THE ROSE BOWL A LOOK BACK : Winds of War Pushed Rose Bowl Out of Pasadena

The Rose Bowl belongs to Pasadena like the Mardi Gras belongs to New Orleans. Like the Celtics belong to Boston. Like Kellogg’s belongs to Battle Creek.

But for three weeks, 45 years ago, the Rose Bowl belonged to another city, one about as far removed from Pasadena as you can get.

On Jan. 1, 1942, for the only time in its history, “the granddaddy of them all” went on the road. Tobacco Road. The game was played in Durham, N.C., where Duke University entertained Oregon State College.

How the Rose Bowl came to be transplanted to the South that year is the tale of one man, who with considerable community support, refused to let the early days of a world war get in the way of a good college football game.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, life changed abruptly in America.

That was particularly true on the West Coast. At first, the Tournament of Roses Assn. hoped that its twin national institutions, the Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl, would be allowed to go on as scheduled. After all, there had been no interruption during the first World War. In 1918 and 1919, the parades proudly adopted martial themes and the two games matched service teams, then turned the proceeds over to the Red Cross.

But this war was different. This time, the enemy was a lot closer to California and there was no telling what he might be up to.

Whatever the Japanese might be planning for the mainland, it was Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt’s job to frustrate the attempt. As commander of the U.S. Fourth Army, Gen. DeWitt was responsible for the defense of the Far Western states. In December of 1941, his immediate concerns were blacking out the area under his command and reducing civilian traffic to a minimum as military use of the highways increased.

The Rose Parade, which annually attracted up to a million spectators, and the Rose Bowl, which had already sold out its 90,000 seats, were two crowd-control problems DeWitt figured he could do without.

So, on Saturday, Dec. 13, less than a week after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he directed California Gov. Culbert L. Olson to ask the Tournament of Roses Assn. to cancel both events.

Gov. Olson’s telegram, sent to Association President Robert McCurdy and the Pasadena city board of directors, read in part:

“The congestion of the state highways over a large area, incident to this tournament and football game, and its serious obstruction to their use in defense work; the concentration there of a large police force, now needed for defense services; the unusually large gathering of people, known to the enemy, exposing them to the dangers now threatening, requires that plans for the holding of this tournament and football game be abandoned.

“I respectfully transmit this request to you, feeling sure that all concerned will willingly comply therewith in this critical emergency and necessity for observing every possible protection to our civilian population and aiding in our defense work.”

The Association had no choice but to comply with the governor’s request and announced the cancellations the next day.

Two days later, Dec. 16, the East-West Shrine all-star game, scheduled for New Year’s Day in San Francisco, was also called off, and officials at Santa Anita in Arcadia were told not to open their winter horse racing meeting Dec. 31. The Shrine Game was later rescheduled for Jan. 3 in New Orleans, but Santa Anita stayed closed and was turned into a relocation camp for Japanese-Americans in April.

Before the Tournament of Roses Assn. officially called off the Rose Bowl game, however, it received two offers to transfer the game. One was from the Chicago Tribune, whose sports editor, Arch Ward, proposed Soldier Field and its 120,000 seats as a suitable temporary home for the greatest of all bowl games.

The other bid came from one of the two schools set to play in the game. Wallace Wade, the football coach and athletic director at Duke, volunteered the use of the Blue Devils’ home field, Duke Stadium. That field had permanent seating for only 35,000 but could accommodate up to 20,000 more with temporary stands. The attendance record was set there in 1938 when a crowd of 52,000 squeezed in to witness a game against North Carolina.

The Tribune, which had no previous ties to the Rose Bowl, wanted the event. Wade, who had been to the Rose Bowl five times as a player and coach, wanted the game.

In a telegram to Oregon State Athletic Director Percy Locey, he said that Duke was prepared to make good on its offer, “with Rose Bowl sanction or otherwise.”

At 49, Wallace Wade was one of the most respected college coaches in the country. Joe Williams, a sportswriter for the New York World-Telegram, described him this way in a 1941 column: “He is a bird-hunting, book-reading, God-fearing old-timer, and he doesn’t care very much whether you like him or not. Which is to say he doesn’t go out of his way to glad-hand you. That isn’t his way of doing. At the same time, he’s as solid as marble and sincere as sunset.”

Wade and the Rose Bowl went all the way back to 1916 together. That was before the Rose Bowl stadium was even built. Back then, the game was known as the “East-West Game” and it was contested at Tournament Park, which stood at the end of the Tournament of Roses parade route.

