UNTIL, the bleak afternoon in Evanston when the referee moved the ball to Minnesota's one year line and a Northwestern touchdown, it was well known that Minnesota had been playing football since 1932 without a single defeat. Coach Bernie Bierman wore Knute Rockne's mantle; to Minneapolis citizens from bellboy up, the garment even seemed a bit snug.

University of Minnesota yearbook athletic seem to shine with the brilliance of the Bierman achievement in football, beginning 1915 when Bernie obtained the Gophers the Big Ten title. In the record books of the University Montana, there is no such brilliance attached to Coach Bierman's name. Mustered out of the Marine Corps, he served two years as University of Montana's coach, years unsuccess enough to cause him to quit coaching in favor of selling bonds in Minneapolis.

In 1923 he was back coaching at Pillsbury Academy. As head coach at Tulane, he made the Green Wall surf that roared over the U.S.A. every fall. When he returned to Minneapolis to coach the Gophers in part his problem was to turn powerful Norsemen thinkers on the field. Graying, quiet, Bernie Bierman does not remember a time his life wasn't certain around football, except possible his first six years in Springfield, Minn., before he had been taught to distinguish a football from a rattle.

WHEN James T. Farrell studied at the University of Chicago in 1923 he used to hand in thousand words in an almost illegible longhand to Prof. Jim Weber Linn. Desciphering difficult under graduate handwriting is tiresome, but the professor read young Farrell's stuff with great interest. To the black haired Irish kid from Chicago's Blue Island Avenue, he gave encouragement, out of which ultimately came four grim, first-class novels of life on Chicago's South Side. The fourth, A World I Never Made, has just been published. The world James Farrell has lived in for 31 years is obviously one he had no hand in. He knew stinging poverty, quit college four years ago, worked as a gas station and cigar store attendant, attended night classes at DePauw now takes small part in re-making the world as is possible by but a Socialist. Still poor, James T. Farrell is charming, generous, and a clear thinking, clear seeing writers.