Finding BFS: Further Evidence

Some may remember that we published an article about the 1931 Football Team in 2006, honoring the 75th anniversary of their incredible feat, A Perfect Season - The Football Team of 1931. Ironically, while scanning new photos for the BFS Sampler album on the Photos page of the Digital Archives, I discovered that there had once been a plaque at BFS honoring the acclaimed football team of that 1931-1932 school year. The photos below illustrate how short institutional memory can be. And it's not just BFS, believe me, such memory lapses happen everywhere.

The first photo is of a wood shop class, taken in the late 1930s. What is on the shelf on the rear wall?

This photo is an enlargement of that shelf on the rear wall:

No longer in existence, this looks to be an engraved wooden plaque with the names of all of the 1931 football team's players, their positions, coaches, and the scores of the opposing teams (remember that one of the our team's feats was not allowing any opponents to score that year). What seems to be another engraved wooden plaque is in front of it, but that plaque is so obscured that one can only make out the bottom line, "Brooklyn Frien..." and the "TR," giving almost no clue as to its purpose.

Always interesting to find such evidence of what has disappeared from BFS. Even more interesting to learn that it took less than 10 years for a once-important event to be placed on an unimportant shelf at BFS. Rediscovering and reclaiming the rich history of BFS is vital.