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1928

Football by Scott Goode (10/16/20)

Oldest Record in the Book: Cromer Ames Dazzles Jonesboro Baptist for Four TD

This is the eighth in a series of stories about the oldest records at Harding University. Today's record is from Harding football and is the oldest known record in any Harding sport.

Harding fielded a football team beginning in 1924, its first year of existence in Morrilton, Arkansas. In those early years, Harding played games in leather helmets against high schools, small colleges and junior varsity level teams from larger colleges.

The 1927 team was historically bad. The team went 0-8-1, scoring only two touchdowns all season (and missing both extra points) and suffering an 87-0 loss to Beebe A&M. From the beginning in 1924 through the third game of the 1928 season, Harding's opponents shut out the Bisons 19 times in the school's first 28 games.

In that scoring environment, it might be surprising that the oldest record in the books for the Harding football team came in the fourth game of the 1928 season, when sophomore Cromer Ames scored four touchdowns in Harding's 64-0 blowout of Jonesboro Baptist in the Bisons's only home game.

Note: Jonesboro Baptist opened in Jonesboro, Arkansas, in 1924 and lasted until 1934.

Thanks to a scrapbook kept by Harding student Albert Von Allmen, Harding has photos of the game in its archives.

A game story from the Arkansas Gazette two days later described the action:
  • "The Jonesboro line was unable to prevent large gains from the line bucks of the Bisons … "
  • "Harding outplayed Jonesboro in every phase of the game. The air was filled with a dazzling aerial attack and Jonesboro was unable to assemble any defense."
  • "Harding's line smeared all Jonesboro plays on or behind the line of scrimmage."
The final paragraph of the story confirms Ames's record-setting day: "Four of the ten touchdowns were won by Ames of the Bison team who was the star." Nine times in program history, a Harding player has tied Ames's record, but it has never been broken. Cole Chancey was the most recent to tie the record, scoring four touchdowns in a game twice in 2017.

But who was Cromer Ames?

Walter Cromer Ames was born April 24, 1903, the fourth child of General Beauregard Ames and Frances E. (Cromer) Ames in tiny Ozan, Arkansas, a town of just over 100 people located in Hempstead County in the southwest corner of the state.

Note: General Beauregard Ames was not a general. That was his given name. He was a farmer born in June 1861, just two months after his namesake Confederate General P.G.T. Beauregard touched off the Civil War by leading the attack on Fort Sumter in South Carolina.

The Ames family lived in Ozan in 1910, a few miles away in Wallaceburg in 1920 and in Blevins, another Hempstead County town by the middle of the decade.

Cromer was 23 years old when he enrolled at Magnolia A&M (now Southern Arkansas University) in 1926. That year, he played for the Mulerider football team and made one of the most famous plays in the program's history.

In James F. Willis's book Southern Arkansas University: The Mulerider School's Centennial History, 1909-2009, Willis recounts the play in which Ames caught an errant pass in his own end zone and returned it 101 yards for a game-tying touchdown against Henderson-Brown (now Henderson State University). Ames then won the game by kicking the extra point.

It is unclear where Ames spent 1927, but in 1928, he enrolled at Harding for what appears to be his only year in Morrilton. He is the last sophomore pictured in the 1928-29 edition of The Petit Jean, Harding's yearbook. Ames never appeared in another Petit Jean and was not among 16 players individually pictured on the 1928 team.

I have been unable to find Cromer Ames in the 1930 or 1940 censuses. In 1941, Ames and his wife Dessie lived in La Feria, Texas, a town of about 1,600 located in South Texas. He worked for C.A. Ripley, who engaged in various business ventures, consisting of the purchase and sale of vegetable produce, operating an ice manufacturing plant, conducting a hardware store, and farming.

Ames died on his birthday in the South Texas town of Harlingen in 1979.

Ames left his mark on the Harding football team. The squad went unbeaten in its final four games of 1928 and finished 3-1-2 for its first winning season.

Almost 92 years later, Ames's effort on a sunny, cool Friday afternoon against the Jonesboro Baptist Parsons still stands as the oldest record in the book.
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Three more notes: I had a lot of help collecting information for this story. Special thanks to my friend and fellow rabbit-hole chaser Jim Yeager, Joanna Crisco in the Harding Alumni Office, Harding archivist and special collections librarian Hannah Wood and several members of the Brackett Library staff.

I found the photo that appears on this article in the Harding sports information archives. The only label on the photo said that it was the 1928 football team. I have no other information, but it is my opinion based on comparing other photos that the second player on the back row against wall is Cromer Ames but maybe not. Either way that photo is one of my favorite Harding athletics photos.

If anyone has success finding Cromer Ames in the 1930 or 1940 census, please send that information to me at sgoode@harding.edu.
 
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Players Mentioned

Cole Chancey

#34 Cole Chancey

RB
5' 10"
Senior

Players Mentioned

Cole Chancey

#34 Cole Chancey

5' 10"
Senior
RB
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