Purple Passion : Moses Greets Arrival of Wildcats After 47 Years in the Desert

Charlton Heston strode through the crowd in a purple shirt, brandishing the wooden staff he used playing Moses in “The Ten Commandments.”

“Fear not, O Wildcats,” he bellowed. “I shall not abandon thee.”

Forty-seven years have passed since the Northwestern Wildcats played in the Rose Bowl, and their return for Monday’s game against USC has apparently sent long-suffering fans and alumni such as Heston into a giddy delirium.

The actor’s performance highlighted the latest and most extreme example of this week’s Bowl hype--a news conference of Cecil B. De Milleian proportions at Universal Studios Hollywood.

Standing beside a man-made lake on the studio’s back lot, Heston gave it his best Moses as the waters--dyed purple for Northwestern’s school color--parted by special-effects pumps, allowing the Northwestern team to roll through in a tour tram. Moments later, the actor presented them with fake stone tablets carrying a sole commandment: “Thou Shall Not Lose.”

“I’ve been waiting for them,” Heston said of his alma mater, which suffered through dozens of losing seasons in the aftermath of 1949’s Rose Bowl--the last time the Illinois school managed to triumph in the Big Ten.

“They have a high academic standard, which means they’re pretty smart, and that teaches you patience,” Heston said of Northwestern, the only private university in a conference dominated by giant state schools.

Standing behind the crowd of reporters, players and fans who had assembled for the ceremony, Guy Miller could only wonder at all the fuss. For the Wildcats, a surprising 10-1 season meant a trip to Pasadena. For him, it meant a trip down memory lane.

Miller, whose cousin and nephew went to Northwestern, attended the ’49 Rose Bowl at age 19. Now 66, he heard that Universal had invited to the news conference anyone with a ticket stub from that game. That sent him climbing into the attic of his Canoga Park home in search of an old chest.

Sure enough, he found the ticket stub. (It cost $5.50, compared to this year’s $75.) He also found love letters from his wife. She was living in Illinois at the time and couldn’t make it west for the game. But she visited a few weeks later, hoping for a break from the Midwestern winter--only to run into a freak snowstorm in Los Angeles.

“It snowed for three days straight. We had more snow than Illinois,” Miller recalled. “That’s what I remember most from that year.”

The players in attendance at Thursday’s event weren’t born back then. They snapped photographs as purple fireworks exploded overhead. Dye, 200 tons of it, had been poured into the man-made lake to turn the water purple, too.

Star running back Darnell Autry said alumni such as Heston have been an inspiration for the team.

“A lot of people come up and say, ‘Thanks, I’ve been waiting 30 years, 40 years,’ ” Autry said. “You always hear about the bad ones, the bandwagoners. It’s nice to know we’ve had loyal fans.”

Fans who are willing to dig through the attic or pull out an old, wooden staff. Asked if he might call upon divine intervention to boost the team’s fortunes come Monday, Heston shook his head.

“That wouldn’t be fair, would it?”