Historic Goat Up for Grabs on Saturday

In a quirk of scheduling, this Saturday at 1 p.m. at Laird Stadium the Carleton Knights will try to win back a trophy of a goat from St. Olaf which originated in 1931, while in Madison, Wisconsin, the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers fight the Badgers for Paul Bunyan’s axe which dates to 1948.

What’s the connection? As described in my “Historic Happenings” column in the Northfield Entertainment Guide of November 2009, the Gophers-Badgers games from 1930-43 were tussles not over an axe but a Slab of Bacon trophy. This was a trophy made of black walnut, with a football carved into it showing the letter W or M, depending on the viewing angle. It was designed in 1930 by Dr. R.B. Fouch, a Minneapolis dentist—who just a year later carved the “goat trophy” for the St. Olaf-Carleton football rivalry.

A trophy in the form of a goat resembling a sawhorse had originated at St. Olaf in 1913 for basketball. In the course of research, I found a short article in the Oct. 16, 1931, Northfield News which announced that a “relative of the famous basketball goat” would rest in the trophy case of the winner of the Oct. 17^th football game. The story said, “The new goat, which is carved from a wood plaque, has been stamped ‘official’ by the athletic departments of both colleges. It is the work of a Minneapolis man who designed the ‘bacon’ the Minnesota and Wisconsin universities fight over each fall. The newcomer is getting a final coat of varnish to preserve its sad expression and its football pants.” The trophy was to be displayed before the game at the Toggery, a men’s clothing store. St. Olaf won the first goat game 25-6.

For years it was thought the goat had been designed by “a St. Olaf carpenter" (as per Wikipedia, for example) but the News article disproves that. I found that Dr. Ranthus B. Fouch was a graduate of the college of dentistry at the Univ. of Minnesota in 1914. I then tracked down his son, Ranthus B. Fouch, Jr., of Lewisburg, W.Va., who told me his father (“quite handy with small tools”) was killed in a 1945 auto accident. He was aware his father had carved the “Slab of Bacon” trophy but had not known of the goat trophy. Archivists Jeff Sauve of St. Olaf and Eric Hillemann of Carleton could find no connection of Fouch to either college, so the impetus for the carving will remain a mystery.

As for the “Slab of Bacon” trophy, it disappeared sometime after a Minnesota victory in 1943 and was replaced by Paul Bunyan’s axe in 1948. In 1994, the missing trophy was discovered in a storage room at the Wisconsin Athletic Dept. during a renovation of the stadium. Then coach Barry Alvarez joked, “We took home the bacon, and kept it.”

Why a goat? The expression “to get someone’s goat” means to annoy someone. This season Carleton has a 3-3 record, 1-3 in MIAC competition. St. Olaf is 5-2, 3-2 in the MIAC. Both are coming off losses, Carleton at St. John’s 51-14, St. Olaf at home to Augsburg 45-37. St. Olaf has “gotten Carleton’s goat” for the past two years and the record of the annual football rivalry is 48-43-1 in favor of St. Olaf. The winner of the goat in the Oct. 20 game at Carleton will definitely “annoy” the losing team.