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"In the deed the glory"


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Deep Red: Alexander's words still resonate with NU fans

 

By BRIAN CHRISTOPHERSON / Lincoln Journal Star

 

The words have been there through the glory years and the gory years, through the Devaney and Osborne years, and the Glassford and Jennings years.

 

The words have been photographed, analyzed, memorized, rained on and snowed on.

 

Many Nebraskans know the last line: “In the deed the glory.” Some remember all the words.

 

“Not the victory but the action;

 

Not the goal but the game;

 

In the deed the glory”

 

Few know about the guy who dreamed up the words etched in the tower on the southwest corner of Memorial Stadium. (They’re also now etched across the West Stadium facade.)

 

Hartley Burr Alexander was a man with many descriptions. A poet, author, scholar, iconographer, professor, Renaissance man.

 

A “Midwestern weirdo,” one New York writer quipped. But as Lincoln historian Jim McKee once noted, the late economist Alvin Johnson claimed Alexander was the “greatest philosophic mind that had ever come out of Nebraska.”

 

He was a philosophy professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln when he wrote those words that secure his spot in Husker football history.

 

“Alexander’s reputation was well-known,” said Bob Ripley, Nebraska State Capitol administrator. “He’d give lectures and half the whole bloody town would show up.”

 

During the same time Memorial Stadium was being built, New York architect Bertram Goodhue was working on Nebraska’s new state capitol.

 

Goodhue was struggling to find the right symbolism and inscriptions that might go with his work. The governor said Goodhue would be wise to talk to this professor on campus.

 

Goodhue found genius in Alexander, who is said to have written the outline for the entire thematic program for the capitol in two months.

 

“The salvation of the state is in the watchfulness of the citizens” came from Alexander. So did “Knowledge hath no enemy save ignorance.”

 

His words are inscribed on the Los Angeles Public Library and the Rockefeller Center and, of course, Nebraska’s football cathedral on Vine Street.

 

On the southeast corner: “In Commendation of the men of Nebraska who served and fell in the Nations Wars”

 

On the northeast: “Their Lives they held their country’s trust; They kept its faith; They died its heroes”

 

On the northwest: “Courage; Generosity; Fairness; Honor; In these are the true awards of manly sport”

 

But it seems his words on the southwest corner have left the greatest impression.

 

Alexander graduated from UNL, then earned a master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

 

He wrote columns for the Nebraska State Journal alongside Willa Cather and served as an associate editor for Webster’s New International Dictionary.

 

Robert Knoll deemed him a “visionary” in his book “Prairie University.”

 

“A building should read like a book,” Alexander once said.

 

He died 70 years ago, but it is not uncommon on Husker game days to see fans stop in the street to pay homage to his work.

 

There have been 16 Nebraska football coaches since Memorial Stadium was built 86 years ago. There’s been stadium expansion, the addition of skyboxes, videoboards and scoreboards that tell you exactly how many rushing yards a team has at that given moment. The grass field was replaced by AstroTurf, which was replaced by FieldTurf.

 

Changes all around, great wins and bitter losses, but the words remain.

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