WHO SAID IT FIRST

Al Jones wondered how it started.

Where did the Shrine Bowl Sloan ‘Strong legs run that weak legs may walk,” come from?

The inspirational sentence has appeared on every Shrine Bowl program cover since 1938, the second year. Who wrote it? Who gets the credit?

Al S. Jones was one of several Shrine Bowl workers attending a night meeting in November 1949 when the slogan concept came up. Some thought it had originated with the East-West game.

Another thought it came out of the Carolinas’ event. One believed it was the creation of Fuzzy Woodruff, a sports writer with the Atlanta Journal.

They took the question to Past Imperial Potentate Thomas C. Law and got their answer. The Scottish Rite Bodies of Atlanta began sponsoring an All-Star Football game in that city on January 1, 1930 using high schools players. In 1935 Ralph McGill was a sportswriter on the Atlanta Constitution long before he achieved national fame. On Tuesday before Thanksgiving, he watched the two teams practicing. Then he visited the Scottish Rite Orthopedic Hospital in Atlanta that was receiving the proceeds of the annual game.

He walked out a very different man. He immediately went to his typewriter and wrote a story for the Wednesday morning Constitution His lead paragraph opened with the now immortal sentence, “Tomorrow strong legs run that weak legs may walk.

Ralph McGill became a Shriner in 1941.

He won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1959 and went on to become the Publisher of the publisher of the Atlanta Constitution.