COLLEGEVILLE, Minn. - Frank Farrington didn't realize exactly how prescient he was.
 
After witnessing Saint John's junior halfback Jim Lehman '56 rush for five touchdowns and kick three extra points in the Johnnies' 39-7 victory over Augustana (S.D.) in the 1954 season finale, the former sportswriter and editor for the St. Cloud Times sat down to chronicle the achievement in his popular "Fanning Mill" column.
 
"It was only natural that his pals should slap him soundly on the back and grab his paw," Farrington wrote. "He had just set a new scoring record for the school – something that is not done every 10 or 15 minutes."
 
Indeed, though three other players have managed to equal the feat in the decades since, Lehman's five-touchdown performance remains tied for a single-game program record 70 years later.
 
All told, Lehman – who passed away in 2009 – accounted for 33 points in the matchup, played in Collegeville on Nov. 6. And he could have had more had meteorological conditions not slowed him down.
 
"It was colder than heck that day," recalled the late Wayne Hergott, SJU's starting quarterback, in a 2020 interview. "The field was literally frozen, and Jim still had five touchdowns. And there was at least one more play where he would have scored had he not slipped."
 
SJU's second-year head coach John Gagliardi also limited Lehman's action because of the lopsided nature of the score.
 
"Though the Breckenridge (Minn.) junior scored almost all of the Jay points, he played less than half the game," read the account of the contest in the Times. "Even at that rate, he saw almost twice as much action as the other Johnnie regulars, who saw no more than 15 minutes of play."
 
Lehman had started at quarterback for the Johnnies during Gagliardi's first season in 1953 before the new head coach decided his talents were better utilized as a running back.
 
"But by the end of the year (in 1953), I was starting and he had moved to halfback," Hergott recalled with a chuckle. "I'd love to leave the story there to make me look good.
 
"But the truth was John knew the kind of talent that Jim had was being smothered at quarterback, because quarterbacks didn't run the ball as much. We needed to have the ball in Jim's hands in the running game as much as possible."
 
In fact, it was an injury Lehman sustained in a scrimmage early in 1954 that convinced Gagliardi to begin limiting contact in practice – the origin of the legendary head coach's famous List of No's.
 
"I guess maybe I felt like I had to do it for a while," he said of full-contact scrimmaging in a 2002 interview with the St. Cloud Times. "But the biggest key in turning me away from all of that was when Jim Lehman got hurt in a scrimmage. It was pointless – when your star players get hurt, boy, you're in trouble.
 
"I was trying to survive here. Why take chances like that?"
 
Lehman finished his career with 30 rushing touchdowns – which, at the time, was a school record and remains tied for eighth-most in program history. He was an All-American as both a junior and senior and was named the 1955 MIAC Most Valuable Player after scoring 16 touchdowns that season.
 
Following graduation, Lehman served in the Navy and spent time briefly with the Baltimore Colts before injuries ended his pro-football aspirations.
 
He and his wife Barbara eventually settled in Alexandria where they raised sons Jim Jr., Tom and Michael. Tom, of course, went on to great success and fame as a golfer on the PGA Tour – though he very nearly followed in his father and brother Jim Jr.'s footsteps at SJU.
 
"I was enrolled at Saint John's right up until mid-August before school started," recalled Tom, a high school quarterback who had planned on playing football for the Johnnies, in a feature story that accompanied his father's induction into the SJU J-Club Hall of Honor in 2021. "But I'd had the good fortune of playing golf in a tournament with one of the captains of the team at the University of Minnesota. And I got a call from the golf coach there who asked if I'd like to play for the Gophers.
 
"So I ended up dropping out at Saint John's and enrolling at the U of M. But before that, Saint John's was where I had planned on going. It wasn't just my dad. My uncle had gone there, and my brother was there too.
 
So there was a real family legacy at that place."

1984 (40 years ago)
SJU elected to withdraw from its longstanding membership in the NAIA and focus exclusively on competition at the NCAA Division III level.

"Dan Ward, OSB, the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (MIAC) faculty representative, suggested the move, in part, because the MIAC officially endorses the NCAA rules," The Record reported. "And because he thought it advisable to have SJU teams follow only one set of eligibility requirements."
 
90 years ago (1934)
With the final home game of the season completed, the football field at what is now known as Clemens Stadium was being resurfaced.

"The work consists (of) filling in the depressions and raising the general level of the field in order that the draining of the field will be improved," The Record reported. "The center of the field will be raised some ten inches higher than the sidelines. This calls for hundreds of loads of ground, and several teams are busy hauling the ground from the banks behind the erstwhile baseball field. Thus, at the same time, the athletic field is being enlarged.

"The tiling is also being overhauled and catch basins (are being) constructed along the inside edge of the new running track."