It was 1859 when the first Marrin graduated from what was then known as St. John’s College. Four more generations of the Marrin family would follow him through the Fordham gates, many of them going on to study law or making their mark in other ways, like contributing to the Fordham football tradition celebrated this past weekend.

That’s what Richard Marrin Sr., FCRH ’67, LAW ’70, did, playing under Head Coach Jim Lansing during a pivotal time for Fordham football. His son Richard Marrin Jr., FCRH ’91, LAW ’96, also played for the Rams. He fondly recalls when he and his teammates looked past their own setbacks during the late 1980s to envision the kind of resurgent program Fordham has built in recent years. The Rams achieved a 32-8 record during the past three seasons—fourth best among NCAA FCS teams—and overcame the Penn Quakers, 31-17, on Saturday.

“We knew at the time that our losses, our sacrifices, were a steppingstone,” said Marrin, an attorney who practices in the United Arab Emirates. “We wanted to win, we were used to winning, but we accepted that losing is part of winning, and that someday future Fordham football players would win at the next level. And here we are,” he said.

A Family Legacy Spanning Five Generations

That ethos of striving after a larger—even heroic—ambition is one aspect of Fordham that he thinks has kept his family members coming back to the University over the years. He and his five siblings all graduated from Fordham: Matthew, James, and Peter Marrin, classes of 1996, 1998, and 2000, respectively; Jennifer Marrin Cullinan, Class of 1993; and Margaret Marrin Spencer, Class of 1990, who, like Richard, also graduated from Fordham Law School, in 1993.

Over the years, many members of the Marrin family have been drawn to legal careers, starting with Joseph Marrin, Class of 1859, who apprenticed in the law and worked as an attorney for Fordham in the days before the University even had a law school. His son Wilfrid graduated from Fordham in 1890—after having been a three-year letter winner on the football team—and apprenticed in law before studying engineering at Columbia University and serving as borough engineer for the Bronx.

Wilfrid’s son, Wilfrid Marrin II, Class of 1931, was the first Marrin to graduate from Fordham Law School. He practiced admiralty law in New York, and his two sons, Wilfrid III and Richard Sr., graduated from both Fordham College at Rose Hill and Fordham Law. Richard Marrin Sr.—who died in 2010—first attended the University on a scholarship to play tennis and squash, but he later moved on to football. He was inducted into the Fordham Athletics Hall of Fame in 2002 and would go on to become the namesake of the team’s Rich Marrin Most Valuable Player Award.

“My father was so happy to be part of Lansing’s program,” said Richard Marrin Jr., referring to Jim Lansing, FCRH ’43, a former All-American end for the Rams who would help reestablish the sport at Fordham after a 10-year hiatus. Football was only a club sport when it was brought back to the University in 1964, the year Lansing was hired as head coach. After he led the team to national club championships in 1965 and 1968, the team was elevated to varsity status in 1970, and Lansing joined the Fordham Athletics Hall of Fame in 1976.

Pushing the team on was Fordham’s legacy as a national football power during the days of Vince Lombardi, FCRH ’37, the Seven Blocks of Granite, and sold-out games at the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium. “It was not far from most people’s memory at the time,” Marrin said.

An Education for the Ages

His own time on the football team amplified some of the signature strengths of a Fordham education, like developing self-knowledge. “I was a less-than-stellar player, but I knew I was contributing,” he said. Through the generations, his family has consistently valued this and other aspects of Fordham’s educational philosophy, like promoting ingenuity and innovative thinking and “engaging the people around you with a loving attitude,” he said.

His undergraduate years were filled with novel experiences, like working on an on-campus archaeological dig for a class in anthropology (one of his majors) and joining his fellow student-athletes for occasional dinner and repartee with professors, including Gerard Reedy, S.J., the former Fordham dean who passed away in March.

“They were intelligent, engaging, funny people we had the honor of being invited to dine with as students,” he said. He’s seen this same welcoming attitude among alumni, “and that’s what makes Fordham special for me, that it’s a living thing,” comprising a sort of diverse, worldwide family connected by common values, ready to share some of their time and attention with one another, he said.

Marrin attended Homecoming on Saturday along with his wife, Mona; his brother Matthew and Matthew’s wife, Rachel Marrin, FCRH ’96, GABELLI ’05; his sister Jennifer and her husband, Kevin Cullinan; and his and his siblings’ children.

Richard remembers being taken to Fordham Homecoming games as a child and learning his way around the Rose Hill campus long before he enrolled at the University. Last fall, he came to a football game with his son, then 8, who “looked at the buildings, looked across Eddies Parade towards Keating Hall, and said, ‘It’s just like Hogwarts,’” the wizardry school in the Harry Potter series, Marrin said. “I told him he’s not that wrong, because there’s magic here.”

[In the photo at top, three Marrin siblings—Jennifer, Richard, and Matthew—and their spouses are shown with eight of their children. From left, they are Jimmy, Danny, Christopher, Charlotte, Olivia, Maximus, Lucy, and Sarkis.]

“An unfinished house in a field” is how Archbishop John Hughes would later describe the state of Fordham’s property at the time he bought it in 1839. The first Jesuits wouldn’t arrive until 1846, five years after the small college was up and running. Meanwhile, going south into New York City was a tougher trek in those days before cars and commuter trains—and that’s just how the college fathers liked it.

“They didn’t let the students go down to the city. The city was considered ‘sinful,’” said Roger Wines, PhD, professor emeritus of history.

