Before reviewing one of the greatest hoaxes in sports history, let’s first meet the perpetrators: Morris Newburger, Lew Krupnick and Bink Dannenbaum.
Newburger was a senior partner at the Wall Street brokerage firm Newburger, Loeb & Co. Two of his passions were sports and pranks. One time, for a friend’s birthday party, Newburger sent 12 trained seals. Another time, when his wife, a Manhattan socialite, was having a dinner party, he had a telegram delivered: “If you ever invite these people to my house again, don’t include me.” It was signed, “Your husband.”
Newburger’s most inspired move, though, was concocting a fictional college football team — led by an equally fictional running back known as the Celestial Comet — and duping major newspapers (yes, including The New York Times) into writing about it.
“When my father took me to the movies,” said his son Maury Newburger, a Manhattan travel agent, “it was usually to watch old Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy films. That’s when I figured out where he got some of his comical ideas.”
Krupnick, who ran the mail room at Newburger, Loeb & Co., was one of Newburger’s accomplices. He, too, knew how to play; he had worked alongside Jack Benny in vaudeville.
Alexander Dannenbaum Jr., known as Bink, was a friend of Newburger’s who was in the broadcast business. Dannenbaum’s son, Alexander Dannenbaum III, said that his father had his own impish streak.
Bink Dannenbaum and his boss at the old Westinghouse TV network once bought, for $500 apiece, a vintage Rolls-Royce from an English duke. “I’ll take the front half,” Dannenbaum joked. When the car was shipped to the United States and needed gas, Dannenbaum said to his partner: “You have to pay for the gas — you own the back half.”
“My father was larger than life,” Bink Dannenbaum’s son said. “He would fill up the room. You know the ‘Mad Men’ TV series? My father lived in that culture. The three-martini lunches, all that.”
Morris Newburger, Lew Krupnick and Bink Dannenbaum. Here’s what they got up to, almost 75 years ago:
Questioning the scores
Every Sunday back in 1941, Newburger would pore over the college football scores in small type in the New York papers, and he wondered aloud to Krupnick how these results were gathered. Newburger questioned whether some of the colleges really existed. He was especially suspicious of Slippery Rock Teachers in Pennsylvania.
“What gets me,” Krupnick said to Newburger, according to an article in The Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel in 1986, “is how all those scores fit exactly into the space. They might even make up names just to fill it out. I’ll bet that if somebody sent in an imaginary score, they’d print it.”
That night, while at dinner with his wife and a few friends, Newburger went to a phone booth and called The Times, The New York Herald Tribune and other papers.
Harold Rosenthal, who worked on the rewrite desk at The Herald Tribune, answered the phone. Newburger told him that Plainfield Teachers College had beaten Winona, 27-3.
“Plainfield Teachers?” Rosenthal said. “That a New Jersey school?”
Newburger said yes. The name had settled in his mind because his secretary was from Plainfield, New Jersey.
Newburger found a newsstand open at 2 o’clock Sunday morning. He bought all the papers — there were about 12 — to see which ones might have the Plainfield score. Then he woke up Krupnick in Brooklyn with a phone call.
“They bought it,” Newburger said. “My score got into the papers.”
Krupnick had to see for himself. He threw on his clothes, and raced down to the newsstand at the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Parkside Avenue in Brooklyn.
Sure enough, in The Times, there was the Plainfield-Winona score, on the first page of the sports section, not far from the detailed accounts of wins by Fordham, Army, Notre Dame and Dartmouth. In alphabetical order, Plainfield-Winona found its place just below Penn State 40, Lehigh 6, and above Potomac State 13, Shepherd Teachers 0.
“It was not uncommon,” Rosenthal said later in an article in The Times, “for the smallest schools to telephone their scores because of the lack of telegraph facilities. Also there were a good many small schools taking up football and dropping it continually.”
The next game
The day after Plainfield’s first score appeared in print, Newburger, at lunch with a Wall Street colleague, began talking as though the college were real, according to an article in The Herald Tribune.
