Wrenn

Athletes may die twice: once when they put their gear away; once when breath leaves them. Two weeks ago sportsmen marked the passing in the first fashion of James Thorpe the Indian; last week death of the second, the definitive sort, came to Robert D. Wrenn, four times National Tennis Champion.

In the days when the late Reginald Vanderbilt, as a rakish Yale student, entertained the citizens of New Haven with nocturnal thunderings from his red racing car, his classmates remembered with respect a Harvard athlete who, a few years before, had stormed their fort with every crimson team--one Wrenn, Robert. He had played on the baseball nine; he had been a crack hockey forward; a resolute and heady quarterback--beyond question as good an all-around athlete as had attended any eastern college for perhaps a generation. His friends lost money to him at golf. Before Reginald Vanderbilt had left college, this Wrenn was National Tennis Champion, had, he admitted, a weakness for tennis.

Because he had been born with a superior quickness and accuracy of muscular response, he seemed for a while unbeatable. In 1893, 1894, 1896, 1897, he held the title. In 1894 a scorching Irishman named Goodbody beat the speedy Hovey, the rare Hobart, and Larned the Nonpareil, but when he met Wrenn he met his finish. In 1897 a strapping Englishman named Eaves (whose name, people said, was really Heaves), crossed the sea and beat the pride of the States, but Wrenn made him drop games like so many H's.

When the Spanish-American War broke out, Wrenn and Larned, who had volleyed shots in many a heated finals, shot a volley together in Colonel Roosevelt's Rough Riders. Wrenn got the typhoid fever. Coming home, he bought a Stock Exchange Seat in 1900 for $50,500, the highest price then on record. For a while he was the Board Member for Day & Heaton; later, with his two brothers he formed the firm of Wrenn Bros., No. 39 Broadway, of which he was a special partner at the time of his death.