He Helped Plant Seeds of Rivalry

You have to get up pretty early in the morning to find an older participant than Burnell Yarick in the football rivalry between Hoover and Glendale highs.

“I doubt you can find anyone who was even born in Glendale before I was,” said Yarick, 84, who hosts a gardening show on a local radio station at 6:30 a.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.

Yarick was an offensive lineman for Hoover in 1929, when the Tornadoes beat Glendale, 6-0, in the first game between the now-longtime rivals.

He says he most likely will be in attendance Friday night, when Hoover (1-8, 0-4 in league play) and Glendale (2-6, 0-4) renew their 68-year-old rivalry in a Pacific League game at Glendale High.

Yarick still remembers that 1929 game, won on the final play when quarterback Howard Bentley scored on a one-yard sneak. He followed the block of his left tackle, Yarick.

“All I remember is him and the ball landing right beside me, across the goal line,” said Yarick, who attended Glendale as a sophomore before transferring to Hoover when it opened in 1929.

The Great Depression, as well as President Herbert Hoover’s only term in office, each began that same year.

“A lot has changed since those horse-and-buggy days,” said Yarick, the son of the Glendale School Board president.

Like what?

“Well, television, for one,” he said.

After graduating from Hoover in 1931, Yarick went to Glendale College, where he played two games before switching his attention from paydirt to top soil.

He worked much of his life as a farm advisor and agriculture teacher, before retiring and taking his botanical expertise to the weekend radio waves.

Yarick remains involved with the Glendale-area football scene.

He is the oldest member of the Glendale Quarterbacks Club, an organization of 100-plus former area players and football enthusiasts who meet weekly through the season.

“Burnell is an institution here,” one fellow member said.