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 WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2010 6:09 am |
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The big game kicks off: The story of the 1947 Everett Junior College football team Part II The Santa Rosa Junior College football team didn't look any different than the other outfits Everett Junior College had faced during that memorable 1947 season. The Trojans had heard so much about “the big Californians” that they half expected to see 50 Paul Bunyan clones walk into Everett Memorial Stadium.So when they looked at their opponents on that December afternoon in 1947 while warming up for the first Evergreen Bowl, the Trojans weren't intimidated by what they saw. “We just knew we had a damn good football team,” said Dick Skinner, one of several freshmen on that EJC team. “We had all the confidence in ourselves.” For Part I, Click here What the Trojans didn't know at the time was that the Santa Rosa Bear Cubs were a lot like them. Of the 100 players who showed up for SRJC's tryouts the previous year, all but six had military ties. The Bear Cubs also shared another personality trait with Everett's Trojans: a propensity to raise hell. “As long as they didn't go into the bars, they were all right,” said 92-year-old Bob Mastin, a former assistant coach on the 1947 Santa Rosa JC team. Using the same single-wing offense employed by EJC, the Bear Cubs had nipped and tucked their way through a competitive schedule made up of California juggernauts — a lineup of opponents far superior to the Trojans' schedule. By the time Santa Rosa JC arrived in Everett by train on Dec. 4, the Bear Cubs sported a 6-2 record and a spot in the national junior-college polls. Santa Rosa's backfield included two heralded backs: star freshman Bill Hubbel and leading rusher George Lagorio, both of whom had become household names in JC football. A crowd of 10,000 — more than double the attendance at the Trojans' season opener that year — watched eagerly as the players stretched and ran before one of the first games ever played at Everett Memorial Stadium. KRKO radio broadcast the pregame festivities to thousands. As kickoff approached, the Santa Rosa players shivered in the cold of a Pacific Northwest December. The benches on the SRJC sideline were bordered with hay so that the visiting players could keep their feet warm. Rain began to trickle down. Almost sixty-two years later, Santa Rosa's Mastin described the conditions in three words: “Colder than hell.” Now that the two teams were standing on the same field, the sides seemed to be leveled out. Perhaps the Santa Rosa Bear Cubs were a bit bigger, admitted one member of that Everett team, but that didn't necessarily make them better. “To me,” Everett's 5-foot-6 quarterback, Scott Smith, said years later, “everyone was big.” ‘THE OTHER GAME' A tadpole of a child, who grew into a sparkplug of a man, Scott Smith never got tired of rising up and surprising people who thought he was too small. Topping out at 5-foot-6, the Everett High School quarterback vowed that he would play college football — no matter how many people thought the feat impossible. One thing that was never in doubt was that Smith would be a military man. His father, Fenton, served in the Navy and fought in World War I. His older brother, Fenton Jr., graduated from the Naval Academy in 1942 and immediately went off for a tour of duty on a submarine. “When that war started,” Scott Smith said recently, “I knew I'd be there.” Smith initially spoke of dropping out of school to go overseas, but his father talked him out of it. He had to wait until late 1943, a few months after high school graduation, before following in his family's Naval footsteps and heading off for a tour in the Pacific. Serving on a destroyer, Smith saw action in the Philippines and Iwo Jima. His most vivid memories involved the dangers of war: the time he scaled the destroyer's gun on the front of the ship and used bed sheets to dislodge a 54-pound projectile from its barrel, and the time a Japanese kamikaze pilot, strapped with explosives and carrying a machine gun, fell out of a fighter plane and into the ocean 20 feet in front of Smith. War was no game, Smith quickly realized. All those so-called battles he had waged on football fields were minutiae compared to this. “When you're playing football, other than beating the hell out of your opponent, you're really just trying to bruise him,” Smith said earlier this summer in a telephone interview from his Marysville home. “When you're playing the other game” — the game of war — “either you're here, or you're not.” Smith did almost two years of service