If you had asked me yesterday morning how many Long Island Championships our athletic teams have won, I’d have reflexively told you nine.

I would have been wrong.

I had always been led to believe that the 1999 baseball team was the first to claim island dominance, followed by several girls’ soccer, girls’ basketball, and boys’ basketball teams. Today, while I was pouring over old issues of The Blue and White, a student newspaper dating back to the early 1940s, a missing championship came to light.

The June 1960 issue of The Blue and White described the now forgotten accolades of the 1960 fencing squad that defeated ten other schools in the Long Island High School Fencing Association Championships. On May 7, Dan Olson, Sam Peters, and Doug Wedel traveled to C.W. Post to compete in ten individual bouts. The team with the highest win total of those collective thirty bouts would be crowned the champion.

Peters ran through the competition with a perfect 10-0 record, Olson lost just one bout, and Wedel finished 6-4. The team total of 25 was enough for a two-point victory over Eastern Military Academy. The individual championship followed and Peters earned the bronze for the Blue and White.

When the foils had finally been laid down, each of the competitors voted on the title of Fencer’s Fencer, the boy who exhibited the best sportsmanship and overall ability. Olson won the prize to close a banner day for the Brookers.

The fencing team established itself as the best swordsmen on the island in 1960, but Res Gestae 1960 makes no mention of it as it had already gone to print and no issue of the Stony Brook Bulletin includes it either. Thanks to an old article in a tattered student newspaper, these boys have been restored to their rightful place among some of the finest teams in school history.

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