Daily History Picture: Snowball Fight Princeton November 20, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Historical Pictures , trackback
Princeton students after a snowball fight: thanks to Wade for this many months ago.
22 Nov 2015: Anon X writes in with this tab that shows that snowball fights did take place.
He also points out though that there are many on the net who claim that this was taken after a boxing match. Any help? drbeachcombing At yahoo DOT com
Bruce T now writes in, 22 Dec 2015, I don’t think it could be a boxing match. One, look at the hands of the two seated men. We can see three of their four hands. Not a mark to be seen and in the days when the transition from bare knuckles to gloves was just underway. In fact the one fellow could be a hand model. Two, they are very heavily dressed. Coats, heavy sweaters and at least two other shirts. The one fellow does have a glove, but it’s much more suited to hurling snowballs than the grappling style boxing of the time. Finally, our lads are sopping wet around the head and torso. As a veteran of many snowball fights, that’s where you get soaked. A fight? Very possible, but if the photo is authentic, my guess is it’s something that happened because of the snowball fight. Princeton was a male only institution at this time. I’m sure there were more than snowballs exchanged in the melee’. Again for a snowball fight of over a couple of dozen young males, that’s going to happen. The facial damage? Brawling during the fight would be logical as would ice balls and rockballs being used by some of the participants. The latter two things will remove teeth, flatten noses and take out an eye when thrown by eleven and twelve year old boys.Considering the average age of the men involved, roughly nineteen, many athletic and with excellent arms, a well placed ice ball could fracture a skull or worse.
