“I don’t measure a man’s success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom.”
— Gen. George Patton
Maurice Edlund has never read “Band of Brothers,” nor has he seen the HBO miniseries.
But the 85-year-old Stanwood resident has lived the story — twice, in fact.
Edlund knows what it’s like to go to war. He’s one of the lucky ones who made it back.
“War is hell. That covers it pretty well,” the World War II veteran said this summer. “I try to forget, but you can never totally get the thoughts out of your head.”
For many veterans fortunate enough to survive World War II, that era is one they would just as soon forget. But for Edlund and a few of the “Band of Brothers” who followed their tours of duty with a couple years of playing football at Everett Junior College, the 1940s included one year they will forever cherish. To them, 1947 was a year of opportunity, competition and dominance.
“A bunch of great, great guys,” said Larry Rodgers, who played alongside Edlund and several other veterans on the 1947 Everett JC football team, but did not serve in the war himself. “I don’t have a word to describe it. It was the best experience of my life.”
In the fall of 1947, two years after the conclusion of World War II, Everett fielded its own “Band of Brothers.” While they never holed up in the same fox hole, the group of war veterans bonded on a different kind of battlefield — one that wasn’t about war at all. After sharing similar experiences of fear, agony and sudden growth while serving overseas, these “Brothers” came together through the joy of competition. The freedom for which they’d fought gave them a second chance to feel a unique bond.
On a team made up of athletes, misfits and war heroes — one of whom would become among the most decorated veterans this state has ever seen — the group of twenty-somethings awoke from the nightmare of war to help carry a school, and a city, to an improbably historic season.
And when this group came together for the most important game of that 1947 campaign, they stood face-to-face with an opponent not unlike themselves. Only this time, the battlefield was a place not of hostility and death, but of competition and strategy. For Everett’s “Band of Brothers,” the 1947 football season came down to one contest that will not be forgotten.
This is the story of a team, a game, a season and memories that have stood the test of time.
‘THE BIG CALIFORNIANS’
“In war, there is no substitute for victory.”
— Gen. Douglas McArthur,
during his 1962 farewell speech at West Point
None of it would have mattered. That’s what happens to history.
In its second year of existence, the Everett JC football program already had run through a Washington Junior College Conference schedule with barely a hiccup, beating nine consecutive opponents by a combined 197 points, and yet the 1947 season would be remembered only for its final contest.
The Evergreen Bowl, created earlier that fall because EJC officials wanted to see how their squad matched up with one of the finest teams on the West Coast, would legitimize — or minimize — the Trojans’ undefeated season.
The school invited California powerhouse Santa Rosa Junior College north for a postseason game that would become an annual event over the next few years. By inviting a school from California, EJC was telling the city of Everett that it was ready for the big time, ready to see how it stacked up against one of the nation’s best programs.
The Trojans already had won over the city with their rugged style of play and the way they dominated opponents all season. The team was made up primarily of war veterans — approximately two-thirds of the roster had fought in WWII.
“It was a time of excitement in this country because we had The Depression and World War II behind us,” said Larry O’Donnell, an Everett historian who, as a 10-year-old fan attended every one of EJC’s games that fall. “So people were looking for something they could grab onto. And here comes this football team.”
In a part of the country with no major professional teams, a few miles from where the University of Washington team spent most of the era playing in the shadows of bigger California programs such as USC, UCLA and Cal, the EJC Trojans embodied the spirit of their hometown. Humble, hard-working and made up mostly of young men who already knew what it meant to be a hero, the 1947 EJC football team took Everett by storm that fall.
But even after going 9-0 while playing home games at Bagshaw Field, the team had one piece of business remaining. And that was to see how it stacked up against one of the powerhouses from mighty California.
In the weeks leading up to the Dec. 6 game, excitement escalated. Newspaper accounts of each EJC victory included more words about the upcoming battle with Santa Rosa than they did in recapping Everett’s weekly wins.
Not that the Trojans rolled into their big showdown. A narrow, 7-0 win over Yakima Junior College on Thanksgiving Day wrapped up the conference schedule, but also made the Everett team look suddenly vulnerable. The Trojans, admittedly distracted by the upcoming Evergreen Bowl, were able to pull that one out but hardly seemed to be peaking at the right time.
And so the stage was set for the first bowl game ever played in Snohomish County.
The Santa Rosa football team — referred to as “the big Californians” under a photograph on the front page of the Dec. 5 Everett Herald — arrived in Everett to a warm welcome that included a pep band and hundreds of curious onlookers. Santa Rosa’s workout at newly built Everett Memorial Stadium the following day was attended by fans and reporters, who recorded every detail. The newspaper tracked ticket sales, reporting that requests had come from as far away as Bellingham, Wenatchee and Vancouver.
