(1924-2019)
Inducted into the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, 1990
Born and raised in West Hartford, Weiner starred on the football, basketball and baseball teams at Hall High School, from which he graduated in 1942. He was a regular third baseman on the American Legion team. Weiner’s team won the Connecticut championships and went to the finals, played at the Polo Grounds in New York City. In football, Weiner was quarterback, doing the punting and kicking extra points after touchdown. In his senior year, his Hall High team won the conference championship.
Weiner entered Yale University in 1942 as an Army Air Force reserve member. He was outstanding on the freshman football team and was drafted after two games to play for the varsity team. In his first game, against the heavily-favored Dartmouth team, he was so new that his name wasn’t even printed in the program, but the New York Times headline read “Promotion to Yale Varsity of Pickett and Winer rouses Hopes Against Dartmouth.” In fact, the Yale team did beat Dartmouth and won the Big Three championship that year. Sportswriter Dan Parker commented, “Stan Weiner, the Jewish boy from West Hartford High started the team clicking the minute he shot into the lineup…He was harder to bring down than prices in a war boom.” Weiner was the first freshman to score a varsity touchdown at the new Yale Bowl in 1942.
Shortly after the 1942 football season, Weiner was called to duty with the U.S. Army Air Corps and enrolled at a special training program at Kansas State. After two years with the army, he attended the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, where he starred on a football team that defeated Brown and Dartmouth but lost to the undefeated Yale team. Saul Seidman wrote, “Weiner may have been the only football player ever to have earned letters playing both for Yale and against Yale.” He later returned to Yale where he again lettered in football but graduated with a BA in accounting from Columbia and returned to Hartford. A knee injury cut short his football career from that point on.
He started his own accounting practice and became senior partner of Weiner, Bernardi & Alfin in West Hartford. The Connecticut Society of CPAs made him an honorary lifetime member for his many years of service to the profession and in 2005 it presented him with a membership award in recognition and appreciation of his continuing contributions to the profession, after fifty years of being a member. For thirty-seven years, he was a member of the UConn Cancer Golf Committee and he also was a life-long member of Congregation Beth Israel in West Hartford.