Big-Game Faces

My wife’s grandmother was a pack rat and when she died last June, two days short of her 91st birthday, we discovered things about lovable Grandma Julie that we’d never known.

She lived in the same Beverlywood home for 53 years, and among the hundreds of items we found stuffed in bags and boxes were yellowed wedding announcements, withered black and white photographs, neatly organized boxes of cake mixes dating back to 1983, love letters written to a would-be suitor by my mother-in-law before she’d met her husband, and a pair of ticket stubs to the game between the heavily favored Trojans and the Bruins in the 1951 cross-town football rivalry at the Coliseum.

The cake mix boxes, those made sense. Grandma Julie was at home in the kitchen. A burning question to her was whether to put nuts in the chocolate chip cookies. She would hug you, kiss you on the cheek, then encourage you to eat, eat.

But the little woman with the big heart knew little about sports or, for that matter, Tommy Trojan or the UCLA fight song. In 1951, though, the United States was embroiled in a non-declared war in a foreign country against an enemy that threatened our way of life. Sound familiar?

So for most, the big game offered a chance for a few hours of relief from the real world. For Grandma Julie, it offered a big step out of hers.

My wife, Ellen, discovered the ticket stubs in a plain, unmarked envelop in a nightstand next to Grandma Julie’s bed. Best we can figure, Julie’s husband, Los Angeles insurance broker Charles Schraier, must have got them from one of his clients--$8 ducats for Seats 17 and 18 in Row 39 above the western goal posts.

Charles, who died in 1975, wasn’t much of a sports fan, so we figure he sold Julie on the spectacle of the event, not the game, and persuaded her to go with him after convincing her that she’d be in the shade because the game started at 2 p.m.

Whether she knew it or not, she sat through a watershed game for UCLA Coach Red Sanders and his second-year team. The Bruins, seven-point underdogs, handed the 11th-ranked Trojans their first defeat of the season, 21-7. Three seasons later, United Press International declared the Bruins national champions. Most likely, Grandma Julie never realized the significance of that.

Some have told us that we should sell those stubs on eBay, but I don’t think so. Somehow, they have become instant family heirlooms, which shows that if you live in Southern California, sooner or later this unique intra-city rivalry finds its way into nearly every family’s life.