Dartmouth Football Coach, Football fellowship to Oxford
Before becoming headmaster at Tabor, Cappy was on the literature
faculty and head football coach at Phillips Andover Academy. In 1909,
he was the head coach of the Dartmouth Football Team.
(
Dartmouth Big Green All Time Coaches -- Walter Huston Lillard, 1909)
While doing graduate work at Oxford, he traveled around
England, giving lectures on American football at British Public
Schools.
Cappy played undergraduate football for Dartmouth from 1902-1904,
and he played in the game that opened Harvard Stadium. Dartmouth
beat Harvard 11-0.
The team he played on was one of the first integrated Ivy League teams,
with Left End African American
Mat Bullock,
who was also Phi Beta Kappa, on the Track team and sang in the Glee Club.
In an article in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, Cappy told the
story of how (the time frame was over one hundred years ago)
"...the Princeton players sent unofficial word to the Dartmouth team that if
Mat Bullock played they would take him out. It seemed incredible as a serious
threat; but serious or not, our line-up remained unchanged. Only a few minutes
after the game started, Mat ran down the field to cover a punt, made his tackle,
and was piled on viciously. The result was a broken collar bone which kept him
out of play for the rest of the season. It was a case of deliberate mayhem.
There was no penalty imposed on the offending players."
A fight ensued between the Dartmouth and the Princeton players. The umpires
asked Huston to leave the field. But after consultation with the coach, he went
back on the field. He played the rest of the game, and the officials did not object.
Marriage
Ethel Hazen Lillard
(December 11, 1882 - September 2, 1983)
grew up in Hanover, NH, the daughter of Dartmouth
engineering professor, John Vose Hazen. She was a
graduate of Smith College.
Ethel Hazen Lillard, wife of W. Huston Lillard,
her mother, Harriet Hurleburt Hazen,
her daughter, Barbara Lillard Powers,
and her granddaughter, Judy Powers Malloy.
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Walter Huston Lillard
Educator, Dartmouth Football Coach,
Chief of the Resettlement Division
of the International Refugee Organization
Walter Huston Lillard, ("Cappy") an educator who promoted
International peace, was headmaster of Tabor Academy for many
years.
Early Years
As a young man, he was the color guard for American day
at the International Paris Exposition of 1900, carrying
the American flag down the Champs Elysee. The band master
was John Philip Sousa. Sousa played "The Stars and Stripes
Forever" for the first time that evening at the
Place de L'Opera. At the crescendo, Cappy and his co-color
bearer started waving the flag. "Never have I heard such an
ovation," he wrote. His daughter, Barbara Lillard Powers
wrote that between guard duty, the guards played baseball
against John Philip Souza's band and lost "when Sousa,
running behind, brought out a keg of beer with the offer of a
glass to any of his bandsmen who made a run."
World War II
In the 1934, when one of his friends in the German
academic world was arrested and imprisoned as an
"enemy of the state", Cappy interrupted a trip to go
himself to try to help. Through the US Consul in
Berlin, he got permission from Himmler's office
for him and the Consul to visit Dr. Morsbach.
In the papers I found after her death, my mother
described how my grandfather and Dr. Reis "were
picked up one morning in an SS official car,
complete with SS driver and 'escort'. They were
driven out to Magdeburg where my father got his first
look at Hitler's early moves against the
intelligentsia. Morsbach appeared before
them in grey prison garb looking ill."
The Consul saluted Morsbach, saying, "'His
Excellency, the Ambassador for the
United States, sends you his personal regards
and very best wishes.' Taped as they must have been,
the words must have gone back to Himmler. At any
rate Dr. Morsbach was released shortly afterwards."
In 1946 and 1947, W. Houston Lillard served in Vienna,
Austria, under the United Nations. As Chief of Resettlement
of the International Refugee Organization, he worked in the
difficult job of finding homes for the refugees of World War II.
He worked to resettle thousands of refugees from Poland,
Hungary, Russia, Greece, Spain and many other places,
including thousands of Jewish refugees and Jewish refugees on
their way to Israel. He also helped Christians from Russia,
Yugoslavia, Rumania, and Bulgaria, who refused to accept
Communism and whose resettlement was interfered with by
the Russian government.
photo from Courage on the Danube by W. Huston Lillard
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