Buffalo Bulls Football 1920

• Position - Defensive Line
  
• Class - Incoming Freshman
  
• Hometown - Hilton, N.Y.
  
• High School - Hilton Central
  
• Size - Ht: 6-5 | Wt: 273
  

August "Gusty" Schwartzmeier, a 6'5" defensive tackle from Hilton HS just outside of Rochester verbally committed to play football at UB following this past weekends football camp on campus.

Checking in at 273 pounds the Hilton senior was reportedly also holding offers from UCONN, ODU, and Albany. His desire to play close to home and his impressions of the UB coaching staff sealed the deal for Buffalo.

via digital.lib.buffalo.edu

For the first time in 1920 the Buffalo football team would play on their own field. . The University itself was transitioning from High Street it's current South Campus. So before the season started a portion of the land between Bailey and Winspear Avenues was leveled, drained and fenced so that U.B. had a football field they could call their own.

Once again the Buffalo squad struggled but before the season was out there was the matter of their first football game against Canisius College.

The Canisius Squad were considered big favorites over the 0-4 Bulls but UB prevailed on the road by a score of 12-0.

Canisius soon found itself up against a wall of stone and never was able to advance the ball inside their opponents 30-yard line. -- Buffalo Express 11/14/1920

While a 1-4 season is not something to hang your hat on Coach Powells team did win the game that mattered most and walked away with com good press.

Elsewhere in the world 1920 saw Clifford C. Furnas, who three decades later wold become UB' 9th Chancellor  was competing in the 1920 Olympic Games.

Art Powell

Masten Park grad Art Powell was taught basketball by Fred Burkhard, who learned the game from James Naismith. Powell went on to play Basketball, Baseball and Football at Syracuse.

He played on the 1904 AAU Buffalo German team that won the first ever basketball tournament at the 1904 St. Louis Olympics.

Powell helped shape football as an umpire and referee for college (including Syracuse games) and NFL games. He went on to coach basketball at Rochester, Indiana before coming to Buffalo in 1916. Powell became the first long term coach on record of the football program, as well as the first coach of the basketball program.

Al Smith was the four time Governor of New York State and the Democratic U.S. presidential candidate in 1928, the first Irish American to be nominated by one of the political parties for that office.

Part of his legacy is that he was linked to the notorious Tammany Hall machine that controlled New York City's politics.

Women's suffrage goes into effect following Tennessee's ratification of the 19th amendment.

On June 1848, the Liberty Party, composed entirely of men, made women's suffrage a plank in their presidential campaign. The next month, the Seneca Falls Convention issued the first formal demand authored by US women for suffrage.

During the 1850s the National Woman's Rights Conventions and Lucy Stone organized women's suffrage petitions campaigns in several states, and Stone became the first person to appeal for woman suffrage before a body of lawmakers when she addressed the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention in 1853.

The Civil War, and the drive to enfranchise freed slaves put womans suffrage on the back burner nationally but at the local levels the movement continued to grow.

World War I provided the final push for women's suffrage in America. After President Woodrow Wilson announced that World War I was a war for democracy, women were up in arms. The National Women's Party led by Alice Paul became the first "cause" to picket outside the White House one banner on August 14, 1917, referred to "Kaiser Wilson" and compared the plight of the German people with that of American women.

On October 17, Alice Paul was sentenced to seven months and on October 30 began a hunger strike, but after a few days prison's authorities began to force feed her. After years of opposition, Wilson changed his position in 1918 to advocate women's suffrage as a war measure. The next year Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote.