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A GREATER GETTYSBURG the game with The Johns Hopkins. If the team won, or even if it lost gallantly trying (and it always tried gallantly), students welcomed it home in style. This meant more speeches, parades, bonfires, and sometimes trouble. A parade through the streets of town could easily get out of hand, and the wood for the bonfire had to come from somewhere. As early as 1909 the faculty suspended classes after 9 A.M. to allow students to attend a game with Dickinson. Later, the faculty sometimes declared a holiday on a playing day, but more frequently after the game when the taste of victory was still fresh. In 1923 a new president assumed the prerogative of calling off classes "in the interests of athletics." In the years that followed, hundreds of students participated in the ritual of gathering before the White House after a victory (announced to the world within hearing by ringing the Glatfelter Hall bell), imploring the president to grant a football holiday. They usually got their wish.359 Undoubtedly, students were pleased when early in the century College officials began responding to their frequent appeals to put the athletic program on a sounder financial footing. Yet as they watched the changes that were being made, clearly in the interests of providing more experienced direction and greater continuity to the program, a few of them registered a valid complaint. Little by little, the student initiative which had long characterized athletics, as well as other campus activities, was being superseded by direction and continuity in which faculty, trustees, and alumni had the dominant voice.360 There were once student managers with genuinely independent and responsible powers and duties, and a coach whom the Athletic Association hired. Now there was a graduate athletic manager and a coach to whom the students were answerable.361 Some of them complained that they had been reduced to the status of errand boys. However, the die had been cast and the course was not about to be reversed. One unmistakable sign of the times was the quiet disappearance of the old student-run Athletic Association. Its president last sat as an ex-officio member of the Athletic Council during the 1921-1922 year. The 1941-1942 season was still part of the golden age for intercollegiate athletics at Gettysburg. Among nine varsity teams, the 359The practice of ringing the bell began as early as 1892, soon after it was installed in the tower. In an interview on September 10,1984, Henry T. Bream said he remembered its being rung after victories at home and away, occasionally if the team had played well but lost, and occasionally off and on all night. 380The Carnegie report lamented that "from the point of view of education, the most regrettable aspect of the control of college athletics in the United States to-day is the meagreness of the responsibility that is entrusted to the undergraduates." It concluded that "much of the genuine educational benefit that responsibility in the administrative control of college athletics might bring is reaped to-day by men whose formal education has ended." Savage, American College Athletics, pp. 102, 103. 66