When he was teaching a Sunday School class in Cambridge, during his
time at college, one of his pupils came in with a black eye. It turned
out that another boy had teased and pinched the first boy's sister
during church. Afterwards there had been a fight, and the one who
tormented the little girl had been beaten, but he had given the brother
a black eye.
"You did quite right," said Roosevelt to the brother and gave him a
dollar.
But the deacons of the church did not approve, and Roosevelt soon went
to another church.
Meanwhile he was learning to box. In his own story of his life he makes
fun of himself as a boxer, and says that in a boxing match he once won
"a pewter mug" worth about fifty cents. He is honest enough to say that
he was proud of it at the time, "kept it, and alluded to it, and I fear
bragged about it, for a number of years, and I only wish I knew where
it was now."
His college friends tell a different story of him. He was never one
of the best boxers, they say, and he was at a disadvantage because of
his eyesight. But he was plucky enough for two, and he fought fair.
He entered in the lightweight class in the Harvard Gymnasium, March
22, 1879. He won the first match. When time was called he dropped his
hands, and his opponent gave him a hard blow on the face. The fellows
around the ring all shouted "Foul! Foul!" and hissed. But Roosevelt
turned toward them, calling "Hush! He didn't hear!"
In the second match he met a man named Charlie Hanks, who was a little
taller, and had a longer reach, and so for all Roosevelt's pluck and
willingness to take punishment, Hanks won the match.
He was a member of three or four clubs,--the Institute, the Hasty
Pudding and the Porcellian. He was one of the editors of the _Harvard
Advocate_, took part in three or four college activities, and was fond
of target shooting and dancing. It is told that he never spoke in
public, until about his third year in college, that he was shy and had
great difficulty in speaking. It was by effort that he became one of
the best orators of his day.
Roosevelt did not like the way college debates were conducted. He said
that to make one side defend or attack a certain subject, without
regard to whether they thought it right or wrong, had a bad effect.
"What we need," he wrote, "is to turn out of colleges young men with
ardent convictions on the side of right; not young men who can make a
good argument for either right or wrong, as their interest bids them."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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