Honoring Dan Sachs ’60

Your story on the Tiger football team’s remarkable undefeated season (Sports, Dec. 5) brought to mind the team’s 1957 season and the bonfire celebrating its having won the newly formed Ivy League’s championship.

The clincher was the team’s 34–14 devastation of then-undefeated Dartmouth at Palmer Stadium before 46,000 in a snowstorm in the last game of the season. Sophomore Dan Sachs was the single-wing tailback; he scored three touchdowns and passed for a fourth. He was named to the All-Ivy team by the league coaches.

 Dan majored in the Special Program in European Civilization, wrote his thesis on Montaigne, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. At graduation he was given the Roper Trophy and the Poe Cup.

 Dan was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and earned his law degree from Harvard. He won a coveted Blue award for his rugby football play against Cambridge. Focused upon a career in national politics, Dan had his eye firmly fixed upon a Pennsylvania U.S. Senate seat.

After a valiant, long fight with bone cancer, Dan succumbed in 1967.

 For nearly a half-century, a scholarship in Dan’s honor and memory, sponsored by his friends, supported by his class and then by a cadre of former scholars, has been awarded each year to a graduating senior to study at Oxford’s Worcester College, as Dan did. In recent years, a Sachs Global Scholarship and one to a Worcester graduate for study at Princeton’s Graduate School have been added. (See page 16 for this year’s winners.) The Sachs Scholarship lays special emphasis upon leadership and public service and is comparable in all respects to the Rhodes and Marshall in its selectivity and prestige.

 When the idea was proposed to Dan for his approval shortly before his death, he smiled and said, “That has scope.” He was right.