Twenty three years ago I bought some sports medals at an antiques show in Sacramento California. The dealer said they were from the estate of renown Yale football and baseball player Amos Alonzo Stagg. As I researched Stagg I started connecting the dots...I learned of his record setting playing days at Yale, his appointment to the first College Football All-America Team in 1889, his remarkable life long coaching career, and his pioneering influence on sports. By these I came to understand his patriarchal place in American athletic history. I ended up visiting the Stagg family in Stockton California, and to make a long story short, I bought Stagg's personal c1920 football player bookends. Not only were they Stagg's personal bookends, they were stunning football art.  An occurrence like that seems like something that would happen to an advanced collector not a novice. But this was way at the beginning of my collecting career, I hardly knew anything about sports antiques yet. As I drove home with them in my beater 65' Olds Cutlass I instinctively knew I had gone to the top of the mountain...I felt I had reached in and touched the very core of football...So this last May when I visited Yale to photograph their trophy room...in a way I had come full circle....I started with Yale in a sense, and I finally made it there....

It was a drizzly day as I made the half hour drive from Norwalk to New Haven. My GPS got me to the Payne Whitney Gymnasium at 70 Tower Parkway....I tried to take it all in as I drove into the Yale vicinity...So this is it I thought....Yale...It might as well have been my first day going to school there...it was a big deal....Yale...Camp, Stagg, Heffelfinger, Hinkey, McClung, etc.....they all went there....But back to reality...I pulled up about a half block from the Payne Whitney Gym and stopped...darn, no change for the meter...It was about ten to eleven and I bopped over to a nearby Shell station and pleaded my case to a middle eastern guy who gave in and changed a couple dollars for quarters...

I phoned my contact Anthony "Duke" Diaz who manages the gym to explain I was across the street getting change and would be there in a few...I got voice mail, and hurried up to get back there. Parked and situated I made it to the entrance...closed...all doors locked....Then I remembered Duke, as he goes by, telling me the Gym would be closed that week but he would be there to show me the trophy room. But he wasn't picking up....darn...I tried all the doors...looked around for another entrance to no avail.....

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So finally I call again and Duke answers...Carlton hello, yes I'll be right down...Phew!....And out he came to the sidewalk...Hi I recognize you from your website he said....follow me...And he walked me in...up one floor by elevator, past a life size bronze statue of Yale's bulldog mascot Handsome Dan, thru a doorway and BLAM!!!....WHOA!!!

.... boom bam boom and I'm in....just like that...that fast and I'm staring at not only relics from the source....but an almost overwhelming amount of it...displayed with all the character you would expect...a classic example of a college trophy room!

  continue to part 2