before heading back to his hometown in early 1945. The next fall, at the age of 23, Smith enrolled at Everett Junior College and quickly went out for the football team. And wouldn't you know it? The 5-foot-6 quarterback achieved his goal by making the team. His duties as quarterback often included serving as lead blocker and taking on defenders who sometimes out-weighed him by nearly 100 pounds. But the 165-pound Smith was just the sparkplug for the job. THE BATTLE IS ENGAGED Before instant replay, before color television and Chris Berman and up-to-the-minute scoring updates, before TiVo and YouTube and the iPhone, there was only the rewind of memory. One's own mind was often the lone witness to history, even on the field of sport. Barely decipherable statistics and a short newspaper account might be available, documenting the score and a few numbers in black and white, but the highlights of a game, back then, were left to the blink of a witness's eye. What Scott Smith remembers from that December day in 1947 was that the Trojans were getting their lunch handed to them. Santa Rosa JC was doing whatever it wanted to move the football, and every trick Everett's single-wing offense pulled out of its hat was met with a chilly, saw-that-one-coming reception from the Santa Rosa defense. “We had this lateral pass that we used all the time, and the first time we used it that day, they jumped on it like they knew it was coming,” Smith said. “We had to forget about that play for the rest of the game.” Trojans halfback Larry Rodgers remembers Santa Rosa pulling a little trickery of its own that day. “The first three plays of the game, I went the wrong direction three times; they faked that well,” Rodgers recalled. “Then they never did it again. To this day, I wonder why they didn't keep doing that because it was working so well.” During the opening quarter of that 1947 Evergreen Bowl, the Trojans looked outmatched for the first time all season. Santa Rosa moved the ball up and down the field, piling up yards but no points. Two long drives resulted in a turnover on downs at the Everett 3-yard line and a missed field goal. The best thing going for Everett was the left leg of sophomore punter Pat Brady, whose gravity-defying kicks were enough to keep Santa Rosa pinned deep in its own territory at the start of every drive. And when one of Brady's punts came fluttering down and careened off the waiting arms of a Santa Rosa return man, that's when Everett got the break it needed. 'JUST GOOD-LOOKING AND SMART' While trying last summer to put together a reunion of the 1947 team, Everett Community College vice president John Olson kept getting the same question from almost every living member he contacted. Will Pat Brady be there? As Olson said in a July e-mail to The Herald: “He was their guy that made it to the big time.” Athletically, Brady went further, and farther, than anyone else on that 1947 team. His EJC career led to stops in Reno, Nev., and Peoria, Ill., he was drafted by the New York Giants of the National Football League, had a short stint in the Canadian Football League and, eventually, a three-year career with the Pittsburgh Steelers of the NFL. From the beginning, Brady was different from his EJC teammates. A graduate of Seattle's O'Dea High School, Brady was one of just three members of the 1947 team who didn't grow up in Snohomish County. While the Seattle native did have a common bond with his EJC teammates in that he served his country, the former military policeman stood out from the rest in a physical sense, measuring 6-foot-3. Brady had so much raw athletic talent that he was EJC's quarterback on passing plays and also starred on the Trojans' basketball team. He quickly established himself as the school's most impressive athlete. Historian Larry O'Donnell, who was a fan of the 1947 EJC football team as a child, recalled a game in which Brady was called on to punt in foggy conditions at the old Bagshaw Field. Brady boomed one up into the fog, and the ball seemed to rise beyond the heavens. “Everybody was waiting, waiting,” recalled O'Donnell, who attended the game. “And then eventually it comes down, 15 yards behind the poor guy who was waiting to catch it. “They didn't have to punt very often, but, boy, was it a thrill when he did.” Brady's EJC career led him to Reno, Nev., although he had to hitchhike just to get a tryout with the University of Nevada football team. He cemented a place in the record books while at Nevada, kicking one punt an NCAA record 99 yards. But the school dropped football the following year, and so Brady headed east to Peoria, Ill., and enrolled at Bradley University. After a solid senior