Ed Rogers in football uniform.


Ed Rogers in his law office.


Jim Thorpe and Lone Star Dietz with John Killiany, Albright College quarterback Class of 1946.


HEAD GAMES Sometimes opponents’ fears of tricks from Carlislers got the better of them. An instance of this occurred in the 1929 Haskell–Duquesne game. At half-time, Duquesne’s head coach Elmer Layden, one of Notre Dame’s legendary Four Horsemen, angrily accused Lone Star Dietz of sending in plays to his Haskell players via smoke signals from his ever-present cigar. That the officials didn’t buy Layden’s claim made him hopping mad. It seems that Layden was looking at the wrong thing. Years later, one of Dietz’s former Albright College players related that Dietz always held a rolled-up pro- gram during a game. When he wanted to send in a play, he held the program against his nose – one side for a run- ning play, the other for a pass. – Tom Benjey


46 AMERICAN INDIAN FALL 2012


Two photos of William H. Lone Star Dietz appear on the coaches page of the 1916 Rose Bowl program. Carlisle’s academic structure created a


need for coaches as students worked half-days in shops and many participated in extracur- ricular activities, several of which had football teams. Adding those teams to the school’s var- sity, second team and the junior varsity squads gave the superintendent 14 teams to field each year. Major William A. Mercer, Carlisle Indian School Superintendent from 1904 to 1908, complained that he had money to buy just one set of new football uniforms each year, and that set went to the varsity. The varsity’s old uniforms were handed down to the other teams. Unsaid was that he didn’t have money to hire coaches for those teams, either. Warner usually had one or two paid as-


sistants, one of whom was usually responsible for the second team. Most of the coaching of these teams was left to players. Often, a varsity player would coach one of the several shop


teams or the junior varsity (a team of much younger boys at Carlisle), creating entry-level opportunities to learn to teach the less experi- enced and less skilled players how to play the game in the Carlisle System. In 1904, for the first time, Indians got the


opportunity to coach Carlisle’s varsity. A few Carlisle players held head coaching positions at high schools and small colleges prior to that, but none had headed a team of Carl- isle’s caliber. Ed Rogers replaced the departed Warner as head football coach; Pierce and Frank Hudson (for two weeks) assisted him. An October 15, 1904 article datelined Carlisle, Penn., described the use of Indian coaches as a (possibly risky) experiment that was paying off. The 1904 Carlisle team went 9-2-0. Only Harvard and Penn escaped. Surprisingly, in a September 2, 1905 spe- cial to The New York Times, Carlisle Indian


COURTESY U.S. ARMY MILITARY HISTORY INSTITUTE


PHOTO COURTESY OF ALBRIGHT COLLEGE


PHOTO COURTESY OF TOM BENJEY


PHOTO COURTESY OF WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES ARCHIVES


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