Totally random family ephemera discovered today in a stack of cards and letters untouched for the past 113 years… with an unexpected historical sporting connection.

A tiny congratulatory calling card note from Florence Ingram Snow (1880-1940) to my grandfather, Joseph B. Schlotman, on his engagement to my grandmother, Stella D. Ford, in March 1914.

The note was written two months after her husband, Neil Worthington Snow, the greatest athlete to have ever represented the University of Michigan, died suddenly following a game of racquets at the Detroit Racquet and Curling Club. He was 34. Snow had the distinction of winning more varsity letters than any other student at Michigan – four in baseball, four in football, and three in track. Playing football for Michigan in the first Rose Bowl in 1902, Snow led the team to a 49-0 win over Stanford, scoring a record five touchdowns.

In his tribute to Snow, famed sportswriter Grantland Rice wrote: “There have been any number or at least many, who were both football and baseball stars, but we recall no other who was as great a combined star as Snow was at both games, and who at the same time was a wonder on track and field. Jim Thorpe is the closest approach that might be recalled off hand, and while Thorpe is a member of the Giants, he is nothing like Snow’s equal on the ballfield.”

Even Edgar Guest weighed in with a poetic tribute to Snow in the Detroit Free Press:

After her first husband’s untimely death, Mrs. Snow moved with her two children to Altadena, California where she was active in many of the region’s social activities. She married Norwood Whiting Howard of Los Angeles in 1923 and stayed active in social and business circles until her passing in March 1940.