Landmarks with Leon is now also known as Lehigh Valley Landmarks. I'm your host, Rachel Leon, and president of the City Council in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Each week, I'll share a short feature with a big story commemorated with a historical marker that explores a person, place, or an event important to the Lehigh Valley.
In the fall of 1936, in Easton, Pennsylvania - Lafayette College’s football team finished with one win and eight losses. A year later, a new coach arrived on College Hill, and the same program went undefeated. Eight wins. Zero losses. Seven shutouts. Opponents outscored 103 to 6.
Easton had never seen a turnaround like it — and the man who orchestrated it would eventually land in the College Football Hall of Fame. His name was Edward Everett Mylin. Everyone called him “Hook.”
Mylin was born October 23, 1894, in Leaman Place, Pennsylvania. At Franklin and Marshall College, he served as a two-time team captain and quarterback, and also earned varsity letters in soccer, baseball, track, and basketball. The nickname “Hook” came from his unusually long arms — a trait that stuck with him long after his playing days ended.
After college, Mylin coached at preparatory schools before entering the college ranks in 1923 at Lebanon Valley College. He moved to Bucknell University in 1934, where his team defeated the University of Miami, 26–0, in the first-ever Orange Bowl, played on January 1, 1935.
That success caught the attention of Lafayette College, which brought him to Easton in 1937. The timing could not have been better.
Lafayette’s 1936 season had been a disaster — one win against eight losses. Mylin’s first team responded with an extraordinary 8–0 record, winning the Middle Three Conference championship and shutting out seven of eight opponents. The turnaround earned Mylin the American Football Coaches Association’s Coach of the Year award for 1937.
Locally, his teams became known as the “Mylin Miracle Men,” a nickname that captured just how unexpected the transformation felt to Easton residents watching it unfold.
The success continued. Mylin’s 1938 Lafayette team defeated Penn State. In 1940, Lafayette went a perfect 9–0, finished unbeaten in conference play, was ranked nineteenth in the final Associated Press poll, and defeated Army. That team turned Fisher Field into more than a campus athletic ground.
World War II interrupted Mylin’s Lafayette tenure. He served overseas in the United States Army before returning to coach the 1946 season. His 1942 Lafayette team finished 3–5–1 but still managed to share the Middle Three championship that year. Mylin left Lafayette in 1947 to coach at New York University, staying through 1949.
Across four college programs and more than two decades on the sideline, his overall coaching record stood at 106 wins, 99 losses, and 17 ties.
Mylin’s reputation extended well past the scoreboard. The College Football Hall of Fame describes him as personable and popular with students, faculty, and even the opposing coaches he regularly outmaneuvered — a rare trait for a coach whose teams so often embarrassed the opposition.
In 1974, he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach. He died on June 19, 1975, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Mylin’s importance to Easton is tied to more than statistics. It’s tied to a place: Fisher Field, later renamed Fisher Stadium, which opened in 1926 and became Lafayette’s permanent football home.
Mylin arrived eleven years after the stadium opened, right as college football was becoming a genuine civic spectacle across America. His 1937 turnaround gave Easton something more than a winning season — it gave the city a team and a coach people could rally around, linking College Hill, downtown Easton, and generations of alumni.
Fisher Field at Fisher Stadium still occupies its original site on the Lafayette College campus on College Hill in Easton. The facility has been extensively modernized over the decades, but its location preserves the setting where Mylin’s greatest teams once played.
Information for this episode was provided by the College Football Hall of Fame, Lafayette College Archives and Athletics, Bucknell University Athletics, and the American Football Coaches Association.
