When Willamette went to war
| The 1941 Willamette University Bearcats, left to right. Front: Irv Miller, Cecil Conner, Pat White, Tony Fraiola, Al Walden, Jim Fitzgerald, Buddy Reynolds, Chuck Furno. Second row: Earl Hampton, Bill Reder, Martin Barstad, Ted Ogdahl, Jim Burgess, Gene Stewart, Glenn Nordquist, Wally Olson. Third row: Dick Kern (manager), Paul Cookingham, George Constable, David Kelly, Ken Jacobson, Allan Barrett, Marshall Barbour, Clarence Williams, assistant coach Howard Maple. Back row: David Kurtz, Robert Bennett, Gordon Moore, Andrew Rogers, Neil Morley, Marv Goodman, Carrel "Truck" Deiner, Coach Roy S. "Spec" Keene. Cookingham, Kurtz, Clarence Walden and coach Maple did not make the trip to Hawaii. |
By Tom Wilson
The 1941 Willamette Bearcats compiled an impressive 8-2 record.
They easily won the Northwest Conference title, outscoring their
five opponents 218-7. The team included future Willamette
University Athletic Hall of Fame selections Ted Ogdahl, Marvin
Goodman, Dick Weisgerber (assistant coach) and head coach Roy S.
'Spec' Keene.
Willamette had 11 of 13 players on the NWC first-team all-star
unit: ends Bill Reder and Marshall Barbour; tackles Martin Barstad,
Neil Morley and George Constable; guards Tony Fraiola and Gordon
Moore; and backs Al Walden, Buddy Reynolds, Gene Stewart and
Ogdahl.
Ken Jacobson, a blocking back, quarterback, and linebacker
explained, "Spec was a good recruiter and he wanted to go big time,
but we really didn't have the facilities. We played and
practiced on the same field. We did win the Northwest
Conference all four years that I was there. At that time the school
had about 800 or 900 students."
Jacobson was a sophomore in 1941.
After losing only to Idaho, the Bearcats were looking forward to a
trip to Hawaii. Willamette and San Jose were to play a series of
games with Hawaii called the Shrine Bowl.
"We took the train from Salem to San Francisco and got on a cruise
ship. The ship stopped in Los Angeles to pick up more
passengers. My father (State Senator Douglas McKay) was a very good
friend of the coaches. He and I went to Hawaii. We went with
some neighbors also," said Shirley (McKay) Hadley, a sophomore in
1941.
"I was a freshman in college [that year]. I was right out of
high school from a small town with 300 students. I had never
really been far from home, and had never seen the ocean. It
was a big experience to go to Los Angeles and then on to Hawaii.
Many of the fellas got seasick on the trip, fortunately I didn't,"
remembered fullback and quarterback Earl Hampton.
The first game was played Dec. 6 before a crowd of 24,000.
Although the Bearcats had suffered a 20-6 defeat, many of the
Oregonians were looking forward to several days of postgame
festivities.
Marv Goodman, a senior in 1941 reasoned, "In those days you played
both ways, I don't remember for sure but I think we only had a
roster of 23 or 24 players. I played end on both sides
of the ball. It was freezing when we left Salem, then we hit 85
degree weather and we didn't last long."
Goodman was a football Little All-American in 1941. He also
lettered in baseball, basketball and track at Willamette.
"I remember the huge stadium of about 25 or 30 thousand
people. I had never seen that many people in my life. The
Hawaiian boys were very fast. I think we could have given
them a better ballgame, if a number of our fellas weren't
recovering from seasickness. I don't want to use that as an
excuse, but think that certainly impacted the final score," stated
Hampton.
Jacobson said, "They were a much bigger team then we were.
The year before they [Hawaii] were in the states and we scrimmaged
them. I thought we would hold our own with them in Hawaii.
They had very good running back that we had trouble matching up
with speed-wise."
On the morning of Dec. 7, the Willamette team and fans from Salem
were waiting outside the Moana Hotel in Waikiki for a bus tour to
take them on a sightseeing tour of the island and a picnic. They
were planning to see Pearl Harbor. Then black oily
smoke filled the air.
Hampton said, "I happened to be out in front of the hotel while it
was going on. Down the street there was a big explosion about
two blocks away. I guess a Japanese plane dropped its last
bomb as it was leaving. We didn't know exactly what was going
on until later, when we picked up news on the radio. Then
Coach Spec and some military personnel came by and they had rifles
with bayonets stacked in the lobby of the hotel. They told us that
they were expecting the Japanese to attack the island and that
Waikiki would be a likely place. They were digging trenches
out by the beach, while some of us helped them."
"We spent most of the afternoon and evening not knowing what was
expected of us. We wouldn't have been much of a defense against the
Japanese. That night we stayed in the hotel. It was a
harrowing experience for us, since most of us had come from small
farms," he added.
