• Forgot to Register

    From my inbox, thought I’d pass this along.  Greg Kinney, the great curator at the wonderful U-M Bentley Historical Library forward this cartoon last week and I love it.  It was stored in one of the athletic department scrapbooks: The gent on the left is disgraced Michigan football player James Joy Miller, who was dismissed after the 1909 season for failing to properly register and attend classes.  The scandal made it all the way over to the New York Times and Michigan ended up apologizing to each of the teams they faced that year. Cook is explorer Frederick Cook, who reached or (claimed to reach) the North Pole in 1908, months ahead of the guy credited with it – Robert Peary.  At one point he promised to the King of Denmark that he would submit all the detail of his reports and findings to the University of Copenhagen.  He submitted a report, but not all of the detail the school was expecting and this happened: In late November, drawing on his diary, he completed his promised report to the University of Copenhagen. (He chose not to send his diary to Denmark for fear of losing it.) In December, the university—whose experts had been expecting original records—announced that Cook’s claim was “not proven.” Many U.S. newspapers and readers took that finding…