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Still better, in fact the best stunt of all, is to keep your eye open for pictures of the actual figures of the running athletes. Every magazine and daily paper has such figures in it occasionally. These figures can be mounted on cardboard to give them stiffness, colored, to make them look lifelike, and again mounted on small wooden blocks. Using them, it is not hard to imagine you are at a real track-meet with real athletes struggling for supremacy.

The last thing needed is a paper on which you write the order of events, with spaces in which to write the winners' names. This order of events could follow the usual one of the outdoor meet. A sample program would be as follows:

Event 1-100-yard Dash (Trial heats)
Event 2-100-yard Hurdles (Trial heats)
Event 3-Pole-vault

Event 4-Mile Run

Event 5-220-yard Hurdles (Trial heats) Event 6-Shot-put

Event 7-220-yard Dash (Trial heats)

Event 8-880-yard Run

Event 9-Hammer-throw

Event 10-100-yard Dash (Finals)

Event 11-120-yard Hurdles (Finals)

Event 12-High Jump

Event 13-220-yard Hurdles (Finals)
Event 14-220-yard Dash (Finals)
Event 15-Broad Jump
Event 16-440-yard Dash.

Having written out this program, the meet is ready to start. This is the way you run the various events:

100-yard Dash. Use one die, each man throwing in turn. In this event, as in all others, each man throws in turn regardless of how he stands in the race. The distance is, of course, 100 yards, or 25 spaces, and the positions are determined by the order in which the men cross the line between the twenty-fifth and the twenty-sixth space. Since this is a trial heat, divide the number of entries up into groups in the way they usually do in a real meet. Each college is allowed three entries, and care should be taken to not have more than one man of each college in each heat. Record is made of the winners of each heat, and, for the finals, these winners run the race. Of course, no points are scored except in this final heat.

220-yard Dash. Run the same way as the 100, except that you use two dice and the distance is 220 yards, or 55 spaces.

440-yard Dash. In this event you use two dice, and, in order to save the time it would take for a throw to be made for each entry, a good plan is to eliminate the last men as you pass the twenty-fifth space, the fiftieth space and the seventy-fifth space. The number

X

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90

91

35

34

33

32

31

30

29

28

27

26

25

24

23

START OF IOC

FINISH

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IX

THE TRACK. X INDICATES HURDLES FOR 220, O INDICATES HURDLES FOR 125 YARDS

eliminated each time depends on the number in the race. If but two colleges are racing, don't eliminate any of them. If there are, say, twelve in the race, eliminate one each time. If a larger number, increase the number left out. 880-yard Run. Here, owing to the greater distance (two laps), you use three dice, and it is a good plan to again eliminate. In this case, however, the eliminations should come at the 55th space, the 110th space, and the 55th space again on the second lap.

Mile Run. This is run just like the 880-yard run, except that you run four laps, and eliminate only on the complete lap being made.

120-yard Hurdles. This is run with one die for a distance of 120 yards, or thirty spaces. To imitate the obstacle of the hurdle, place a cross with ink on every sixth space. Mark four crosses. These represent the hurdles. Any man

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Each man throws in turn, three times. The inches are indicated by an additional throw each time of two extra dice.. The winner is the man making the highest throw.

Hammer-throw. This is played the same way as the shot-put, but you use fifteen dice and throw them twice, so that the final throw would be just as if you had thirty dice. The inches are again indicated by two extra dice. High Jump. This is run just like the polevault. It takes an even throw to clear the bar, which starts at four feet. It is raised an inch at a time. The winner is the man who

eliminates all the others.

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Run the same way as the 120, except that more hurdles are marked in with crosses made by different colored inks.

In this race, the crosses are marked on every cighth space, six crosses in all.

So much for the track events. In the field events, the contests are managed a bit differently, for the pasteboard track is no longer used, but the dice still play a very important part.

Pole-vault. Use one die. Imagine the bar placed at nine feet. To clear it, a man must throw an even number, two, four, or six. He gets three tries to clear, as in the real event. The bar is then supposed to be raised each time six inches till it reaches eleven feet, when it is raised two inches at a time. As is usual, the contest continues till one man is left, the rest having been eliminated because, in three tries, they could not clear a certain distance.

Shot-put. We use nine dice for this event.

A SPECIMEN SCORE-CARD

Broad Jump. This is run like the shot-put, except that you use five dice, with the usual two extra ones for the inches. Each man gets three "jumps," and the winner is the man making the greatest distance.

To score, follow the usual college system of giving five points for first, three for second, two for third, and one for fourth. Make a score-card, with the events at the top of the paper and, running down the left hand margin, the names of the colleges. As the points are scored, mark them under the proper event opposite the name of the college, and it will be surprising to see how easily the meet is followed.