As the hours ticked down to kickoff, football fans throughout the state waited with bated breath. Would the Everett team that played inferior opponents from the Pacific Northwest be able to hang with the big Californians?
There certainly were plenty of people who believed the task to be impossible.
HIS NEXT MISSION
Football was the last thing on Maurice Edlund’s mind when he felt the blinding pain blister his scalp. Serving a tour of duty with the Marines on the other side of the Pacific, Edlund heard the explosion but didn’t know what hit him. A Japanese mortar shell, he would ascertain years later, must have exploded a few feet away. Edlund remembers only the sound, then waking up after undergoing surgery to remove a piece of shrapnel from his skull.
His first thought was not of football but of education. Edlund still had his mind, despite the war wound, so he found himself daydreaming of a future that included an early return to the States and enrollment at a college somewhere not far from his parents’ Stanwood home.
But as the wound started to heal, while Edlund recovered in a hospital overseas, he thought of something else entirely. He couldn’t imagine leaving his troops.
“We just assumed that was part of the job, and hoped we’d be luckier on the next campaign,” Edlund said recently, shrugging off the significance of his only physical war injury.
And so, Edlund returned to battle. He served from 1942 to 1945.
Only when the war was completed did Edlund begin his next mission. This one was on a much different field of battle, although the cast of characters who flanked Edlund were similar in age and background.
In 1947, one year after Everett Junior College had fielded a football team for the first time, Edlund and several other war veterans gave the school its most memorable football season.
The school, now known as Everett Community College, disbanded its football program in 1975, so any future debate is futile: The 1947 football season was, is, and will forever be, the greatest in school history.
To Edlund and his comrades, that historic season was but a gift.
“We were just pleased to be alive,” he said, “and to be able to play football.”
BUILDING THE BALLCLUB
There was little need for military recruiters in those days. Men were conditioned to be ready to fight for their country, no matter what was going on in their lives.
And so when dozens of war veterans, many of them on the GI Bill, returned from battle and arrived at 5-year-old Everett Junior College in the fall of 1946, they were a bit overwhelmed by the recruiting efforts of a man named Joe Cooper.
Cooper, a fellow war veteran who had been discharged from the Air Force in 1945 after serving nine months overseas, was one of three EJC students school president Marvin Buechel asked to spearhead a campaign to add football to Everett Junior College’s curriculum. A 20-year-old, recent EJC graduate who was finishing up summer school, Cooper helped raise more than $3,200 by selling athletic booster cards to students on the corner of Hewitt and Colby. He convinced a local supplier of athletic equipment to provide helmets, pads and jerseys at discount prices.
But the school still needed to find athletes to fill the uniforms. Buechel and Cooper started recruiting players from the 600-person student body — more than triple the enrollment from the previous year — in hopes of giving EJC its first football team.
They were asking for men, even if those men happened to be haunted by the ghosts of death and war and battle. They would take the haggard, weary, even the unruly.
They would take anyone, quite frankly.
And yet the war veterans who agreed to take on the challenge turned out to be exactly the kind of men Everett Junior College needed to start a football program.
To bring them together, EJC hired a coach who could understand the military minds from first-hand experience. Bill McLaughlin, who trained Navy recruits during boot camp and who had played football at the University of Puget Sound before the war, proved to be the perfect fit. He was, simply, a leader of men.
“He’d just come out of the Navy himself, so they could really relate to him,” said Don Cogdill, a 1947 Everett High School graduate and one of the few 18-year-old freshmen on the EJC team the following fall.
Approximately 30 years old, Bill McLaughlin gave the veterans on the EJC football team respect but didn’t let them walk over him. He used a soft hand while demanding obedience, and there were plenty of times when the ex-soldiers needed to be kept in line.
“He was trying to discipline some very undisciplined individuals,” recalled his son Jock McLaughlin, who was an adolescent when his father coached at EJC. “They’d lived the tough life and were going to do what they wanted to do. They listened to authority, but they did what they wanted off the field.”
Bill McLaughlin’s most important rule for those first Everett JC teams was to be on time, at any cost. Running back Keith “Bobo” Moore took the rule so seriously that he once drove his tractor across land flooded by the Snohomish River just to make it to practice on time.
McLaughlin’s 1947 team had plenty of characters, including the playful two-handed punch of the Martinis brothers (Paul and Andy), the strength of 225-pound wisecracker Jim Jolgen and the steady leadership of team captain Maurice Edlund.
The Trojans’ best player was a punter (Pat Brady), their most productive offensive weapon was a converted fullback (Marv Cross) and they relied mostly on a group of sophomores who smoked cigarettes and were two years removed from hand-to-hand combat.
