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Research dossier · People & Ideas

Wilbur Luft

American football player and coach

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 30, 2025
Entity authorityQ62089535 ↗
Source-derived summary

Wilbur "Shorty" Luft (June 1, 1908 – December 20, 1991) was an American football player and coach. He served as the head football coach at Central Washington University from 1948 to 1949, compiling a record of 8–9–1. Luft was a quarterback at Washington State University in the early 1930s and was named the starter for the 1931 Rose Bowl.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Wilbur Luft” is american football player and coach. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Wilbur, Luft and American, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA useful biographical orientation record, particularly for establishing names, roles and a first chronology. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1908, 1991, 1948, 1949—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1908-01-01. For this dossier, Wilbur, Luft and American is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “american football player and coach” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 30, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q62089535. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1908, 1991, 1948 and 1949.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Wilbur Luft”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Wilbur Luft primary sources, Wilbur Luft archive and Wilbur research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Wilbur Luft”?
  2. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
  3. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Wilbur Luft” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.