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How many Olympic medals have Georgetown athletes
won?
By the archivist's count, at least 33 Olympic athletes have had
a Georgetown affiliation. These athletes have competed in track
and field, rowing, basketball, equestrian, and kayaking events
and have won 15 medals -- five gold, five silver, five bronze.
Our initial venture into Olympic competition came in 1900, when
the games were held in Paris, France. A trio of Georgetown sprinters,
Arthur Duffy, William Holland, and Edmund Minahan, competed and
won four medals one gold, two silver and one bronze. This still
stands as the highest medal total by Georgetown athletes at any
single Games. According to the Georgetown College Journal of December
1900, of the nine American colleges represented at the Paris Games,
only the University of Pennsylvania, with a squad of thirteen,
placed in more events than Georgetown.
Is it true that the statue of John Carroll, which sits
in Healy Circle, arrived on campus too late for its own unveiling
ceremony?
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Fund raising for the bronze statue of John Carroll began
in 1909. A grand unveiling ceremony was planned for May
4, 1912. Chief Justice Edward Douglass White, who had been
a student here from 1857 to 1860, was to make the presentation
speech and Cardinal Gibbons, Attorney General George F.
Wickersham who was representing President Taft, Speaker
of the House Champ Clark, and Baron Hengelmuller, Ambassador
from Austria-Hungary and Dean of the Diplomatic Corps, were
also slated to speak. However, after invitations had been
sent out, the foundry notified the university that the statue
would not be ready in time. Not wanting to postpone the
ceremony, Georgetown officials ordered a plaster cast of
the statue, which was painted brown and duly unveiled in
front of thousands. In 1940, Brother James Harrington, who
was in charge of workmen on the campus in 1912, recalled
that: "Weeks later, in the dead of night, today's bronze
statue was substituted for the spurious one and no one was
the wiser."
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At the unveiling, May 1912. From the Georgetown University
Archives.
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Did a decorated war hero once serve as our mascot?
After World War I, many veterans came to Georgetown, among them
a dog named Stubby who was said to represent the breed of Boston
bull terrier in a general way. Stubby had been adopted by the
102nd Infantry while it was training at Yale and, when his unit
was deployed to France, he went along, smuggled on a troop ship.
He arrived at Georgetown in 1922 with J. Robert Conroy, a Law
student, and became the mascot for the football team. Between
halves, Stubby would nudge a football around the field, much to
the delight of the crowd. When he died in 1926, The Hoya ran an
obituary which reads in part: "While [in France] he went
through the four big drives with his regiment, and acquired a
throbbing hatred for the enemy, and a penchant for collecting
medals. It is related of him that, not content with merely helping
the boys out in rounding up the enemy, he went out on his own
one day, picked up the first German in sight, clamped eager teeth
into the calf of the gentleman's leg, and held him there until
his buddies relieved him of his prisoner. For his bravery and
devotion to the Americans, he was awarded medals by both the French
and American governments. He was wounded once by shrapnel, but
otherwise came through unharmed." Stubby's final resting
place is in the Smithsonian Institution. Several pictures of Stubby
can be seen
at the "History Wired" Smithsonian website.
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