1919-10-25

Recap of the games from the Mysterious October of 1919

October is usually full of mystery and uncertainty. And while I’m sure it wasn’t planned this way, the October of 1919, when it came to Reitz High School Football, was no exception.

We know for certain Reitz played and beat the Central 2nd team on Oct. 4, 6-0. But the rest of October is a mystery.

Using the research that was given to me when I started the website in 1996, here’s what I show for the rest of October: Reitz played Owensville on Oct. 11 and lost, 14-12. Reitz was off on the 18th, then played Mount Vernon on Oct. 25, and lost, 33-0. However, nowhere in the newspaper does it list these games, either in preview or recap. There’s no known Reitz yearbook published for this year, either. So I went to Owensville and Mount Vernon and looked through their yearbooks.

Both had them. But based on what I found, it only confuses the situation. The 1920 Kickapoo, Owensville’s yearbook that covered the 1919 season, lists the Gibson County team as having defeated Reitz, 34-0, on October 25. The Oct. 31 edition of the Evansville Press also verifies this score.

Okay, so we’ve verified the Oct. 25 game against Owensville, but still no mention of the other two games. And, it gets stranger. Mount Vernon’s yearbook makes no mention of the school having a football team in the fall of 1919. Also, the Kickapoo yearbook lists the Oct. 25 battle against Reitz as being their second game, with their first being a 12-0 loss to Petersburg on Oct. 11. No mention is made of a Reitz-Owensville game on Oct. 11 nor of a Reitz double header on Oct. 25.

Could the two October 25 “games” have been mixed up by the early Reitz historians and actually been the same game? The scores are similar. This was all so long ago, unfortunately there’s no one left to ask, so we don’t know.

All we do know is that Reitz may have played one, two or three games during this time period. Actually maybe four or five, because there was talk about the Panthers getting ready for upcoming games with Boonville and Madisonville. But I never could find any results and that was the only mentions I could find.