season, Brady was selected by the New York Giants in the 13th round of the 1952 NFL draft, but received a better offer from a Canadian Football League team. He was with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats for the first four games of the CFL season before he was released when league rules required Hamilton to reduce its roster to eight Americans on Oct. 1. The Hamilton coach contacted Art Rooney Sr., owner of the NFL's Steelers, who were looking for a punter. Pittsburgh gave Brady a tryout, and after working out a deal with the Giants, signed the former Everett Trojan. Brady spent three seasons in Pittsburgh, leading the NFL in punting twice. He is still remembered as one of the best punters in Steelers history. “He was the greatest punter I've ever seen,” said Scott Smith, quarterback of the 1947 EJC team. “He's the only man on record who once punted a ball from the 30-yard line out of the damn stadium (while playing for the Steelers).” Jock McLaughlin, whose father, Bill, was head coach of the 1947 team, remembered Brady for his natural ability. “He was one hell of an athlete,” the younger McLaughin said recently of Brady, an outfielder in baseball who received an offer to play for Sacramento of the Pacific Coast League. “But dad was sure he was playing at 78 percent of his maximum. ... My dad once said: ‘Brady never worked an honest day in his life, but he's doing better than the rest of us. He's just good-looking and smart.'” Brady never made it to the EJC reunion. He was 83 years old by the time the school honored its 1947 team earlier this summer, and Brady's health was such that he could not make the trip from his Reno home. In July, one month after the reunion, Brady lost his battle with lymphoma and passed away at a Reno hospital. While Brady's travels took him far away from his home state, and his junior-college alma mater, he will not soon be forgotten. “He was an outstanding punter,” said Maurice Edlund, team captain of the 1947 EJC team. “He pulled us out of many jams with his ability to kick the ball 55, 60 yards in the air.” FIRST BLOOD When one of Pat Brady's booming punts came wobbling down inside the 20-yard line late in the second quarter, the Santa Rosa return man had nary a chance. The football bounced off his arms and rolled to the 15-yard line, where Everett's Ted Sullivan gleefully covered the ball. A few plays later, the Trojans drew first blood. Bobo Moore, the fullback who had reported to the team only days before Everett's opener three months earlier, barreled into the end zone from 2 yards out to give the Trojans a 6-0 lead. “That,” team captain Maurice Edlund said more than 60 years later, “was the turning point.” And it proved to the 10,000 fans in attendance that these Trojans might be able to hang with the mighty Californians. Everett held onto that 6-0 lead heading into halftime, and by then the Trojans had the confidence they needed to play with one of the nation's best teams. But Santa Rosa had its own confidence coming out of the locker room in the second half. The Bear Cubs immediately marched down the field for their first points of the game on the opening drive of the third quarter. George Lagorio's touchdown run tied the score 6-6, and even though Santa Rosa missed the extra point, momentum had suddenly swung back toward the favorites from down south. Everett's first drive of the third quarter stalled, and after another long Brady punt, Santa Rosa was on the march once again. This time, the Bear Cubs went 51 yards to get deep into EJC territory. The tide was turning so violently that the Trojans needed a miracle to keep from getting swept away. Everett's Larry Rodgers provided that miracle with one of the most remarkable plays of the season — and perhaps the most important play in school history. Coming Tuesday: The conclusion of the game and, with the 1947 season behind them, the Everett players move on with their lives, which for reserve lineman Archie Van Winkle means a heroic return to the battlefields of war.Cast of main characters Pat Brady, the Trojans' punter and most impressive athlete Marv Cross, Everett's star halfback who in 1947 ranked among the nation's leading scorers Maurice Edlund, defensive/offensive end and a team captain Bill McLaughlin, former Navy man and Everett JC's first head football coach Larry Rodgers, offensive/defensive halfback who made a big play in the Evergreen Bowl Scott Smith, the team's 5-foot-6 starting quarterback Keith “Bobo” Moore, fullback who scored the first touchdown in the Evergreen Bowl Archie Van Winkle, a reserve lineman who earned fame far from the football field |
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