, by the way, did not include a stateroom or meals on the boat. Staterooms were going for $2.43 and $3.42.

Again, in today's money, that's $184.37 for just the boat, and then either $33.04 or $46.50 for the stateroom. And that doesn't include food.

That's a bit pricey, no? 

On the other hand, that game was Princeton's only away game that year. It was also the only sort-of blemish on an otherwise perfect season, as Princeton and Harvard tied 14-14 in that game. 

Not to worry though. Princeton still won the 1920 national championship.