James Nelson - The Polar Bear Expedition

Despite his size, Harry starred in football while at Meriden High School, and in 1910 he was recruited by then football powerhouse Georgetown University. Playing quarterback, he earned the nickname “Nine Point Harry” after almost single-handedly defeating the University of Virginia three years in a row. “After his fourth year, Virginia broke off athletic relations with Georgetown,” the Washington Times would report.

“If ever a varsity eleven had an evil genius, Virginia has one in Harry Costello, the most brilliant individual football player in this section of the country, and his spells and devilish incantations brought [Georgetown’s] third successive triumph over the Orange and Blue, 16 to 13,” the Times would also report after the 1912 tilt.

“As fleet as the wind itself,” another paper would gush in 1911, “he has indomitable pluck and nerve and an eye that is sharp as the hunter’s… It is related of this young hero that once when he was supposed to be in bed with a broken rib or some similar ailment, he suddenly appeared on the football field… and insisted on getting in the lineup.

“He had escaped from his room by dropping his football togs out the window and going out after them as he knew that his relatives would never permit him to play if they knew his plans. That is only one instance of his grit.”

Even the legendary Jim Thorpe got into the act, saying that the best football player he ever played against was the “tough Irishman from Georgetown.” By 1913, Harry had been named captain of the Georgetown squad.

After graduating in 1914, Harry headed back home, and played professional football for the “Yosts” in Bridgeport, but in his first game broke a rib. In 1915, at the age of just twenty-five, he was hired to coach the University of Detroit football squad, and also worked as a sportswriter for the Detroit Free Press , continuing an interest in newspapering that he had indulged with the Washington Times while still a student at Georgetown.

The lure of football was too much, however. By 1916, Harry was again prowling the gridiron, this time earning four hundred dollars per game while playing for his former rival Jim Thorpe, who was the player-coach of the famed Canton Bulldogs, which in 1920 would become one of the first franchises in the NFL.

In one game, against the Buffalo All-Stars, Thorpe quickly scored on a forty-six-yard punt return. “Moments later he zipped a pass to Harry Costello for another touchdown,” according to the Professional Football Researchers Association. “In the second quarter… Big Jim ran for two TDs, tossed a second touchdown pass to Costello, and then reversed the process by scoring a touchdown via a throw from Costello.”

Final score: 77–0.

There would be no football for Harry Costello in the fall of 1917, however. The United States had declared war on Germany on April 6; on May 11, Harry married Mary E. Kitchin in Detroit; four days later, he reported for officers’ training at Fort Sheridan, outside of Chicago.

The following fall, the newly minted second lieutenant Harry J. Costello arrived at Camp Custer, near Battle Creek, Michigan, to which others fresh from training at Fort Sheridan were also heading. Harry Costello would soon find himself in the Machine Gun Company of the 339th Infantry Regiment.

Among them, too, was Harry Mead, a native of Valparaiso, Indiana, where his family ran a boardinghouse, taking in students of Valparaiso University. Mead also attended the school, and graduated in 1910 in the “Classics Class,” and after studying law at the University of Michigan he moved to nearby Detroit and hung out his shingle.

As had Harry Costello, Mead applied to and was accepted by the first officers’ training class at Fort Sheridan, and at the age of twenty-eight he began his own journey to Camp Custer—and whatever service with Company A of the 339th Infantry Regiment might hold for him.

Another Fort Sheridan graduate, Joel Roscoe Moore, was considerably older than either Harry. Already thirty-eight, Moore had been born in Hillsdale, Michigan, to father William, a miller, and mother Emma, who cared for Joel and his three younger siblings. He was married in 1903 to Mabel Olmstead. Sadly, they lost their only child, daughter Helen Emily, to acute ileocolitis—inflammation of the bowels—at the age of three months in October 1906, while Moore was attending Albion College in south-central Michigan.

After graduating in 1908, Moore began working on his master’s degree in economics at the University of Illinois, and took a position of assistant in the Economics Department, earning the grand sum of $450 for the academic term. He eventually would publish his thesis, the scintillatingly titled work Taxation of Corporations in Illinois , in 1914.

Like Harry Costello, the cerebral Moore was also athletic and loved track and football—so much so that in 1910 he took a job at Great Falls High School in Montana, where he taught three history classes and coached the football team. Only fifteen boys turned out—but he would remember that being a luxury compared to other teams.

“Take Fort Benton, for instance,” he would tell a reporter in 1947. “It didn’t have enough players, so by prior agreement the coach, Culbertson, played one tackle and the town blacksmith at the other, and that blacksmith was a big fellow.”

Moore would last only one year in Great Falls. Despite a student petition asking that he be retained for the following school year, the school’s teachers’ committee hired someone else to take his place.

“The superintendent didn’t like me and wouldn’t give me a contract,” he would recall. Moore and wife Mabel moved on to La Crosse, Wisconsin, where he taught at La Crosse State Teachers College and coached football on the side, until he applied for officers’ training. He, too, trained at Fort Sheridan and would soon take over Company M of the 339th Infantry Regiment.

Not everyone at Camp Custer wanted to lead, of course. Donald Eugene Carey, a twenty-five-year-old from Eaton County, Michigan, was, like Moore, older than the average recruit, and with a college degree from Olivet College and experience in teaching, he was offered a chance for officers’ training through the auspices of an uncle, a prominent attorney.

But Carey turned him down. “I didn’t even want to be a corporal,” he later said. “I didn’t want the responsibility for the lives of other men.” Instead, after being classified 1-A in January 1918 and later taking a physical and being told by the doctor, “Go home, and get ready for war,” he bided his time, teaching school in Camden, Michigan, until receiving a telegram that ordered him to report for induction on May 28.

Carey, like Godfrey Anderson, soon enough encountered his own trash-talking drill instructor. “You should have heard the lieutenant bawl out a couple of the Wops in our company,” he wrote home on June 5. “He talks two languages: English and profane.” But, Carey would add, “I like him and try to do my best.”

One other arrival at Camp Custer came from a much more illustrious background and would prove to be one of the most popular men in the 339th Infantry Regiment.

J. Brooks Nichols, who turned thirty-three in the summer of 1918, was the only child of a prominent manufacturer in New York, and attended the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. He moved on to Yale, and after graduating in 1908 “entered the oil business in Lexington, Kentucky,” one social register would report in 1922.

After a year, Nichols moved to Detroit, and managed the United States Radiator Corporation for three years before becoming restlessly engaged in “various private enterprises of his own,” one history of Detroit would say. “His business interests and investments rank him among the capitalists of Detroit and his sound business judgment is manifest in the continued development of those business activities which he controls.”