Editor’s note: This is the first in a six-day series looking at some of the best athletes in Snohomish County history. The countdown will include 10 athletes per day for the first four days, and five athletes per day Saturday and Sunday. The Herald will give special attention to one athlete each day.
f the Snohomish County Top 50 were simply a matter of pure, unadulterated athleticism, Merlin “Boody” Gilbertson would probably be a half-court jump shot away from making the list.
He was a self-described “average” basketball player. He was a late bloomer. And he wasn’t even the leading scorer on his own high school team.
And yet Gilbertson made our list, at No. 42, based partly on the strength of those around him.
Now 83 and living in Lake Stevens, Gilbertson is the lone living starter from one of the greatest basketball teams in Snohomish County history. He might not have been the leading scorer on the 1940 Everett High School basketball team, but Gilbertson was its most complete player. He was also one of five Seagulls from that team to go on to play college basketball.
In addition to being a star in semipro baseball during his later years, the 6-foot-4 Gilbertson held unique size and talent for a basketball guard. He was the jack-of-all-trades for a basketball team that featured four players 6-3 or taller.
That team would win 29 straight games and a state title.
For all the Seagulls’ talent – Gilbertson went on to play at the University of Washington, while teammates Bob Cummins (Seattle University), Raymond “Tiny” Arndt (Washington State College), Bill Gissburg (Oregon) and Jack Hubbard (Central Washington College) also played in college – the lone surviving starter from that team gives the credit to one man. Gilbertson said first-year head coach Jim Ennis was the reason that Everett High was able to put together such an incredible year.
“Coming into the year, we only had one good player, and that was (forward) Bob Cummins,” Gilbertson said. “The rest of us were all average players. (Ennis) molded us into the team we were.”
Cummins, who was 6-foot-3, was the team’s leading scorer and go-to player. The 6-foot-7 Arndt provided an inside presence. Gissburg and Hubbard were decent shooters and good fits for Everett’s uniquely aggressive zone defense.
And then there was Gilbertson, who was built like a forward but quick enough to play guard.
“He was a good player,” said Ralph Brown, a retired physician who was a reserve for the 1940 state champs. “He was really rugged. He worked the boards, and he had a little one-hand push shot. He was a good ball handler, but mainly just a big, rugged guy.”
Gilbertson, who was a bench player as a junior at Everett High, really emerged in his final year. After helping the Seagulls go 29-0 – they registered double-digit victories in 25 of their final 26 games – he went on to Washington and continued to develop as a player.
“I was one of those guys that got better as time went by,” he said.
Gilbertson was the Huskies’ sixth man as a sophomore in 1941-42, then worked his way into the starting lineup for the Pac-8 champions as a junior. That season, in 1942-43, UW swept USC to win the Pacific Coast title but lost its best player when captain Wally Leask was called into World War II duty in March. The Huskies went on to the national tournament and were leading Texas by 13 points at halftime before eventually losing that national quarterfinal game.
“If Wally had gone with us,” Gilbertson said, “we could have won the national championship.”
Gilbertson soon followed in Leask’s footsteps by being called into military duty. He went to the war in April 1943, spent three years away, and re-enrolled at UW in September of 1946.
Gilbertson was a starter his final year with the Huskies before joining the Sheboygan Redskins of the National Basketball League for two years, making $400 a month as a professional player. Gilbertson said that before his third season, at the age of 27 years old, he declined an offer to sign another contract because he wanted to begin his own accounting business.
After 30 years as an accountant in Everett, he retired in 1979. He now lives in Lake Stevens, “but I still consider myself an Everettite,” he said.
Gilbertson played college and professional basketball, played baseball at UW and for 12 years at the semipro level, yet the Everett High basketball team remains his most memorable.
“Everybody is so concerned with that 1940 basketball team,” he said, “but they forget that we had a hell of a baseball team too.”
Fifty-five years later, the EHS basketball team is still the one people remember.
Said Brown, the reserve on that team: “It was the right team at the right time.”
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