ORANGE COUNTY SPORTS HALL OF FAME: THE NEW INDUCTEES : TIP OF THE CAP : Huntington Beach Coach Clears Space in Scrapbook for Another Memory

When Harry (Cap) Sheue first played high school football, his team didn’t have a coach. In fact, there wasn’t even a team until Sheue and some friends decided they wanted to form one.

They got some financial help from local merchants in Iola, Kan., and bought 16 uniforms from a Montgomery Ward catalogue.

“The pants were $2.95 and the jerseys were 90 cents,” Sheue said. “There was a shoemaker downtown who’d put cleats on an old pair of shoes for 50 cents and we bought bandannas at the five-and-dime for a nickel.”

That was more than 75 years ago, but Sheue, 91, remembers it as if it were last week.

“We went 5-2 that year,” he says.

See.

“When basketball season came around, they sent this teacher, Mr.

Harris, out to be our coach,” Sheue said. “Mainly, he was just there to keep us from raisin’ hell, I guess, because he’d never played a basketball game or even seen a basketball game.

“He came out with this manual under his arm, ‘How to Play Basketball.’ It was a joke. We had all been playing basketball at the YMCA for years.”

The team was no joke. Mr. Harris had a great seat for every game as “his” Iola High School team won the Kansas state championship in 1915.

Sheue ended up coaching in high school for more than 40 years and never needed a how-to book. For 39 years, he coached, taught, counseled and inspired students at Huntington Beach High School. Monday night he will be inducted into the Orange County Sports Hall of Fame.

Sheue already has garnered his share of accolades. He’s a member of the California Coaches Assn. Hall of Fame, and the football field at Huntington Beach High was renamed Sheue Field in his honor.

Spend an afternoon going through Sheue’s scrapbooks and you will quickly discover that his greatest legacy is the impact on the lives of hundreds of young adults, not just a few athletes.

He taught a freshman orientation class at Huntington Beach High that left a lasting impression. About 50 of his former students still correspond with him regularly.

A few who still live in the area drop by and take him to breakfast occasionally. One former student keeps Sheue supplied with books that have specially printed large type to facilitate easy reading.

“I’ve got this big old box of letters there,” Sheue said, pointing to a closet in his Huntington Beach apartment. “And when I get them out and read them, it makes me feel like it was all worthwhile.”

The apartment is a museum of sorts, filled with plaques, awards, pictures and other assorted memoirs. His most coveted trophies and awards are housed in a special trophy case at the high school.

It’s the scrapbooks he cherishes most, though. He has taken pictures of all his awards and put them in the scrapbooks because “someday I’m gonna die and somebody’s gonna throw all this stuff down the shoot.”

But not the scrapbooks. Never the scrapbooks.

It easy to understand why people don’t let go of Sheue easily. He looks you straight in the eye and often rests his hand on your knee to emphasize a point. He exudes this comfortable warmth that makes it seem like you’re talking to your grandfather.

Forget the Dale Carnegie course. Just study the Sheue method. And if you can build half the repertoire of fascinating stories, you’ll be a big hit at parties and around the camp fire.

The man makes Uncle Remus look like an amateur raconteur. Every question seems to elicit another fascinating tale.

What did you do during World War I, Cap?

“A friend talked me into volunteering for a nearby supply outfit, but when I got home from signing up I found a draft notice. I ended up in a machine-gun battalion in France. The day before we moved up to the front, I got this big Manila envelope. It said I was supposed to report to the supply unit.

“Funny, the government still works like that.

“We had these machine guns mounted on carts aiming up in the air. We were supposed to shoot down the German planes as they came over but I don’t think we ever came within 100 yards of one. We were never involved in any of that over-the-top stuff and we didn’t get shelled much, but we got gassed pretty good.

“On Nov. 9, 1918, some damn fool got the idea that we should attack this fortress on top of a mesa at Metz (France), which hadn’t been conquered in 1,000 years. That night, they sent in a jillion ambulances and evacuated the worst of us. I was real sick. I don’t know if it was the gas or the flu, but I was out cold for 48 hours.

“When I woke up, I was in a hospital and the church bells were ringing, ‘BONG, BONG, BONG.’ Somebody yells, ‘Attention’ . . . I never knew how you were supposed to come to attention in bed. Then this officer says, ‘Gentlemen, I’m pleased to tell you that the war is over.’ Five hospitals and six months later, I finally got sent home to the States.

“That’s the government for you.”

What do you remember about an orphan kid named Clare VanHoorebeke?

“Clare played football his freshman year for me and then got a job and quit school. He came back when he was 19 and asked if he could play again. I told him the rule was he could play until he was 21, but that was it.

“One day, after the last game he was eligible for, I saw him clearing out his locker. He was quitting school. I told him I’d let him coach the ‘D’ football team if he stayed and graduated. He ended up the greatest football coach in Orange County history, but I’ll always admire him most for staying in class with kids that were three and four years younger than he was. That took guts.

“After Clare graduated, I got him together with the coach at Tempe University (now Arizona State). When he got out of college, his life’s ambition was to coach at Huntington High. In 1950, we needed a coach. I was athletic director and the principal came to me and I told him to hire Clare.

“Nothing happened for about a week and when I asked the principal about it, he told me he hired someone else because he didn’t think hiring a hometown boy was a good idea. What kind of (bleep) is that? I knew Anaheim (High) needed a coach so I called their principal and they hired him.

“In the next 21 years, Anaheim won 17 Sunset League titles.”

When Sheue was a young boy, a huge deposit of natural gas was discovered near Iola. A new, four-story YMCA was just one of the benefits of the resulting influx of money. That building became a cornerstone in the his life.

“Boy, that YMCA had everything, a swimming pool, even a bowling alley,” Sheue said. “I just about lived there. Had a job as a recreation director by the time I was 14.

“I played every sport they offered and I was elected captain of a lot of the teams. So the kids started calling me ‘Cap’ and it just stuck.”

Sheue returned to Baker University in Kansas after the war and in 1921 began his coaching career at Osawatomie, Kan. Two years later, he got a coaching job at Bartlesville (Okla.) High, but it wasn’t long before he decided it was time to go West.

When Sheue drove across the country in 1924, the roads were mostly dirt.

He enrolled at USC to begin work on his master’s degree, and the first class he took was simply called, “Football.” The teacher was Knute Rockne.

Sheue coached one year at Lompoc High before coming to Huntington Beach High in 1925. Sheue retired 39 years later, but he has never really left.

One clear autumn afternoon in 1925, Sheue and his football team were taking a bus to a game at Tustin High when it occurred to him that he had achieved everything he ever wanted out of life.

“I was smelling the orange blossoms and looking at the snow-capped mountains in the distance,” he recalled. “It was sunny, probably 75 degrees, and I thought, ‘Thank you, God, for leading me here.’ ”

HARRY (CAP) SHEUE

Age: 91.

Hometown: Iola, Kan.

Residence: Huntington Beach.

Accomplishments:

Elected member of California Coaches Hall of Fame in 1975.

Founder, and for 30 years director, of prestigious Southern Counties high school track and field meet.

For 39 years, a teacher, counselor, coach or athletic director at Huntington Beach High School.

In 1967, Huntington Beach High’s football field was renamed Sheue Field.