"We were out in front of the hotel and we had a picnic planned
with the University of Hawaii. We were going to a beach on
the other side of the island. We were waiting for the bus and
then we saw airplanes flying over. We saw several formations
of planes, but we couldn't tell what they were. Then the bus
didn't come and somebody said that there were maneuvers going
on. You could see bombs dropping in the water. We
thought that those were really close maneuvers for military to be
practicing. Finally, someone turned on the radio
and we found out that we were being bombed," recalled Jacobson.
"The boys on the team actually wondered how many (servicemen)
watched them on Saturday and then died on Sunday."
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"We had breakfast and we were waiting for the bus. The sky
was just black with smoke and anti-aircraft fire. On the radio they
didn't know much more than we did. Rumors were rampant, we
couldn't drink the water because we were told that it had been
poisoned by the Japanese," said Goodman.
"We had our boxed lunches packed for the tour, and some of us were
swimming while waiting for the bus. Then a solider came along
and told us to walk under the trees and go back to the hotel
because the island is under attack," added Hadley.
Marv Goodman's wife Gloria remarked, "The boys on the team
actually wondered how many (servicemen) watched them on Saturday
and then died on Sunday."
After the aerial onslaught was over, the football team was
enlisted by the Army to fend off a possible Japanese invasion by
water. First they helped to string barbed wire on Waikiki beach at
low tide. The players were issued bolt-action Springfield M1903
rifles from World War I and given some brief training. There first
orders were to be prepared to defend the beach. Shortly thereafter
they were assigned to Punahou High School in the hills above
Honolulu. Authorities feared that water towers and storage tanks
nearby might become targets of sabotage. The players moved into the
dormitories and classrooms and went on sentry rotation of 6 hours
on/4 hours off.
Marv Goodman said, "We were taken into the Hawaiian guard and
issued World War I rifles. I had about a block walk to
patrol. I can remember that there weren't any traffic or
lights, it was eerie. I had a round in the chamber, I really
didn't know much about firing it. We were certainly projected
into an atmosphere that we weren't prepared for."
"The U.S. engineers got bombed out of their headquarters. So
they took up shop at the high school. So we formed up and
took a shift at guard duty, and then the San Jose team would take
one, and then the national guard would take a shift. I"d never even
seen a rifle before. They gave us Springfield rifles with the
bayonet on it. We"d patrol the school and say ‘Halt,
who goes there" and ‘Stand and be recognized". This went on
24 hours a day until we left, " remarked Ken Jacobson.
Shirley Hadley joked, "The guard duty was interesting because the
football team didn't know much about guns. My father had
tried to show them about the guns. They were lucky that they
didn't shoot each other."
"I worked at Tripler [Army] hospital helping the injured children.
I helped them eat and read to them until their family located
them. Supposedly the kids were on their way to Sunday school
and were hit by stray shrapnel," she said.
They finally left Hawaii on Dec. 19 aboard the SS President
Coolidge. A luxury ocean liner, the Coolidge had arrived in Hawaii
with evacuees from the Philippines. Now it was commandeered to
transport gravely wounded servicemen, most of whom were badly
burned or amputees. Willamette coach, Roy ‘Spec" Keene and
Douglas McKay persuaded the captain to take the team and their
followers back to the mainland in exchange for assisting with the
wounded. McKay was a state senator from Salem, who would
later become governor of Oregon and a member of President
Eisenhower's cabinet. There were approximately 1,200 people
on board the ship that was designed to carry 800. The normal
four-day trip took seven days because of the zigzagging route
required to avoid Japanese submarines. On Christmas Day the
Willamette football party returned safely to San Francisco.
Hadley recalled, "We helped with the wounded that were in the
bowels of the ship. They were very badly injured —
one was a baseball player, he was wondering how he would pitch with
only one arm. The ship was way overloaded with 1,200 people when it
should have had only 800. We had destroyer escorts from
Hawaii and switched halfway with destroyers from San
Francisco."
"They took the badly wounded on the boat and we helped out.
We stayed in steerage because that was all that was available. We
heard that there were ships being torpedoed and that didn't make
you feel very good, " said Goodman.
"We were put on a hospital ship with about 125 wounded. We
were in a convoy and changed direction every 15 minutes. We
were told that there were Japanese submarines out in the Pacific,"
Earl Hampton remembered.
Jacobson said, "As we got closer to San Francisco we could get
radio, and we heard of ships being sunk by the Japanese subs.
On that last night into port, I don't think any of us slept."
Almost the entire team enlisted in the service. Bill Reader
was the only team member killed in action during WWII.
The team was inducted into the Willamette University Athletic Hall
of Fame on Sept. 13, 1997. Also inducted that year were Wayne and
Shirley Hadley, longtime supporters of Willamette athletics who
were with the football squad in Hawaii.
Hadley reminisced, "The young men on the football team were a
great bunch."
"They still go to all of the games [when Willamette is home]. The
ones that are left get together every other week over coffee and
have a really good time trying to solve the world's problems," said
Gloria Goodman.
Tom Wilson, a contributing writer to D3football.com, is the
publisher of Rowanfootball.com. Contributing: Cliff
Voliva.