Wonder coach at the rustic and little known College of Western Maryland, Richard Cresson Harlow was appointed head coach at Harvard on January 7, 1935, to the dismay and discouragement of a Cambridge weary of football losses. In seven years of looping defenses, double shifts and sleight-of-hand offense, the prestidigitator from Westminster put the Crimson back in the Eastern football picture and in the process built himself a reputation as on of the leading tacticians in American football.

In the years before the war Harlow ran up a record of 41 wins, 33 defeats and 5 ties, his best season coming with the 1941 team when the Crimson won 6, lost 1, and tied 1 and blasted Yale by a 14-0 score. 1942 was a bad year and the Crimson lost to Yale, 7 to 3, to close out what a Boston sports scribe termed "a poor season against too strong opponents."

Two Years in Navy

In 1943 Harlow with most of the football material at Harvard joined the armed forces. He rose to the rank of lieutenant commander during his two-year-plus stayed in the Navy, most of which was spent in the Pacific area.

While on Midway Island Harlow contracted malaria which ended in a high blood pressure condition after three months in Naval hospitals. Released from service in the spring of 1946 Harlow returned to Cambridge in the fall, although far from his pre-war health.

Without the benefit of a spring practice to learn the Harlow system, the 1946 Harlow eleven won 7 games and lost but 2--one a 27 to 14 loss to Yale. This year's season was one of the poorest in recent Harvard history as the Harlow system failed to function for the first time since the master came to Cambridge.

Far from a well man during the last two years of coaching at Harvard, Harlow had to restrict his time on the practice field and subsist on a strict diet.