Monster's Ball
By Stefene Russell
Photograph courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society Archives
We’ll never know where these freshmen procured this early version of the Earth ball. We’ll never know the names of the rakish guys in knickers, the good sports pretending to be squashed, the squares in suits. We do know the name Hampson, the young photographer who shot this photo on Washington University’s Francis Field. And we know the name Gavrilo Princip, the 19-year-old Bosnian kid—hardly older than the boys in this picture—who shot Archduke Ferdinand in the streets of Sarajevo the year before. Princip’s bullet was the catalyst for World War I, already raging in Europe as these newly minted college students goofed off outside the gym. A glance at the trees reveals the leafless branches of early spring; in other words, these boys have no clue that on May 7, a torpedo from a German U-boat will rip into the side of the RMS Lusitania—and America will enter the war.
