B Y PET ER W EI S ’ 7 8 , P’ 1 3
HISTORY LESSON
Go Team!
96
NMH Magazine
The story of this 1981 varsity jacket begins, as so many stories do, at Harvard University. In 1865, the Harvard baseball team began identifying its top athletes by allowing them to affix a large crimson “H” to the center of their sweaters. Thirty years later, Mount Hermon took up a similar practice, awarding athletes an “H” made of a deep maroon chenille, which was sewn on whatever sweater a boy might have at hand. While the earliest letter jackets appeared in the 1930s, athletes at Mount Hermon seemed to prefer the original practice of letter sweaters; in the 1940s, the student store was selling sweaters of black or white, to which deserving
P H O T O : C H AT T M A N P H O T O G R A P H Y
athletes could sew their own varsity awards. The classic boiled-wool letter jacket did not catch on until about 1960, and though the fashion waned at the close of that decade, it had a renaissance in the mid-to-late 1970s. Generally speaking, today’s NMH student feels that the 20th century has little to offer the fashion-conscious, but wear a jacket like this one around campus and you’re sure to evoke one feeling above all others: jealousy. “Hey, that’s a cool jacket, Mr. Weis. Where did you get it? Can we get one of those?” Varsity letters are still awarded to deserving NMH athletes. The jackets themselves await their next renaissance.