Mr. Memorial Stadium

Published 12:01 am Sunday, October 2, 2011

EVERETT — Mel Olsen’s children grew up at 1716 38th St. It’s right off Rockefeller Avenue, and sounds like a perfectly ordinary address.

Scott Olsen, 47, will never forget the house. It had three bedrooms and one bathroom, but there was nothing ordinary about it.

“We lived in the stad

ium,” he said. “It was really cool. The stadium was my playground.”

His father, Melvin “Mel” or “Ole” Olsen, spent 28 years as the groundskeeper at Everett Memorial Stadium. The house, part of the Everett School District athletic complex that now includes the AquaSox baseball stadium, came with the job.

“When I was born, that was my house. I lived there until I was 19,” Scott Olsen said.

“We went down and played on the field after football games,” said JoAnne Gallays, 63, one of Scott’s two sisters.

Gallays, who lives in Lake Stevens with their other sister, 62-year-old Judy Mirabella, said that the Saturday mornings after Friday night games were extra special.

“We would walk through the football stadium and collect all the money and things people left behind,” Gallays recalled.

Family stories of those stadium days and memories of Mel Olsen’s lifelong friends will be shared at a celebration of his life starting at 4 p.m. Saturday at the Everett Elks Lodge.

An Everett native and World War II veteran, Melvin Olsen died Aug. 15. He was 88.

His is a story of one man’s life, but also of an era when Everett was a tight-knit community with one high school and a brand new stadium.

Melvin Olsen was born in Everett on Sept. 11, 1922. He attended Everett High School, where he played football when the late Jim Ennis was the school’s young coach. Jim Ennis, father of well-known football coach Terry Ennis, went on to coach at Cascade High School and was a charter member of the Washington State Football Coaches Hall of Fame.

Years after he was Mel Olsen’s high school coach, Jim Ennis was athletic director for the Everett School District. In 1959, he hired Olsen to become the stadium’s groundskeeper. Today, the house is unoccupied and the field is artificial turf.

Scott Olsen said one of his father’s friends, Al Orsland, had told him that before Ennis hired him for the stadium job, he drove by a house where Mel Olsen was living to check on the lawn.

Olsen said his father was always meticulous in mowing the stadium, with a mower towed behind another vehicle. He took great care to mark the football and baseball fields. He said his father wasn’t happy about letting the Seagals, a former Everett High girls’ drill team, march on the field.

When Olsen retired in 1987, he told The Herald: “When I was young, I played ball in a sand lot with holes and dust all around. That was in the back of my mind when I would go out to prepare a field. I wanted to do the best job that I could.”

Described by his children as a humble man, he didn’t mention in that interview that he was part of a team now legendary in Everett football history. That game came after his duty as a Marine in World War II.

Olsen left Everett High before he graduated to enlist in the Marine Corps shortly after the start of the war. He served aboard the USS Indianapolis in the Pacific Theater.

Gallays said her father was ill and was sent back to San Francisco before the ship was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine on July 30, 1945. More than 800 men died in and after the attack, which sank the ship. About 300 survived.

Gallays said her father, one of about 20 Marines who had been aboard the Navy ship, rarely talked about the war. “He kept it in his heart,” she said. “He lost a lot of friends.”

Back in Everett after the war, Gallays said, “he married my mom and started the American dream.” He and his wife, Shirley, who died in 2000, were married 52 years. Shirley Olsen was a nurse who also helped her husband with the school district maintenance job.

Part of Olsen’s American dream was going to Everett Junior College on the GI Bill. He was a halfback on the 1947 Everett Junior College Trojans football team. One of his many nicknames, “Maul,” came from his style of play, Scott Olsen said.

In 2009, Herald sports writer Scott M. Johnson wrote a three-day series about the team, calling it “A tale of two battlefields” because so many players were young World War II veterans. The team’s undefeated season ended with an unexpected 18-6 win over the Santa Rosa Junior College Bear Cubs.

That miracle game was played in the brand new Everett Memorial Stadium, which was built on land purchased by the Everett Elks club and donated to the district in memory of those who went to war but didn’t come home.

After the glory of the college game, Olsen settled down in Everett and worked at the old Simpson Lee Paper Company before tiring of shift work and taking the school district job.

A longtime member of the Everett Elks Lodge, he was once Elk of the Year and played Santa at an annual Elks holiday party for disabled people. A member of the Everett Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, Sons of Norway and other organizations, Olsen was later active in senior exercise classes at the Everett Y.

When Olsen retired, one article dubbed him “Mr. Stadium.”

“He was a pretty special man,” Gallays said. “We just knew him as Dad.”

Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460, muhlstein@heraldnet.com.

Celebration of life

Friends of Melvin “Ole” Olsen are invited to a celebration of his life from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday at the Everett Elks Lodge, 2802 Hoyt Ave. The event is a potluck. Olsen’s family also asks that friends bring memories to share.