In the 1916 game, Wade was a starting guard for Brown University, but the Ivy Leaguers lost to Washington State by two touchdowns. Ten years later, he returned as a head coach with the first of three Alabama teams that would beat Washington by a point, tie Stanford and rout Washington State between 1926 and 1931.

Moving to Duke, Wade made his fifth appearance in Pasadena in 1939 with probably the best team he ever coached. The Blue Devils marched through their 1938 schedule undefeated, untied and unscored upon in nine games.

In the Rose Bowl, however, they were upset by USC, 7-3, on a last-minute touchdown pass by a fourth-string quarterback named Doyle Nave.

After the game, Wade went to the USC locker room to congratulate winning coach Howard Jones. Moving through the crowd of players to Jones’ office, someone asked him if he wanted to congratulate Nave, too. Wade declined, saying: “I don’t want to congratulate Nave. In fact, I’ve already seen too much of him.”

Later, Wade said he was only been joking, but Western sportswriters took the remark as a put-down of Nave. Consequently, Wade not only left Pasadena as the losing coach but, by most accounts, a sore loser.

Wade didn’t appreciate that, but he didn’t let the incident sour his relations with the Rose Bowl. So, three years later, when the opportunity arose to offer the abandoned game a temporary home, he seized it. Wade wanted to go back, even if that meant staying home.

Oregon State, which won the Pacific Coast Conference championship with a 5-2 record, was just as eager to play the game. The Beavers had never been to the Rose Bowl before and didn’t want to let the chance slip away.

In those days, the PCC champion had the only automatic berth in the Rose Bowl and was free to choose its opponent, provided that team could accept the bid. Oregon State, ranked 12th in the country by the Associated Press at the end of the 1941 regular season, wanted to play the No. 1 team, Minnesota.

The Gophers, led by halfback Bruce Smith, the Heisman Trophy winner, were atop the AP poll for the second straight year and had won six of the last eight Big Ten championships. But from 1922 through 1946, the Big Ten did not allow member schools to play in bowl games, so a date with Minnesota was out.

Duke was ranked second by AP. Undefeated and untied, the Blue Devils also led the nation in scoring average with more than 34 points a game. And Duke’s conference, the Southern, had no objection to bowl games. Oregon State sent Duke an invitation to Pasadena and it was accepted immediately.

That was before Thanksgiving. Two weeks and the outbreak of a world war later, Duke was inviting Oregon State to Durham.

Oregon State accepted the next day, Dec. 15, and the Tournament of Roses Assn. gave its enthusiastic endorsement. Meanwhile, North Carolina governor J. Melville Broughton was able to get the approval of the War Dept. by assuring officials in Washington that the game would not interfere with the state’s defense program.

So, Wade, Duke, and the city of Durham had less than three weeks to prepare for something the Tournament of Roses Assn. set aside a year to plan.

Cooperation came from all directions. The University of North Carolina offered to open its Chapel Hill campus to Oregon State, NBC radio agreed to make its broadcast of the game available to every radio station in the state, and even the weather was sunny and milder than usual for the time of year.

When the 56,000 tickets to the game were put on sale, they were snapped up in less than four days. Everybody in the state was excited about having the Rose Bowl in Durham.

Everybody, that is, except the Duke football team.

Tommy Prothro, the former college and pro coach who, ironically, would take Oregon State to its only other two Rose Bowl appearances in 1957 and ‘65, was the starting quarterback for Duke in the ’42 game.

“We weren’t that excited about it,” Prothro recalls. “As a matter of fact, we voted not to play in Durham. We’d all been looking forward to playing in California and when we found out the game was going to be in Durham, well, we were real disappointed. That was like another home game.

“We had a lot of seniors on the team and with the war on and all, we all knew we’d be in the service soon. So, if we couldn’t go to California, we wanted to go home for Christmas. It might be our last chance for a while.”

Wade was surprised by his players’ lack of enthusiasm. He argued that Duke was the only college team that could say the Rose Bowl came to them instead of the other way around, but he couldn’t get their approval until he agreed to let them go home for five days over Christmas.

Then, unable to celebrate the holiday with his own team, Wade spent it with Oregon State.

When the visitors’ train pulled into Durham at 8:15 a.m. on Christmas Eve, the Raleigh News and Observer estimated that 2,000 people were at the railroad station to greet them.