He and anthropology professor Allan Gilbert, PhD, have researched and written about early life at Fordham for years, drawing on the meticulous records kept by Fordham’s early Jesuits as well as their own excavations at the Rose Hill campus. Their archaeological work, part of which they write about in a soon-to-be-published book, helps illustrate just how different life was in the early years of Fordham, which was founded as St. John’s College 175 years ago on June 24, 1841.

For one thing, the small, rustic college was also a working farm, Wines noted. “The students lived here in an atmosphere where the grape jelly came from the grapes [and]the milk came from the cows,” courtesy of the live-in Jesuit brothers who also shoveled the coal, tended the grounds, and staffed the infirmary, among other labors, he said.

Water came from wells, baths were once-a-week, and recreation tended to get the blood pumping, according to Wines and Gilbert. In the summer, it was swimming in the Bronx River or cross-country hikes to the Harlem River or Pelham Bay, led by Jesuits who believed in physical exertion. In the fall,  college elders would block the flow of a stream to create a pond where the campus’ large parking lot and garage sit today, and students skated on the pond when it froze over in the winter, Gilbert and Wines said.

In fact, ice skate fragments were among the many artifacts they found buried in the earth at the heart of the Rose Hill campus.

The Excavations

In 1985, Wines and Gilbert sought permission from Fordham’s then-new president—Joseph A. O’Hare, SJ—to excavate the foundations of Rose Hill Manor, the colonial-era farmhouse that served as one of the original campus buildings. They won over Father O’Hare by taking him to the spot where they wanted to dig: “We said to him, ‘Six feet down is the 18^th century.’ He said, ‘Okay, go for it,’” Wines recalled.

For the next 17 years, they mobilized students from their history and archaeology classes for the digging, covering the crumbly innards of the site with tarps in the off-hours to protect them from the elements. Within a few years they had cleared out one corner of the manor’s cellar, finding a wood floor, brick cisterns, impressions of floral-patterned wallpaper, a bin full of anthracite coal, and many fragmentary objects.

They also dug in various other places around the Rose Hill campus, including, in 1986, the construction site for two residence halls–Loschert Hall and Alumni Court South–after work crews discovered two pits containing pre-1877 refuse from the college. They explored cisterns, drainage basins, and ditches around campus, compiling a list of archaeologically valuable locations.

Their collection of artifacts includes pipe stems, patent medicine bottles, the college’s first set of dishes, rods of lead for writing on slate, and the remains of a toothbrush made from bone and hog bristles. They found dice, combs, pottery, and religious medals, and a remnant of one of the era’s advances in communications field: the nib of a steel pen, a device that allowed for easier writing than did the goose-quill pen that came before.

Studies at St. John’s College

Writing—or, more to the point, penmanship—was a key part of the curriculum, and was especially important for finding a job. “Employers judged your character and fitness for the job on how clearly you could write,” Wines said. Students also studied Greek, Latin, history, literature, and other classic subjects in a custodial, highly structured setting. Students lived barracks-style in wings that were added to what is today Cunniffe House (the “unfinished house in a field” Hughes referred to), the same building in which they attended class. Rose Hill Manor had various occupants over the years, including Jesuits-in-training.

Students followed a six-year curriculum—modeled on a European lycee—that the Jesuits brought with them in 1846. It comprised three years of grammar (corresponding to an American secondary school) and three years of college-level humanities. After six years, students received a bachelor’s degree, and those who stayed for one more year could earn a master’s in philosophy.

The students numbered anywhere from 100 to 200 for the first few decades, and some were adolescents, possibly as young as 10.

Unlike the College of St. Francis Xavier, the companion college founded in Manhattan by Fordham’s first Jesuits, the college at Rose Hill could draw students from beyond the New York area because it was a boarding school. About a third of the students were Latin American boys from merchant-class parents who wanted them to be able to speak English and do business in New York while also maintaining their faith.

“This was a good place to send them because they would be in a safe Catholic environment,” Wines said. “Nothing bad was going to happen to them.”

The Jesuit Approach

Vice wasn’t the only worry in the city to the south; hostility to Catholics in New York led Hughes—named the first archbishop of New York in 1850—to buy the college’s land through an intermediary, Gilbert said. Hughes also made sure the charter for the school was approved before announcing it was being taken over by Jesuits, whom critics considered to be “political priests,” Wines said.

The Jesuits brought a rigorous system with them in 1846. Students cycled through a regimen of prayers, study halls, classes, meals, and occasional recreation that stretched out across six-and-a-half days a week. (The weekend hadn’t been invented yet.) They began the day by washing their faces in sinks filled by a servant who’d drawn water from the well outside, and everyone went to bed at the same time every night when the candles or whale oil lamps were snuffed out.

The students stayed in this closely supervised setting for a longer school year, one that lasted until mid-July. One principal teacher taught all major subjects to each class, paying close attention to the moral as well as intellectual formation of students. “They really took care of you for a whole year” and found out everything, including “things you probably wish they didn’t,” Wines said.

Recreation consisted of ball games or indoor games played with plain objects like marbles or dominoes—which Gilbert and Wines found during their excavations—or, simply, words and imagination. “There was nothing to buy; you just made it up,” Gilbert said.

Preserving the Past

He and Wines have put much of the relics into safe storage in Dealy Hall and are exploring the possibilities for finding them a new space. Wines is working on a book about the early history of Rose Hill and the Bronx, and he and Gilbert wrote a chapter about their excavation of Rose Hill Manor for a forthcoming book, impishly titled Digging the Bronx.

In its pages, readers will see the many ways in which schools, colleges, and other institutions are exploring the history of an area that has been transformed from countryside into a major metropolis, all within the lifespan of Fordham.

“It’s a range of different kinds of applications, so that people get a sense for how many sorts of people are out there digging in the ground,” Gilbert said.