Ride Hasn’t Always Been Smooth for Game Named for Freeway : Preps: Since it began 25 years ago, the 605 All-Star Football Game has seen good times and bad.

Construction of the San Gabriel River Freeway was barely two years along in 1965 when a group of men kicked around their favorite topic at a weekly meeting of the Whittier Kiwanis Club.

The club wanted to raise more money for charity, and the guys at the meeting thought they had an answer. “(We) were interested in athletics, so we talked about having a high school all-star football game,” said Gerald Haines, then a school administrator.

Someone--no one is sure who--came up with the idea of naming the game after the new 605 Freeway that was to link Long Beach to Whittier in the Southeast area. Two years later, the idea became reality.

The Whittier Kiwanis Club long ago surrendered operation of the annual 605 All-Star Football Game, but it remains a popular event. A capacity crowd of 12,000 is expected at Cerritos College on Saturday night at 7:30 for the 25th game.

Like the freeway, the 605 Game has suffered some problems during the last quarter of a century. But it has remained a final showcase for many seniors from the predominantly blue-collar cities of Southeast Los Angeles County that border the 26-mile thoroughfare. For many players, this is their last game.

“A lot of these kids come from families where their parents are not college graduates and (going onto college) is not paramount in their minds,” said Bellflower High Principal Donn Ashton, who coached in the first 605 Game while at Mayfair High in Lakewood. “A lot of them get married very soon out of high school. A lot go looking for a job.”

There have been exceptions. Former Norwalk High Coach Jeff Brinkley, now at Newport Harbor High in Newport Beach, was voted the game’s outstanding back in 1970. Fourteen years later, the Norwalk Excelsior graduate returned to coach in the game.

The 605 Game has also been a springboard for coaches. Cerritos College Coach Frank Mazzotta, for example, coached in the 1974 and 1976 games while at Warren High in Downey. Southern Section CIF Commissioner Stan Thomas, at the former Neff High in La Mirada, was a coach for the South in 1967 with Ashton. Four-time 605 Coach Marijon Ancich, now at Tustin High, directed St. Paul High in Santa Fe Springs to three Southern Section CIF titles.

“It was a real important game to that area,” Ancich said. “A tremendous rivalry developed between the . . . teams. There was a great deal of intensity among the players, and the crowds were really (large) in the early years.”

Early on, players were showered with gifts from the Kiwanis Club. Some were as simple as pencils bearing the year and name of the game. Others were as costly as game jerseys with the players’ names on the back. Full-color posters touting the event papered telephone poles and supermarket windows.

“The idea was to make this an attractive game for the kids,” said Leo Grijalva, a retired school administrator who co-chaired the first contest with Haines. “We wanted it to be something special.”

The Kiwanis Club got a little carried away, though. No game was held in 1969 because the NCAA, which sanctions such events, discovered that the club had spent $900 more than it was allowed on player freebies.

When the game returned in 1970, the Kiwanis Club added five Long Beach high schools and dropped several northern schools a year before the 605 Freeway was completed. The North, which won the first three games of the series handily, dropped six of the next nine, beginning in 1971.

For most of the 1980s, the game fell on hard times.

“The main problem was getting people involved in running the game,” said Sam Harkiss, a Whittier dentist and the chairman of the game in the late 1970s. “We were a small club and we didn’t have the manpower. It was a lot of work.”

Schools sold fewer tickets. Attendance slumped, and the 605 Game crawled along. Uniforms fell into disrepair. Freebies dried up. In 1984, Brinkley spent his own money to provide a barbecue for the South. At least once, founders recall, the game was moved from Cerritos College to Pioneer High School in Santa Fe Springs. Local media no longer gave the 605 prominent play.

In the fall of 1985, after complaints from local coaches that the game had disintegrated into a second-rate event, the Whittier Kiwanis Club backed out.

Peter Dames, a member of the La Mirada Athletic Council, persuaded the La Mirada Kiwanis Club to take control of the game, and in 1986 it was played in the 5,000-seat stadium at La Mirada High School. Teams were reconfigured into East and West.

Dames put in long hours trying to restore the game’s luster, but he was unsuccessful in his primary goal: to motivate more high school coaches to help operate it.

“I was not a coach. I was not in the school system, and I needed their help to make it go,” Dame said.

Dame said the next three games turned small profits, but much of that was spent to maintain equipment, not to help charities. Three months before the 1990 game was to be played, the La Mirada Kiwanis Club voted to drop it.

But the game was saved again--this time by a coalition of area football coaches with the cooperation of Cerritos College, where the game has been played the past three years.

Dame agreed to stay on as an adviser under the coaches, but he resigned after less than a year.

By then, a committee of coaches from the 38 area high schools had been formed to control the 605 Game.

Schools contribute $500 a year toward running the game and are guaranteed at least two players on the team. Schools receive 500 $5 tickets. Many use them to raise additional funds. Lakewood High Coach Mark Rose, who will be one of the coaches for the South on Saturday night, said he has raised $2,000 this year by selling tickets to boosters.

Crowds of 11,000 have viewed the past two games. Local bands play, and cheerleaders from every school are present. The game has attracted corporate sponsors, and this year it will be seen tape-delayed on cable television for the first time.

Bell Gardens Coach Dave Newell, a member of the coaches committee who has twice coached in the 605 Game, believes the event has turned the corner.

“With a big crowd in there, concessions make money. And the schools now help support the game,” he said. “It’s a winner all the way around.”

That pleases both Haines and Grijalva. In recent years, they had lost track of the long-running event they helped create in those days when new transit systems were branching out to crisscross Southern California.

Nevertheless, neither man ruled out a trip down the 605 this weekend to see the football game that bears its name.