bined 5-12. By the end of
the 1937 season, Kipke’s
tenure was near its end.
“Kipke was already let
know that he wasn’t going
to be rehired,” Piotrowski
said. “But none of us knew,
nobody knew that. Kipke
wanted to hold onto his
job, he had Tom Harmon
coming up as a freshman
then.”
That transitory period —
and Kipke’s efforts to hold
onto his job — seem to
have cost Piotrowski his
only chance at becoming a
starter.
According to Piotrowski,
he had appeared in sev-
eral
games
throughout
his career, playing half-
back most of the time
while occasionally being
employed
as
a
tackler.
Then, on the suggestion of
the trainer, he had tried
out for fullback, and “did
pretty well at that.”
He expected to start at
Penn during the second-
to-last week of the 1937
season, which would have
earned him a varsity letter.
But that never happened.
“Someone
didn’t
want
me in there, or wanted
someone else to start,”
Piotrowski recalled. “So I
was kinda shut out. It was
the team before the Ohio
State
game.
But
Kipke
came to me the following
Monday at practice and
apologized for not playing
me.
“I was only a kid then, I
didn’t say anything. He
says, ‘I couldn’t play you.’ I
think he was hanging onto
his job.”
The next year, Piotrowski
quit the team. It happened
just as easily — and natu-
rally — as him joining. He
wanted to continue court-
ing Jean, and he didn’t see
a long-term future in the
sport.
Losing out on the chance
to start was tough for
Piotrowski to swallow at
the time, and his brow
furrowed
slightly
when
recalling the incident 80
years later. But he says he
was alright with the deci-
sion, and he’s moved on.
“Some little things you
remember,”
Piotrowski
said, “but you just forgive
and you forget. … I can kind
of forget things like that
pretty fast.
“There’s a lot going on at
Michigan. (My) last year, I
went to the
gym a lot.”
***
In
1977,
Waterman
Gymna-
sium
was
demolished
to
make
room for an
expansion of
the Chemis-
try Building.
To
expect
Michigan’s
campus
to
remain
mostly
unchanged
since
Piotrowski’s
matricula-
tion
would
be
irratio-
nal.
Many
of the expe-
riences
he
described
are a glance
into a sepia-
toned past.
Piotrowski
loved
to
bowl at the
Union with
friends.
Once,
he
earned
a
t-shirt as the
bowler of the
week. There is no bowling in
the Union anymore, but there
is a Wendy’s.
He used to buy a sweet roll
and coffee for
breakfast at a
price of just 15
cents. Tuition
per
semester
was $50.
He found suc-
cess at full-
back
at
the
cradle of col-
lege
football
weighing just
167
pounds.
Khalid
Hill
and
Henry
Poggi
weigh
263 and 257
pounds,
respectively.
Piotrowski
estimates
he
was
85
the
last time he
attended
a
game in Ann
Arbor. He says
he’d get lost if he tried walk-
ing around campus nowa-
days.
Yes,
some
things
have
changed
since
Robert
Piotrowski attended classes
at Michigan. But the spir-
it of it all — that remains
unchanged.
Piotrowski remembers the
weekends spent downtown
drinking
beer with his
fraternity
brothers.
He
remembers
frantically
cramming
late at night
for tests. He
remembers
the pride of
walking onto
the
field
in
front of a sold-
out crowd at
Michigan Sta-
dium, only a
couple
years
after
play-
ing in front
of
sparsely-
populated
bleachers
in
Manistee.
And he still
remembers
why he went to Michigan in
the first place, and what it
gave him.
“I’m glad I went to Michigan
because you learn some of
the finer things,” Piotrows-
ki said. “Classical music.
Go to concerts, which you
wouldn’t do if you lived in a
small town. They didn’t have
anything like that. … I’d go
back (home) to visit quite
often, of course. But there’s
more opportunities (in Ann
Arbor), things you learn
going to school, in a frater-
nity.
“Sometimes you lie in bed
and Ann Arbor comes up to
you. These little things that
you never thought of for
years come up. I’m glad I
went to a bigger school. Oth-
erwise I would’ve ended up
back in Manistee and I don’t
know what I’d be doing.”
Later in his life, long after
graduation, Piotrowski trav-
eled the world with Jean.
He went to China, Japan,
New Zealand, Australia and
South America. Those trips,
he says, wouldn’t have hap-
pened
without
Michigan.
The
university
“enabled”
him to think about all the
possibilities — such as trav-
eling the world — that he
never would have thought
about in Manistee.
“I was looking for something
more,”
Piotrowski
said,
“which I got at Michigan.”
5
TheMichiganDaily, www.michigandaily.com
PHOTO COURTESY OF ORION SANG
Sometimes
you lie in bed
and Ann Arbor
comes up to
you. These
little things you
never thought
of for years
come up.