At first, Everett JC’s 1947 unit did not look like a team of destiny, nor did it aspire to be.
“Back in those days, people didn’t talk about goal-setting and those things,” said Neil Bartlett, a guard/linebacker on those first two Everett JC teams. “We were just looking for a way to get through college.
“We just jelled together and became a good ballclub.”
WOUNDED SOLDIERS
Questions surrounded the 1947 Everett Junior College football team right up until its September opener against Clark College.
After a 1946 season that saw the Trojans play a makeshift schedule made up of military teams from around the area, as well as the University of Washington freshman squad, Everett continued to fortify its roster with a new group of freshmen and some 11th-hour additions leading into the fall of 1947.
Sophomore running back Bobo Moore, the team’s starting fullback in 1946, had taken a job in Chicago and was not expected back. But just days before the Clark game in September 1947, Moore showed up unexpectedly at a Trojans practice, only to find hotshot Washington State College transfer Marv Cross starting at his position.
Coach McLaughlin suddenly found himself having to make room for both fullbacks. Several other returning players from the ‘46 team trickled in late as well, and the Trojans’ biggest question mark heading into the opener was how to find enough playing time for all the eager young men at practice. Balancing egos proved to be one of McLaughlin’s toughest tasks.
“He had a heck of a job on his hands with the (war) veterans,” said Larry Rodgers, a 19-year-old sophomore on that EJC team and one of its few members without military experience. “Toward the end of that season, there were lots of fights (at practice) because guys were angry about not getting enough playing time.”
One of those backups, offensive lineman Archie Van Winkle, was the feistiest of the bunch. A former UW student who served with the Marines in World War II, Van Winkle gave every bit of himself to the EJC football team in hopes of earning a starting spot. But he never cracked a lineup that included returning linemen Jim Jolgen, Otto Tollefson and Neil Bartlett as well as heralded newcomer Paul Martinis.
Archie Van Winkle’s stardom would have to come later in life, when he returned to the battlefields of war. He spent that 1947 season practicing hard and earning scraps of playing time, but was only a bit player for the Trojans.
What Dick Skinner remembers most about the 1947 team was the scene in the locker room before the first practice. As the team dressed, several war veterans put tape, braces and bulky pads on body parts injured in battle. Jim Jolgen had a softball-sized divot in his quadriceps after being injured at the Battle of Tarawa in 1943. Center Conrad Sampson was wounded at the Battle of Guadalcanal a year before that.
“I give them a lot of credit,” said Skinner, an 83-year-old Kelso resident who was a freshman in 1947 after serving as an Army typist in Alaska during the war. “They had to be hurting. For them to be out there playing, it showed how much they loved the game.”
And, despite the early question marks and the practice fights, the ‘47 Trojans proved to be pretty darned good at the game. By the week of the inaugural Evergreen Bowl, Everett had a long list of steamrolled opponents in its wake.
Only one more opponent stood in the Trojans’ path to perfection.
EXTRA MOTIVATION
What they saw when they unfolded The Everett Daily Herald that December morning hit them like a snowstorm. Lloyd Rodstrom, The Herald’s sports columnist and the authority on Everett sports, had anointed Santa Rosa JC the team to beat in the first Evergreen Bowl at the new Everett Memorial Field.
The EJC Trojans had had a nice run, winning all nine of their games as Rodstrom had correctly predicted, but this time the eager, young sports columnist had to go against his typical pick and go with the powerhouse football program from the Bay Area.
“The Californians definitely have the stronger team,” Rodstrom wrote in the Dec. 4 edition of The Herald. “And here’s our predicted score … Santa Rosa 20, Everett 7.”
Never mind that the Trojans had won their first nine games by a combined score of 246-49, that they had shut out four of their nine opponents and allowed just one team to score more than seven points (Mount Vernon, in a 45-19 EJC victory in Week 2).
For this game, Rodstrom had to go with the visiting Bear Cubs from Santa Rosa.
“They were ranked fourth or fifth in the nation,” recalled Larry Rodgers, an Edmonds native who played halfback on Everett’s 1947 team. “So word got out that they were heavily favored.”
The Trojans handled the perception like they had so many other obstacles in life. That is, they rolled up their sleeves and attacked it with military precision.
“We’d learned never to give up, to keep trying and keep charging,” said Maurice Edlund, an end who played both ways. “We had to come from behind in a few games, and we knew to keep pushing in the right direction.”
As if the Trojans didn’t have enough motivation to beat the mighty Santa Rosa Bear Cubs, Lloyd Rodstrom had given them even more.
Coming Monday: The Evergreen Bowl kicks off and the Everett punter, who would go on to play in the NFL, proves to be one of Trojans’ most valuable weapons.
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