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| The Big Fish That Didn't Get Away |
He's a modern-day George Bailey, now nine decades into what most assuredly has been a wonderful life. His Bedford Falls is actually Erie, Pa., where an average winter brings 87 inches of snow and doesn't end until well into April.
He grew up here, came back after college, and now has stayed another, oh, 60 years. Today, Erie is still his home, in retirement. He met his wife of 57 years there, raised his kids there and now plays with his grandchildren there.
 Courtesy: Princeton Athletic Communications
Unlike Frank Capra's fictional creation, though, Henry Fish has managed to sneak away from his hometown on a few occasions, whether it was to vacation in Mexico, become an accomplished skier in Austria or, during his days at Princeton University, turn a love of a sport he hadn't seen until only a few years earlier into a Hall-of-Fame lacrosse career.
While Henry Fish may be 82 years old, he sounds less than half of that when he answers the phone. Mention the sport of lacrosse, and his voice gets even more energized.
"Those were great times," he says. "It was exciting to be part of it."
Fish is a member of the Princeton Class of 1948, a midfielder who scored 47 goals as a Tiger. He was an All-America in 1947 and 1948. Back before the North-South game became a senior-only event, Fish was a three-time participant.
"I still have a very nice letter from Dick Colman [Princeton's Hall-of-Fame football coach who coached lacrosse as well during Fish's time as a player]," Fish says. "It says that he thought I was the best midfielder in the country in the spring of 1948. Somebody must have read that 40 years later, because I got this call in the 1988 telling me I'd been elected to the Hall of Fame. It's an honor I appreciate greatly."
Fish played on teams that went a combined 23-8 in his three years. He is joined in the US Lacrosse Hall of Fame in Baltimore by two of his teammates, Fred Allner and Leonard (Myrt) Gaines. Another teammate of his, Ernie Ransome, would later coach the Tigers.
"I was very happy to join two classmates in the Hall of Fame," he says. "To have three of us from our team in the Hall of Fame I think is pretty unusual."
Indeed, the names of the three Hall of Famers are all listed on a nearly-yellow piece of paper, one that lists the 10 Princeton starters for the 1948 Princeton-Navy game in Annapolis. That, and an equally-as-yellowed roster and game-by-game scoring chart, are all that remain in the archives of the 1948 season.
The roster notes Allner as being from the Gilman School and a Baltimore native. As for Gaines, his hometown is listed as Ruxton, Md., which is about 10 miles outside of Baltimore. Those two were from the heart of lacrosse country.
As for Fish, well, his hometown is listed as Erie. As a boy there, he played soccer, basketball and football. Lacrosse in Erie was not an option.
"I went to Exeter in 1941 when I was 16 years old," he says. "The spring of 1942 was the first time I ever saw a lacrosse stick. I played at Exeter in my sophomore and junior years. I never got to play my senior year. I graduated early and joined the service."
Fish, like every other young man of the day, was touched by World War II. Indeed, the 1948 Princeton roster lists branch of service along with height, weight, hometown, position and everything else on a normal roster; of the 24 players on the team, 19 have a branch of the service listed.
"I attended preflight school at the University of North Carolina when I was 19 and 20," Fish says. "I was just finishing up the preflight program when the war ended. At that point, they let us all go. I had been accepted to Princeton, so I started there in the fall of 1945."
Fish is part of a Princeton family, as his father Howard was in the Class of 1919. He also had an uncle Roger (Class of 1912) and two younger brothers (Mac in the Class of 1952 and John in the Class of 1955) who attended the school. Mac passed away in 2001.
Fish played junior varsity basketball [future chairman of the federal reserve Paul Volker was a teammate], but lacrosse was his game.
"We played most of our games on a field next to Palmer Stadium, next to the Armory," Fish says. "There's a building there now [Jadwin Hall]. We'd play our big games in Palmer Stadium. We would practice inside the armory in February. It was such a different game then than it is today. The biggest difference is the equipment. We had big, heavy wooden sticks. You couldn't take shots 90 miles per hour like the kids do now. We wore football shoes. We had leather helmets with metal faceguards. Back then, the rules said that when the whistle blew, everyone had to stop exactly where he was."
Princeton lacrosse started in 1881, but the Tigers did not field a team between 1894 and 1921. The game grew quickly after that, resulting in the program's first USILA national championship in 1937, when the Tigers went 6-0 against college opponents (losing to the Mount Washington Lacrosse Club and the Baltimore Athletic Club). The 1942 team matched that achievement, routing Yale 9-1 in the season finale to wrap up another title.