“Who are they playing next?” the other man asked.
“Randolph Tech,” Newburger said, making up another college. “But it’s an away game.”
“I don’t know either team,” his lunchmate said, “but I’ll take Randolph, for five dollars.”
“You’ve got a bet,” Newburger said.
The week passed, and on Saturday, Newburger took a train to Philadelphia to attend the Penn-Navy game at Franklin Field with Dannenbaum. At the Philadelphia train station, after the game, they remembered that the score of the latest Plainfield “game” had not been called in. Newburger began calling — Plainfield 35, Randolph Tech 0 — the New York papers. Dannenbaum called in the score to the Philadelphia papers.
At The Philadelphia Record, a rewrite man asked Dannenbaum if Plainfield was in Delaware. When Dannenbaum said yes, he was asked if Plainfield was in Wilmington.
“Just outside,” Dannenbaum stammered. The Record printed the score.
There was a groundswell of press interest about this small-college football powerhouse. Newburger gave birth to a sports information director for Plainfield Teachers College. His name was Jerry Croyden, fashioned from Newburger’s familiarity with the Croydon Hotel on the Upper East Side. Newburger became Croyden, and was the only one who answered the new, $5-a-month phone line that was installed at the brokerage firm.
Jerry Croyden (Newburger), with Dannenbaum’s help, began producing news releases with a Plainfield Teachers letterhead. The team acquired a nickname (the Lions) and was outfitted in the school colors (mauve and puce). Its coach was Ralph “Hurry Up” Hoblitzel, a former Spearfish Normal star who devised the W-formation, in which both ends faced the backfield. One of the ends was “Boarding House” Smithers.
Legend of Johnny Chung
The pièce de résistance, however, was Johnny Chung, a 6-foot-3, 212-pound halfback who was half-Chinese, half-Hawaiian. Newburger had a dry cleaner whose name was Chung. Plainfield’s publicity mill ballyhooed Chung as a Heisman Trophy candidate. It claimed that, for energy, he ate bowls of wild rice during halftime.
They called Chung the Celestial Comet. After Plainfield’s win over Randolph Tech, Herbert Allan, writing the “College Grapevine” column in The New York Post, said: “John Chung, Plainfield Teachers’ Chinese sophomore halfback, has accounted for 57 of the 98 points scored by his unbeaten and untied team in four starts. If the Jersey dons don’t watch out, he may pop up in Chiang Kai-shek’s offensive department one of these days.”
Making no apology to Cole Porter, who had written “You’re the Top” for a Broadway show several years before, Newburger composed this Plainfield fight song:
You’re the top,
You’re a double feature.
You’re the top,
You’re a Plainfield teacher.
You’re a football star, a backfield czar, unsung.
You’re a galloping ghost,
You’re just the most,
You’re Johnny Chung.
You’re not me,
You’re a teacher’s idol.
You’re the key,
To a Plainfield title.
I’m a little man, a timid fan, a flop.
But if Johnny, I’m the bottom,
You’re the top.
Newburger and Dannenbaum were sometimes out of sync calling in the scores. There were discrepancies. The New York papers had different results than those in Philadelphia. Newburger also padded Plainfield’s early-season record by adding victories. By some reckoning, the win over Randolph Tech was Plainfield’s sixth in a row; the Lions had beaten Benson Institute, Scott, Chesterton and Fox before they defeated Winona and Randolph Tech.
On Nov. 8, it was reported to the newspapers and wire services that Plainfield had squeaked past Ingersoll, 13-0, as Chung scored both touchdowns. Some of the papers were asking for complete lineups of the game. Newburger derived Plainfield’s lineup from the names of those he knew on Wall Street. He installed himself at left tackle, but in another incarnation he became the quarterback.
“I had always heard that the names of the players on the opposing teams were based on people that my father and Morris Newburger didn’t particularly like,” Alexander Dannenbaum III said.
