New Hampshire Wildcats (1952)

 

Let's pull out another team and season from Big Bag o' Random ...

The 1952 New Hampshire Wildcats.

The Team: This was a rare off-year for UNH, which suffered its first losing non-war season since 1939 and failed to win a game in conference play.

The Players: The leader of the offense was Dick "Dum Dum" Dewing, a fullback who starred on the Wildcats' undefeated 1950 team and an all-Yankee Conference selection in 1952. The UNH Hall of Famer made noise on the field as a player, and made even more noise in his later years.

After his playing days, Dewing, became the famed "Cannon Man," the leader of the famed group of men in colonial gear who fired a cannon after every UNH touchdown, a tradition he was part of until 2019. According to this article, Dewing was "an artillery officer with the First Newmarket Militia, a Revolutionary War reenactment group." The tradition apparently began when UNH athletic director Marty Scarano wanted to surprise coach Sean McDonnell on his birthday. Sounds like everyone got a blast of it (sorry, couldn't resist). Dewing, who also served in Vietnam, died in 2021.

The cannon men wait to fire away in 2009 at a game
 I attended at old Cowell Stadium. I believe Dick Dewing
is the one in front, facing left.

UNH's 1952 offense.

The Coach: Clarence Elijah "Chief" Boston got his name from his father, who was chief of police in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. The Harvard graduate racked up a 60-57-10 record from 1949-64, which included four conference titles, two undefeated seasons and one winless campaign. 

UNH's 1953 home uniform, from the Granite yearbook.
Sadly, there's no caption, so I'm not sure who has the ball here.

Billy Pappas strikes a pose for The New Hampshire paper in 1952.
He is a member of the UNH Hall of Fame, so I'd say the caption's prediction was spot on.

The Uniforms: The basic home uniform — silver helmets with plastic jerseys, navy jerseys with two stripes on the sleeves and silver pants — went virtually unchanged from 1949-56, and the Wildcats even retuned to this look from 1960-64. The road shirts underwent some revisions over the years, but the 1949-55 versions mirror the home versions perfectly.

The Fallout: UNH went back to playing like UNH, going 13-3 in 1953-54 and winning the Yankee Conference title both times. I feel like in the early days of the YC, teams' records fluctuated more because of the obvious lack of depth compared with the big boys, even the Ivy League schools. But then, Vermont never won a conference title and UConn won five in a row later in the decade, so what so I know?