Years of the Tigers : Anniversary: The 75 seasons that San Fernando High has been playing football are steeped in tradition and rich with championships and talented players.

Historians are fuzzy on the details, but sometime in 1914, the San Fernando High Board of Trustees bowed to community pressure and finally allowed the school to field a varsity football team. To say that the Tigers had humble beginnings is an understatement--a 136-0 loss to Inglewood High didn’t improve school spirit that first season--but by the early ‘20s, the team was the scourge of Los Angeles.

Wilbur (Ebbie) Elam was a 5-foot-7, 167-pound guard on San Fernando’s unbeaten team in 1926--a team that did not allow a single point. “Nobody ever got inside our 20-yard line,” says Elam, who today is believed to be the oldest living ex-San Fernando Tiger. “We were the first of the school’s truly great teams.”

Now celebrating their 75th season, the Tigers have enjoyed a long tradition of success, winning 25 league titles and five City Section championships. Their 1974 team--featuring future Heisman Trophy winner Charles White--is considered among the best ever in Southern California. This year, the Tigers posted a 5-5 regular-season record and made the playoffs for the 26th time.

“There’s always pressure to be successful at San Fernando,” says Tom Hernandez, a starting guard on the 1974 City championship team and the Tigers’ current coach. “The community and the students--even the players--expect to win.”

Like a lot of old grads Elam, San Fernando High Class of ‘28, still attends his alma mater’s football games. With his daughter, a teacher at the school, he sits in the bleachers and remembers how it was when he played for the Tigers. The canvas pants and leather helmets. The single-wing. The average-size players. And he wonders:

“Where the hell do all those big guys come from? So much has changed.”

And not only in football. The 75 seasons of Tiger football reflect broader changes in the Valley, from increased population to urbanization. The school, and the Tigers, have had to deal with these changes and adapt to them. Although the football team did suffer through a few down periods, its overall success--a .600 winning percentage--has been one of the only real constants at the school.

In the early years of Tiger football, San Fernando was an agricultural community and a railroad hub, the northernmost outpost of civilization in the Valley. It drew its students from a wide area extending from Canoga Park on the west, North Hollywood to the south and Burbank to the east. But there were only about 20,000 people in the Valley. Elam graduated in a class of 64, most of them white, he recalls.

The ‘30s were marked by an influx of Latino and Japanese students at San Fernando. Not being big, the Japanese played mainly on the Tigers’ B team. “Our B teams were good because they had a lot of 12th-grade Japanese players who were really tough,” says Marvin Orland (Orlie) Schmidt, former Tiger player and the head coach for 19 years.

The end of World War II touched off a population boom in the Valley and radically altered the demographic mix. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, double sessions at the high school devastated the football team--upperclassmen got off at noon and went to work, not practice. At the same time, new schools--Poly, Monroe, Sylmar, Kennedy, Granada Hills--were carved out of San Fernando territory.

“It seems like they built a new school every couple of years,” says Schmidt, whose teams suffered through six consecutive losing seasons from 1955-60. “We’d get a bunch of 10th-graders going in football and then they’d move on, and then we’d get beat by kids we’d had.”

In the ‘50s, Schmidt recalls, defensive back Conrad Johnson was the first black player at San Fernando, but by the time the Tigers were winning back-to-back City titles in ’74 and ‘75, the community’s population was divided almost equally among blacks, whites and Latinos. Among City schools in the Valley, San Fernando High had the largest number of blacks, who were the stars of the football team.

Today, however, “the community is 85-90% Mexican and under 10% black,” Hernandez says. Which affects the football team--”We don’t have as many skill kids as we used to have,” he says--and the balance of power in the Valley. “We used to be the only team with speed and team quickness. Now, because of busing, other schools have as much or more.”

But, Hernandez says, “We always seem to have enough kids at the skill positions to be a good football team.”

Founded in 1896, San Fernando High is the oldest high school in the Valley, and the Tigers are believed to be the Valley’s first varsity football team. Burbank High’s varsity was thought to predate San Fernando by a couple of years, but Burbank High records indicate that the school didn’t begin playing varsity football until 1919, five years after the Tigers. In their first season, the Tigers played “Burbank” twice, but the games probably were against the high school’s club team.

“Fields were dirt back then,” says Bill Frazer, the Tigers’ official historian. “I’ve heard that if you played a faster team, you’d water the dirt to slow them down.”

Frazer, with help from his wife Karen, compiled a 56-page football record book that came out before this season. It’s just coincidence that the book commemorates 75 seasons of Tiger football: This would seem to be the 76th season. Digging through newspaper archives and old yearbooks, however, Frazer discovered that the Tigers--along with probably all the other high school teams in L.A.--didn’t play in 1918 because of a worldwide flu epidemic.

Frazer, who played football at San Fernando in the late ‘50s, has been a walk-on coach at the school since 1965, leaving his job at the Red Cross in the afternoons to help out at practice. He has his theories on why the Tigers have been so successful in football.

“The program has continuity,” he says. “A lot of the coaches were former players. Orlie Schmidt coached Bill Marsh who coached Tom Hernandez, and they all had relatives who played.”

Another reason given for the team’s success is “the involvement of the community,” Hernandez says. Despite changing demographics and homogenization of the Valley, San Fernando has retained a small-town identity and a dedication to the football team going back to the early days. When Elam and his brother Fred played in the mid-’20s, their father would close his service station to attend the Friday afternoon football game.

“It’s kind of hard to find that involvement any more,” Hernandez says, “but this is as close as you can get in the Valley. We get great crowds.”

Because so many ex-Tigers remain interested in San Fernando football, former Coach Phil Lozano founded the Football Alumni Assn. three years ago. It now has 300 members. This year’s reunion dinner will be held Dec. 5 at the Odyssey restaurant in Mission Hills. Schmidt’s 1953 unbeaten city championship team will be inducted into the Tigers’ Hall of Fame along with Ralph Bertell, a running back in the ‘30s.

Previous inductees include Elam’s 1926 team and the 1937 team that won what was then the minor school City title. But conspicuously absent from the hall are such stars as Charles White and Anthony Davis, who played in 1968-70 and still holds the school single-season and career rushing records.

“We wanted to honor the older players first,” Lozano says, “because they’re either passed away or will be passed away.”

Lozano, who went to Franklin High, was head coach of the Tigers for three seasons in the mid-’60s, posting a 22-7 record, and is now assistant dean of student services at Mission College. He worries that when he retires in two or three years, nobody will step forward to take over the alumni association.

“Seventy-five seasons is a tremendous legacy,” he says. “We want to perpetuate it.”