The goal was for Plainfield to finish the season undefeated and go on to play in the contrived Blackboard Bowl in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The last two regular-season games were to be against Appalachian Normal and, on Thanksgiving, Harmony Teachers.
Newburger and Dannenbaum were about to start the rumor that Frank Leahy, the Notre Dame coach, was considering a move to Plainfield Teachers when Time magazine did something no one else could do — it stopped Johnny Chung.
Blowing the whistle
Some believe that an indignant Wall Street broker tipped off the magazine. Others credited with blowing the whistle were Caswell Adams, a writer for The New York Herald Tribune; United Press; and Red Smith, who was writing a column for The Philadelphia Record well before his Pulitzer Prize-winning career with The Times. Irving Marsh, an editor at The Herald Tribune, was said to have called the Board of Education in Plainfield, New Jersey, to find that no Plainfield Teachers existed.
Time magazine was asked by Newburger to sit on the story until Plainfield “finished” its season. No chance. In its Nov. 17 issue, Time wrote: “For three weeks running, the sports page of the New York Times has dutifully recorded the football victories of Plainfield (N.J.) Teachers College. The Philadelphia Record and other papers also took occasional notice of unbeaten Plainfield Teachers. The only error in all the reports was that Plainfield and its opponents were nonexistent.”
Concurrent with Time’s expose was Adams’ column in The Herald Tribune, which included his parody of “Far Above Cayuga’s Waters,” the Cornell alma mater.
Far above New Jersey’s swamplands,
Plainfield Teachers’ spires
Mark a phantom, phony college
That got on the wires.
Perfect record made on paper,
Imaginary team!
Hail to thee, our ghostly college,
Product of a dream!
When Adams died, only 50, after having a stroke in 1957, the third paragraph of his obituary told of his connection to Plainfield Teachers.
In an interview with The New Yorker, a baleful Newburger said: “It’s too bad about Chung. He was stalwart, shifty, All-America material.”
Remorse over a demise
Newburger, under the name Jerry Croyden, sent out his final news release: “Due to flunkings in the midterm examinations, Plainfield Teachers has been forced to call off its last two scheduled games.”
No one printed that, but The Philadelphia Record, which had bought into the hoax, was remorseful that Plainfield Teachers was no more. Under an unsigned item titled “Football Casualty,” it said that the newspaper “regretted the passing (of Plainfield Teachers). The place had possibilities. We don’t see why exposure of the gag should have to end the team’s career. It should keep playing the rest of the season. We want to know how it made out with the now-cancelled games. And we want to know if the ‘Celestial Comet’ could make All-American.”
The Times was unable to trace Krupnick’s life after the Plainfield prank. Newburger was 62 when he died in 1968. Dannenbaum died in 2004, at 93. Their hoax ended only a few weeks before the Japanese attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor. Both were officers — Newburger with the Army Air Corps, Dannenbaum with the Signal Corps — in World War II.
Morris Newburger’s son Maury, born eight years after the hoax, heard that his father and Bob Cooke, sports editor of The Herald Tribune in 1941, became friends.
“The gentle humor that went into the Plainfield hoax appealed to the imaginations of both sportswriters and the public,” Cooke wrote later.
When Newburger died, Robert Lipsyte wrote a column in The Times — “The Wild Rice Bowl” — about the caper. (It was accompanied by an illustration that by today’s standards would be considered an offensive racial stereotype.) In The Philadelphia Record, Red Smith was still writing about Plainfield in 1956. It was the era of Norman Kwong, a Chinese-Canadian who was a star in the Canadian Football League:
“The China Clipper, as they call him, is reputed to be almost as good as John Chung, the Celestial Comet, whose triple-threat genius put the Plainfield Teachers in the headlines 15 years ago. A minor point of difference between the two: John Chung didn’t exist, and neither did the Plainfield Teachers, except in the imagination of Morris Newburger, who created the college, team and star as a sports page hoax. Chung was the prototype of all the galloping ghosts and flying phantoms that clutter the autumn editions. Kwong is as corporeal as meat loaf.”
