A Hero Before the Time of Legends : Buck Gilmore, Forerunner of the Valley’s Great Athletes, Beat His Contemporaries at Van Nuys High to Stardom

In the middle of the Depression, with rumors of war in Europe, romance blossoms on the football field at Van Nuys High. Norma Jean Baker, who later changes her name to Marilyn Monroe, falls for center Jim Dougherty. The raven-haired Jane Russell goes with quarterback Bob Waterfield. This is serious puppy love. Both couples marry after high school.

A pretty sophomore named Patricia Moore also gets a crush on a football player. He’s a bandy-legged, part Cherokee named Dale Gilmore. Everybody calls him Buck. But Buck’s a senior. “And a football hero,” she says. “I thought he was stuck up.” They don’t date until he’s out of high school, but like Norma Jean and Jane, she marries her man. It’s a great time to be a football player at Van Nuys High.

The years go by. On the world stage, Marilyn and Jane become movie stars. Waterfield makes the pro football Hall of Fame. But their marriages end in divorce. In the Valley, Pat and Buck move to Mission Hills, raise six children in a small ranch house, have 22 grandchildren and celebrate nearly 50 years of matrimony. Theirs is a totally normal American life--except for those magic high school days, when future pop icons roamed the halls, and Buck Gilmore, for a brief moment in time, was bigger than them all.

It is 1935. There are fewer than 30,000 people in the Valley. Gilmore, 5 foot, 8 inches, 165 pounds, is a triple-threat halfback playing his last high school game. The opponent is heavily favored North Hollywood. Van Nuys and North Hollywood are major rivals, mainly because there are only two other high school teams in the Valley--San Fernando and Canoga Park.

To take advantage of Gilmore’s speed, Van Nuys Coach Jim Hudson changes his offense from the double wing to the single wing for the North Hollywood game. “It caught them by surprise,” Gilmore says, “and we beat the heck out of them, 28-0. And they were the champions. I can’t exactly remember what I did, but I know I scored at least once.”

Gilmore, older than Waterfield, is the star jock at Van Nuys. The previous spring, at the Valley track championships, he won the 100-yard dash in 9.9 seconds. He also won the 220, long jump and shotput and anchored winning relay teams. Athletically, he is an ancestor of Waterfield and Don Drysdale at Van Nuys, Charles White and Anthony Davis at San Fernando, John Elway at Granada Hills, Bret Saberhagen at Cleveland and Robin Yount at Taft. The Valley’s tradition of athletic excellence begins with him.

“Buck was the first of the outstanding athletes from the San Fernando Valley,” says local sports authority Pete Kokon, a retired sportswriter who wrote his first article for the Valley Green Sheet in 1938.

Half-century-old memories come back to Gilmore in bits and pieces now. He is 71 and recovering from quadruple bypass surgery, but his gait is strong, his silver hair thick and laughter comes easily. He and Pat still live in the three-bedroom house they purchased 36 years ago for $13,000. Over the fireplace in the den is a portrait of Christ. Golf trophies rest on a shelf above a window. Boxes full of track medals and old newspaper clippings are packed away.

“I used to have a lot more medals,” Gilmore says in his gravelly voice. “I think my kids either gave them away or lost them.”

He thinks back to his childhood in the Valley, then a rural farming community with dirt roads and open spaces. He grew up on a 40-acre walnut farm at Woodman Avenue and Magnolia Boulevard, later moving to Tyrone Avenue and Vanowen Street when he was in high school. Bigger and faster than his friends, he was always playing ball. “Sports,” he says, “was my whole life then.”

And he was good at it, too. It is believed that he was the first high school athlete in the Valley to break 10 seconds in the 100.

“And he did it on a dirt track,” says Kokon, who for two decades authored a Valley Times column called “What’s Cookin’ With Kokon.”

The summer of ‘36, Gilmore began dating Pat. He also went to summer school in Hollywood. UCLA had recruited him after high school, but Gilmore couldn’t get in because of a foreign language deficiency. After summer school, he would still need another year of Spanish, so UCLA Coach Bill Spaulding sent him, along with eight other recruits, to Miramonte School for Boys, a junior college in Atascadero.

“It was UCLA’s farm system,” Gilmore says. “We became the whole team at Atascadero. Lost only one game.”

The last game of the season was played in Los Angeles against UCLA’s freshman team, which included future pros Woody Strode and Kenny Washington. Gilmore scored a touchdown “and made a few yards running,” he says, “but all I knew was that we were having a helluva good time and beating them.” How much fun was it? On one play, he recalls, “I went around end and lateraled to Jay Cohen, who was a guard!”

Gilmore enjoyed playing football, and it showed. In a 1937 article in the L.A. Evening Herald Express, Miramonte Coach Homer Oliver calls Gilmore “the best halfback” he’s seen and says, “He’s the laughing sort who goes 60 yards with a grin from ear to ear--the damndest ball carrier I ever saw.”

Gilmore wound up lettering three years on the UCLA varsity. Pat’s mother let her skip high school classes to watch him play. In his senior year, 1939, he was co-captain with John Frawley. The starting tailback was Washington, UCLA’s first All-American. Gilmore started at right halfback and split time with a Pasadena athlete who would go on to immortality in another sport. Jackie Robinson was a year behind Gilmore.

“Jackie and I got along really well,” Gilmore says. “But I think he got a poor shake at UCLA. In my estimation, it should have been him playing tailback instead of Washington.”

Robinson wasn’t happy. A star tailback at Pasadena City College, he was switched to right half at UCLA. It was primarily a decoy position in the single wing. On a bus before a game in 1939, Gilmore says, “Robinson was down in the dumps. He never complained about anything, but he told me he was going to quit the team. He said, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ ”

As co-captain, Gilmore says, “I felt I had a responsibility to smooth things out.” So he informed trainer Mike Chambers, who in turn told Ed Horrell, then in his first year as coach. The result: Robinson began sharing time with Washington. The Bruins finished unbeaten (with four ties) and were ranked seventh in the nation. The next season, with Washington gone, Robinson led the team in rushing.

Robinson, of course, went on to bigger things after college, but Gilmore’s athletic career, except for golf in his later years, came to an abrupt end. He quit school right after the football season. “The only reason I went to UCLA was to play football,” he says. With his impending marriage, immediate cash would be more important than a future degree in physical education, so he got a job as a roustabout in the oil fields at Bakersfield.

But not long after he and Pat were married in 1940, the oil fields closed at the outset of World War II. Gilmore moved back to the Valley and got a job at Radioplane, a defense contractor later purchased by Northrop. Gilmore didn’t leave until 1976, when he retired.

During the war, he worked in a shop, welding, riveting and assembling radio-controlled target planes. Elsewhere in the plant, Norma Jean Baker, now Norma Jean Dougherty, was making parachutes.

“She was just another worker then,” he says. But Gilmore wasn’t. He was famous. One day, “a lady working across the bench from me looks at my badge,” he says. On the badge was “Dale Gilmore.” The woman recognized the name, sort of. “Do you have a brother named Buck?” she asked. Gilmore said he was Buck. “I watched you play!” she said. He no longer was the guy who put rivets in the tail section.

He was Buck Gilmore, football hero.