The beauty of this indoor track-meet is that there is no end to its possibilities. Dual meets can be arranged; intercollegiate contests can

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be scheduled; weekly contests can be held. In short, you play just as often as you have the time, the inclination, and the fellows to play it with. And of course that does not exclude the girls who enjoy track sports and who would like to try their hand at the game.

It might interest you, too, to know how realistic this meet can be made by telling of how we developed it. We not only used the small figures of the athletes, but we used the proper names for the entries in each event, as we had them from the regular college list.

Not satisfied with this, we began to keep records of the winners and see if we could break those records with new winners. This brought in the question of timing the events. Our first idea was to take the actual time, but this led to such a scramble to finish that it knocked all the fun out of the races. So we hit on the plan of counting the number of throws needed till the winner crossed the line.

One fellow acted as score-keeper and timer. His job was to count the number of turns needed till the first man crossed the finishline. Each turn counted as one second. To make the fractions of a second, we noticed the space on which the winning throw had landed him and counted back to the line, deducting each space from the time as one-fifth of a second. Thus if the throw took him over the line eight spaces, that would deduct eightfifths from the winning time.

But just counting actual throws that way gave us some very ridiculous time records as compared with the real thing. So we made a

change, in that we set a certain time for each event and added to that the time made by our counting of the throws, and then we had a time record that was very satisfactory, because it was so near the real thing.

What we worked out was as follows:

100-yard- 5 seconds

220-yard-16 seconds

440-yard-41 seconds

880-yard-1 minute, 36 seconds.
Mile 3 minutes, 41 seconds
120-yard hurdles 9 seconds
220-yard hurdles-24 seconds.

Following this schedule, and taking the 100yard for example, we had six throws. Each throw was a second. Adding it to the set time of five seconds, we had for our time for our 100-yard, eleven seconds, which was close enough to the real time to make it seem realistic.

The reason we like to keep the time record is that it makes breaking records easier to watch, and, as you can imagine, there is some "tall" excitement as the runners swing in on the home stretch and you realize that there is a chance, by making only a few throws, to break the record. Then the cries of encouragement rise from the excited bunch, and what a yell goes up as the runner crosses the line and the record is smashed! Talk about the fun and excitement of a real meet-get a good, live bunch of fellows together some time and start my indoor meet, and you'll have excitement enough to raise you out of your chair time and time again.

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From "Joaquin Miller's Complete Poems," by courtesy of Harr Wagner Publishing Company, San Francisco.

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By VICTOR ROSEWATER

How a boy carried a message for Andrew Carnegie to a war-time comrade he had never seen is a companion story to the incident I related to readers of St. Nicholas (March, 1916) about securing a unique autograph from Mark Twain. By way of explanation, I must state again that I spent the winter of 1888 in Washington serving as a page in the United States Senate, and more particularly looking after callers who wanted to send in their cards to Senators whom they wished to see. Among the visitors from day to day were men and women distinguished in every walk of life; and all of us boys there were taken with the autograph-collecting fever, missing no opportunity to pounce upon folks with famous names to write in our albums which we constantly carried with us.

One hum-drum afternoon, the listlessness of the day was suddenly broken by the arrival of a fine-looking little man, not much taller than I was, who was asking to see all the most important and influential members of the Senate. His card when it came into my possession disclosed the fact that he was none other than Andrew Carnegie, the great ironmaster, whose colossal philanthropies were known to all the world. He was not only short of stature but slight of build, with a square forehead, tawny close-cropped beard, twinkling eyes, quick nervous movements.

Eager to get his autograph, I waited for an opening, and, when it came, he graciously scratched off his signature with a sputtering fountain pen that seemed out of order.

Бол

"And what is your name?" he fired back at me, pleasantly.

I thanked him for his autograph, and answered his question.

"That's not an unfamiliar name," he commented. "Was not your father once a telegraph operator?"

Upon my replying, "Yes, sir, he was," with the further information that my father was then editor of a newspaper called "The Bee" in our home town, Omaha, he continued:

"Well, your father and I were both telegraph operators in the war. I used to talk to him over the wires, but I have never met him. I'll send him a message which he will understand."

The big little man started to write again, and after he returned the album, I found he had put this inscription in the lower corner of the page:

"Seventy-three"
To The Bee
A. C.

I showed the autograph and message to my father, who corroborated what Mr. Carnegie had told me. When, several years later, the two met, the message I had carried was recalled and the over-the-wire acquaintance became a lasting personal friendship.

"Seventy-three" for both of them has now been followed by "Thirty."

Note-In the working telegraph cipher, numbers are code signals; "Seventy-three" means "Best Regards" and "Thirty" is "The End."

July Yours
Anker be megs

Sevent, three

To the Bee

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