Among them was sportswriter Bob Hunter of the Los Angeles Examiner, the only West Coast newspaperman in town. Five days earlier, Hunter was in Jacksonville, Fla., covering UCLA’s final game of the season against Florida. After the game, his editor sent him up to Durham to cover the Rose Bowl preparations.

“The town really outdid itself welcoming the Oregon State team,” said Hunter, who writes now for the Daily News. “They built a big platform for the local dignitaries at the train station and when they finished, the thing it looked like a gallows, like they were getting ready to hang someone. But that morning when the train came in and all those people showed up, it was a hell of a reception.

“But that’s the way it was the whole time I was there,” Hunter said. “The hospitality was great. If you were from out of town, they treated you like a king. We were invited to people’s houses almost every night.”

One of the first Oregon State players to get off the train was junior guard Martin Chaves, who had been elected game captain for the Rose Bowl before the team left Corvallis. No sooner had Chaves stepped off the train than he was pulled up onto the platform, where he was welcomed by Wade, named honorary mayor of Durham by city officials, and interviewed on national radio by NBC’s Harry Wismer.

“We never expected anything like that,” said Chaves, now a Corvallis businessman and president of the Beaver Club, Oregon State’s football boosters. “The people in Durham really made us feel special. Whenever I hear somebody say Southern hospitality, I know exactly what they mean because we experienced it.”

After the welcoming ceremony, the 31-man Oregon State team was escorted by the Durham High School marching band to the Washington Duke Hotel where the players were given breakfast. Later in the day, they left for Chapel Hill to check into their training quarters but returned to Durham the next night as the guests of honor at a Christmas party on the Duke campus.

On Dec. 26, the Duke players returned from their holiday break and both teams settled down to a week of practice.

Duke was a 3-to-1 favorite to beat Oregon State. Some Eastern odds makers were picking the Blue Devils to win by as many as 13 points. And why not? Wade’s team seemed to have everything--the home-field advantage, a 9-0 record, the No. 2 national ranking, and All-American halfback Steve Lach, who was averaging eight yards a carry.

“Everybody figured all Duke had to do was throw their helmets out on the field and that would be it,” Chaves recalled. “But we matched up well against them.”

Duke had piled up 311 points on offense, but Oregon State’s defense had given up only 33 points all season. Duke had Lach and Tom Davis, his running mate, but Oregon State had a pretty fair pair of halfbacks, too, in Don Durdan and Bob Dethman.

Finally, if Duke was undefeated and Oregon State wasn’t, it was probably because Coach Lon Stiner’s Beavers had played a much tougher regular-season schedule against Western teams.

On a cold and wet New Year’s Day in Durham, surrounded by more than 50,000 Southerners who misplaced their manners for the afternoon, Oregon State beat Duke, 20-16, winning the only Rose Bowl ever played outside of Pasadena.

The game marked only the second time since Wade’s arrival at Duke in 1931 that a team scored as many as 20 points against the Blue Devils. Twice in 107 games.

Durdan and Dethman led the way for the Beavers. Durdan scored on a 15-yard run that gave Oregon State the lead in the first quarter, then Dethman threw touchdown passes to George Zellick and Gene Gray in the third quarter. The pass to Gray was the game-winner, the play covering 68 yards and giving the Beavers a 20-14 lead with less than a minute to go in the third quarter.

Lach was heroic in defeat, scoring on a four-yard run in the second quarter to tie the score, 7-7, then gaining 111 yards in the second half. But Oregon State’s defense forced the Blue Devils to turn the ball over seven times.

“That game meant everything to us,” said Chaves, the Oregon State captain. “First, we were going to play it in California. Then it looked like we weren’t going to play it at all. Then we had to take a train across the country to play in the other team’s back yard. After all that, there was no way we were going to lose it.

“Every now and then somebody will ask me if I had it to do all over again, would I rather have played the Rose Bowl in Pasadena? I tell ‘em no. Winning the Rose Bowl in Durham was special. We’re the only team that did it. Somebody wins the Rose Bowl in Pasadena every year.”

That 1942 game was Wallace Wade’s last Rose Bowl. Soon afterward, he left Duke to join the Army. He returned to Durham after the war and coached for five more seasons before retiring in 1950 with a 110-36-7 record over 16 seasons.

In 1967, Duke renamed its football stadium in honor of Wade and the National Football Foundation inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 1984.

Wade died last October at 94.