Bill Logan, who had played at Johns Hopkins and had participated in the Olympics when lacrosse was contested as a demonstration sport, was the coach of both of those national championship teams, and he continued to coach the Tigers through the end of the World War II years. Princeton went 1-4 in 1944 and 1-5 in 1945, and Logan left to become director of admissions at Hopkins, as well as an assistant coach for the Blue Jays.
His successor was Colman, then an assistant coach to yet another Hall of Fame football coach, Charlie Caldwell, whom Colman would replace in 1957.
"He was a great football coach, but he had never played lacrosse," says Fish of Colman. "Fortunately, most of the boys were from Baltimore or New England and had played a lot. The quality of play today is so superior. They're starting younger. They run much more sophisticated plays. They have better coaching. It's a whole different world."
Fish has a pretty good recall of his Princeton career, with a little slip here or there. For instance, when he says: "Princeton lacrosse was pretty outstanding in the 1940s, but we could never beat Johns Hopkins," he's not quite right, as the Tigers knocked off the Blue Jays 12-8 in the 1946 season, his sophomore year. "Wonderful," he says upon hearing the correction, "I didn't remember that."
Princeton went 8-2 in 1946 and followed that with a 9-3 year in 1947. The Tigers were 6-5 his senior year.
"Training for us was a little more, uh, casual those days," he says. "Not a lot of guys were adhering to strict training rules. It was a great time to play lacrosse."
Princeton would win two more national championships, in 1951 and 1953, in the years after Fish graduated. That was followed by the formation of the Ivy League, and Princeton won its first league title in 1957. It has won 22 more since, though none came between 1967 and 1992, shortly after Bill Tierney became the Tiger head coach. Tierney has also coached Princeton to six NCAA championships.
"I've talked to Bill several times, and I say hello to him when I get down there," Fish says. "For a very long stretch, Princeton wasn't doing too well. He's done a masterful job turning the program around. He's an outstanding coach."
While Tierney was turning Princeton around, and for the nearly 40 years that preceded it, Fish was living in, of course, Erie.
He spent one year after graduation at General Electric in a training program, but he returned to Erie to join American Sterilizer Company, a hospital equipment firm that his maternal grandfather had founded. He retired in 1988 as CEO and Chairman of the Board. He and his wife Laurana raised their three kids in town, and they now have six grandchildren.
His life hasn't been all Erie, though the city was always close by even when he wasn't. He joined the Erie Ski Club in 1964 as the group went to Innsbruck, Austria, to watch the 1964 Winter Olympics and get in some skiing of its own. From that beginning, he went back to Kitzbuhl in the Austrian Alps every year through 1971 and then on-and-off after that.
"We found out that if we could complete 50 of the 70 designated ski runs over a period time, we would be rewarded with the Kitzbuhl Gold Star," he says. "A good friend of mine from Erie and I started out with 20 of the first level runs. The next year, we ventured into the next level, where we needed to learn to ski in the powder, with no packed slopes and longer runs. That time, we reached the 30 level."
The quest became more and more difficult each year, including one run that required them to walk up the mountain, stay overnight with a farmer and then ski down the next day.
"By 1971, we had achieved our goal and were rewarded with the Gold Star," he says. "At the time, there had been around 150 such awards all time, and we were among the first dozen Americans."
Fish continued skiing until 2000, when he was well into his 70s, after having hip replacement surgery. He still plays tennis and is still involved in the sport of lacrosse.
Unlike his own youth, Fish has seen to it that there is lacrosse in Erie today. In 2000 he helped co-found the Erie Youth Lacrosse Association, which has helped the sport develop among high school and middle school players. He recently created an endowment fund to help the program continue to grow.
"The kids today are so far advanced from where we were," he says. "The good ones are all ambidextrous. In the old days, I had a tough time playing lefthanded. I remember coming in front in the Navy game and scoring lefthanded. In Palmer Stadium. It was the only lefthanded goal I ever had, I think. I don't remember any others."
If you close your eyes, you can almost see it. The wooden stick. The short shorts. The stadium that isn't there anymore. The era that isn't there anymore.
Henry Fish is a living link to it. Still living, still in the same place where it all started all those years ago. He still lives in Erie, Pa.
He will live forever in the lacrosse Hall of Fame.
Features by Jerry Price from Earlier Seasons
Picture Perfect
Metz on Metz
The Ultimate Warrior
Seeing 30-30
Think You Know Bill Tierney?
Letter of the Law
Andy Moe, Where Did You Go?
Caught in His Web-The Swami
Jerry Price is Associate Director of Athletics and Athletic Communications at Princeton University.
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