TENAFLY, N.J.—We go back 80 years to the football season of 1939 for this photo of the Tenafly Tigers, snapped on the steps of their high school. Tenafly’s striped uniforms were used in the 1930s and 1940s.
This image goes back to the days when football uniforms had noticeably less padding, and helmets were minimally padded leather caps with ear flaps. Incidentally, 1939 is also the year that the first plastic football helmet was invented in an effort to improve player safety.
The Tenafly team played Hackensack, Englewood, St. Cecilia, Leonia, Ridgewood, Teaneck, Cliffside Park, Ridgefield Park and Dumont that season.
In 1939, you could buy a new house in Tenafly for around $5,000, and at the A&P in Englewood you could buy eggs for 19 cents a dozen, Campbell’s soup for 6 cents per can, and a 1-pound bag of coffee for 20 cents. Glenn Miller was popular in the music world, and the films “Gone with the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz” came to theaters. The average price for a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. was 19 cents. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the president.
Most importantly, as the 1939 fall season got started, the Second World War had just broken out. At the end of 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States would enter the war. Over 16 million Americans would serve, and more than 400,000 of them would never come home. In light of this, we can’t help but wonder what the future held for these young Tigers.
The boys are sitting on the steps of the original Tenafly High School, which opened in 1922. That’s the same year Tenafly’s first football team formed. Back then the team was called the Orange and Blacks, and their name appeared that way in local news reports throughout the ’20s.
The original high school building was used into the 1970s. After that, it sat vacant for years before being reopened as the Browning House condominiums in 1982.
—Kristin Beuscher
