Hall of Fame
Pat Roudebush, remembered by Oxford contemporaries as "All-Everything," was an outstanding student and campus leader as well as a fine athlete. He grew up as a campus kid: his home a house at what then was the edge of the campus, now Miami's McGuffey Museum surrounded by the university. His father was Miami's business officer (and Athletic Advisory Board member) under various titles for many years.
In the university, Pat was near straight-A. He was senior class president, received the Herschel D. Hinckley Prize to an Outstanding Junior Man, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, became Miami's nominee for a Rhodes Scholarship, was graduated magna cum laude, and won a scholarship to Harvard. He also had been vice president of both Blue Key leadership recognition society and YMCA; chairman of the All-Campus Carnival, and member of Sigma Chi, Phi Eta Sigma, and Beta Pi Theta.
At the end of his first year in law school, he had been named to the editorial board of the Harvard Law Review. Coach George L. Rider insists Roudebush was one of Miami's finest all-round athletes. He lettered in football on Coach Chet Pittser's 1931 team and was letterman and offensive spark as quarterback on Frank Wilton's first two Miami teams: the 7-1 Buckeye Conference champions of 1932 and the 7-2 Buckeye co-champions of 1933. He won baseball letters under Wilton in 1933, as co-captain, and in 1934, as captain.
He had been accustomed to working with younger boys as a camp counselor each summer and just before he was to begin his second year of law school, he was brought home seriously ill from infection incurred in a fall over a tennis court roller at his summer camp. It was an infection which today's antibiotics almost certainly would have curbed easily; he died within a few days on September 7, 1935. He was inducted into the Miami Hall of Fame in 1979.
