10/01/2006 - Joe Taylor '63 Elected to National Hall of Fame
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Haverford can't pretend that election to the National Academic All- America Hall of Fame, which just happened to Princeton Professor and Dean of Faculty Joe Taylor '63, is the biggest honor he's won. There's the small matter of a few other prizes, such as the Nobel Prize in Astrophysics, the MacArthur Genius Award, the Wolf Prize for scientific work at the all-planet level and many more.
But CoSIDA, the national organization of Sports Information Directors, has selected Taylor for Hall of Fame membership. He will be inducted into this hall on July 5 in Nashville, where Haverford Professor of Astronomy Bruce Partridge, a notable scholar-athlete himself as a fencer and Rhodes Scholar in his undergrad days at Princeton, will represent the College and join his friend Taylor on this happy occasion. Taylor will be one of the few members of the Hall of Fame who was not chosen as an "Academic All-American" in his college career for the simple reason that in those ancient times, there was no such award. So Taylor's election means that CoSIDA saw him as so outstanding that he was worthy of an exception to their usual rule. Taylor was one of three brothers who played right fullback for crack Haverford soccer teams of the late 1950s and 1960s. He made all-Middle Atlantic Conference when the MAC soccer league included Rutgers, Navy, LaSalle, St. Joseph's, Lafayette, Lehigh, etc., and when Penn and Princeton were fixtures on the Haverford soccer schedule. Speaking of scholar-athletes, even the loyal classmates of Joe Taylor who think no one has ever equaled the accomplishments of that class of 1963, must admit that the Class of 2006 turned out pretty well too! The latest kudos come from the NCAA Post-Graduate Scholarship Committee which has already selected Grant Scott '06 for that prestigious award this year and named four other Haverfordians from winter and fall teams as finalists. Two more finalists for the NCAA spring competition have been announced, gutsy baseball pitcher/infielder Ryan Frankel '06, who majored in economics and Spanish, and inspirational tennis #1 and captain Laura Chaddock '06, a psychology major. The results of the spring selection process should be available in early July but we're hoping that Chaddock and Frankel will win to give Haverford a record three scholarship winners in the same year. The seven who reached the finals, including Scott, already represent a new high in that department, for Haverford and, we'd bet, most Division III institutions.