Must I Eat Lutefisk Next Year or Live on the River’s East Bank?

This was the plaintive cry in the Carletonian newspaper on Oct. 22, 1932, from the so-called “Goatrophy” which had been awarded for the first time the year before to St. Olaf in the wake of a 25-6 victory in the annual football clash between St. Olaf and Carleton. The goat begged Carleton to win so it could “rest in the trophy room of Sayles-Hill” and commune with the basketball goat (a “very old timer, born in 1913 A.D.”) that Carleton possessed at that time. Both goats derived from the expression “to get someone’s goat,” in this case by winning, thus irritating the opponent.

Here is the origin of the football goat which the Oles hope to win back from the Carls this year on Oct. 12 at 1 pm at St. Olaf.

Before the 1931 game, the Toggery, a Northfield clothing store owned by two St. Olaf graduates, the Osmundson brothers, commissioned a new football goat. The Northfield News of Oct. 16, 1931, called the new trophy “a relative of the famous basketball goat” which is “carved from a wood plaque” and “has been stamped ‘official’ by the athletic departments of both colleges. It is the work of a Minneapolis man who designed the ‘bacon’ Minnesota and Wisconsin universities fight for on the gridiron each fall.”

I found that the Minneapolis man was Dr. Ranthus B. Fouch who, in 1930, created the “Slab of Bacon” trophy which went to the team that “brought home the bacon” during the years 1930-1943. That trophy disappeared after a Minnesota victory over Wisconsin in 1943 and was replaced by Paul Bunyan’s axe in 1948. (Quite strangely, it was discovered in a storage room in 1994 at the Wisconsin Athletic Department.)

Fouch was a dentist in Minneapolis who was a 1914 graduate of the University of Minnesota. In 2009, I phoned his son, Ranthus B. Fouch, Jr., in Lewisburg, W.Va., who told me his father had a workshop at his dental office and was “quite handy with small tools.” His father died in a 1945 traffic accident.

The Carleton College Archives record 51 St. Olaf wins, 36 Carleton wins and one tie in 1941 in games played for the goat between 1931 and 2023. Carleton won in 2022 and 2023. You will find out whether the goat continues to live on the east side or eats lutefisk on the west side of the Cannon River on October 12 at St. Olaf.