Boston College Athletics
Oslin's Take: The Program Man
September 12, 2015 | Football
Former Boston College Athletics sports information directory Reid Oslin provides a historical look back at the Eagles with a story in the game program for each football home game. Ahead today's season opener against Howard, Oslin meets Tom Leehan who may just have the most complete and comprehensive collection of Boston College game programs anywhere.
By Reid Oslin
Can’t tell the players without a program? Then you need to talk to Tom Leehan, a 40-year University employee who has assembled the most complete Boston College football program collection anywhere.
“I figure that Boston College has played approximately 1,150 games since they started football [1893], and I’ve got programs from about 850 of them,” Leehan said proudly. “And for a lot of games played before 1915, BC didn’t really have a home field, so they just handed out sheets of paper with names on them,” he added.
Leehan joined Boston College’s Facilities Management staff in 1975, and in addition to his day job, earned a bachelor’s degree in management from the Woods College of Advancing Studies in 1984. Today, the helpful and talented Leehan is the department’s lead general utility specialist, using his experience and innovative skills to solve the myriad of facility problems and challenges that crop up daily on a campus as complex as that of Boston College.
A native of Newton, Leehan says that he always been a collector – “Everything but rocks,” he added with a laugh.
He began collecting Eagle sports programs in 1987. “I went to a memorabilia show,” he recalled recently, “and I found five BC programs from the 1940-1942 era and I started collecting them. I have been doing it ever since.
“The only thing I regret is that I didn’t start collecting during the Doug Flutie era,” he said, “although I have gotten a lot of Flutie items since that time.”
Leehan says that his most prized item is an original program from the Boston College – Holy Cross game of October 30, 1915, the first contest played in the school’s original Alumni Stadium on middle campus – now the site of Stokes Hall.
“That was the dedication game for the old Alumni Stadium,” he says, “and it was Boston College’s first football program.” Leehan found the original piece at a sports auction in New York.
He also combs through the twice-monthly publication Sports Collectors’ Digest, but said that he hasn’t found much for his collection in that outlet recently. “Most of the items I already have,” he said.
Leehan also networks constantly with New England memorabilia vendors and is an active member of the Greater Boston Sports Collectors’ Club. “I keep a list of what I don’t have,” he explained. “And I carry it with me all of the time.
“Going back to 1940, I only need about 20 programs,” Leehan said. “I do need some from the teens, 20s and 30s, but those are tough to find. You have to keep hunting.”
Leehan keeps each of his treasures in individual plastic sleeves in carefully indexed binders. His expansive collection – which also includes posters, commemorative items and other BC memorabilia, is carefully arranged in the cellar of his family’s home in West Newton.
His Boston College hobby “Keeps me out of trouble,” Leehan said. “But even more importantly, over the years I have met a lot of alumni who have called the BC Sports Media Office or the Football Office and asked, ‘Do you know where I might be able to get such-and-such an article that appeared in a BC football program?’ I have made copies of the articles and mailed them to the people who had asked.
“There was one alumnus who had played on the 1970 football team who was looking for that year’s BC-Army game program,” Leehan recalled. “He had been written up in an article that day. I copied the pages and told him that if I ever ran across another game program I would send it to him. It took me about three years, but I found an extra copy of the game program and mailed it to him. I didn’t know him from a hole in the wall when he first called, but he was so thankful and happy.”
Leehan said that he collects “anything at all” that has to do with Boston College. In addition to his excellent football collection, he has hundreds of hockey and basketball publications and a good set of women’s sports programs, most of which have been circulated in the last decade or so.
He figures that he’s got about 50 copies of Sub Turri yearbooks published in the past century and dozens of University Commencement programs from the last 40 years.
“Pretty much anything I see, I grab,” he admits. “People often ask what I am going to do with all of this,” he said. “I’ll probably donate it to the University some day.
“You have to want to do it,” Leehan said as he surveyed his vast Eagle sports collection. “But it’s a lot of fun.”
One person who may not look at Leehan’s hobby as “fun” is Tom’s wife, Jean, who sees his BC treasures as slowly overtaking their home. Leehan admits, “She has told me more than once that if I bring any more of that BC stuff home, she’s leaving.
“My reply is always, ‘Beautiful! I need the room!’
