War Had Rose Bowl on the Move in ’42

Gene Gray won the Rose Bowl in 1942.

Then, like so many others on the field that day, he helped win the war.

The 1942 game was the only one ever played outside Pasadena, moved to Durham, N.C., because of concerns after the attack on Pearl Harbor that the West Coast could be next.

Gray, 82, tells his story on speakerphone.

The hands he used to catch the 68-yard touchdown pass that gave Oregon State its 20-16 upset over unbeaten Duke are a distant memory.

Two years after the Rose Bowl, Gray became a bomber pilot who flew missions over Germany during World War II, surviving dozens of forays into enemy territory, only to lose his arms after the war when his military plane crashed in Panama in 1948.

“I just happened to be one of the lucky ones on the team, and one of the lucky ones to survive,” said Gray, now living near Beaverton, Ore.

Many parallels have been drawn between the Japanese attack on Dec. 7, 1941, and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on Sept. 11.

But in this respect the situation was much different: Unlike the Miami and Nebraska players who will play in the Rose Bowl on Thursday, most of the players who gathered at Duke’s stadium on New Year’s Day, 1942, knew their lives were about to change in unimaginable ways.

“It was pretty serious,” Gray said. “A lot were scared because they were going to war.”

Some of the Duke and Oregon State players--coaches too--enlisted shortly after the game. Others, like Gray, were deferred until after graduation.

Wallace Wade, Duke’s coach, had been an Army captain in World War I, and reenlisted to fight again before returning to coach the Blue Devils again from 1946-50. The stadium later was named for him.

Some of the players on the field that day would never return.

Four--Duke’s Walter Griffith, Al Hoover and Bob Nanni and Oregon State’s Everett Smith--died serving their country.

The game was played only 25 days after Pearl Harbor, and the times were ominous.

Perhaps because they knew what was ahead, the Oregon State players enjoyed a grand cross-country trip.

“We played Southern Cal and UCLA back then, so going to Pasadena would have been just another trip to Los Angeles for most of us,” Gray said.

Instead, they spent almost a month traveling by train to the East Coast and back, stopping in Chicago and Washington, D.C., on the way to Durham.

The Duke players, meanwhile, had lost out on a chance to see the country, and the whole game seemed something of a letdown to them.

The Blue Devils had gone unbeaten during the 1941 season, and Tommy Prothro--later the coach at Oregon State and UCLA as well as coach of the Chargers and Rams--was Duke’s quarterback.

Oregon State had lost twice during the season, and an Associated Press reporter wrote after the game that “Oregon Sate came east to the wonderment of most of Dixie as to why the westerners were going to show up at all.”

The Beavers definitely showed up. In the third quarter, with the score tied, 14-14, Gray made the game-turning play when he caught a pass of about 40 yards from Bob Dethman, eluded two tacklers and rambled to the end zone, completing a 68-yard play.

“About the only thing I remember is, it was a pass we had thrown on numerous occasions. We tried it on almost every team,” Gray said.

“You go out in the flat and if the [defensive] halfback comes up, you turn and go downfield. The halfback came up, but I had to wait for the ball.

“When I caught it, one of the halfbacks came across, but the field was a little wet, it was a little misty, and he slipped. I stopped and he went by me and I kept going.”

Oregon State missed the extra point, but Duke would manage only a safety the rest of the game, and Oregon State’s victory became Duke’s only loss of the season.

On the train trip back to Corvallis and all the seriousness that awaited them, the Oregon State players took in New Orleans, where the East-West all-star game was being played that year.

“Some guy at the game with a bottle of booze wanted to know who it was who scored the touchdown against Duke because he lost a lot of money,” Gray said.

“Somebody pointed at me, and that’s when I left the ballgame.”

As the team made its way home, some players got off the train near their hometowns, ready to go to war.

“We dropped off some in Arizona, then in Los Angeles. When we got back to Corvallis, there weren’t enough to talk about,” Gray said.

When he returned, Gray--who had enlisted in the Naval Air Corps--was told to get his degree and report in the spring of ’42.

When he went back for his physical, the Navy rejected him.

“They told me I didn’t belong in the Navy because I didn’t have enough teeth,” said Gray, who’d lost a few when he was kicked in the jaw by a teammate.

“I told them I wasn’t figuring on biting ‘em. I was figuring on shooting ‘em.”

The Army Air Forces found a place for him when the Navy couldn’t and Gray became a bomber pilot.

“I think I flew 35 missions without a scratch,” he said.

His crash occurred after the war.

Gray married in 1945, had seven children and eventually 13 grandchildren.

But he kept flying.

“I was going to get out of the service, but you always fly one more time,” he said.

“I had a flameout in a jet and ended up in the jungle in Panama and was badly burned. They had to amputate my arms.”

Gray worked in insurance for a time, then retired to a five-acre spread with his wife, Trudee, who took care of him in his disability until her death last year.

Gray still follows the Beavers. He even thought this might be the year he went to Pasadena.

“I was going to go if they made it,” Gray said. “But it turned out to be a false alarm.”