Bowerman and the Men of Oregon

by Kenny Moore

  Barbara learned of Bill’s eminence at school. He was allowed to leave class five minutes early because he had to go downtown to put the school paper to bed. He was king of the football team. He sang with the Glee Club. He was on the honor roll. “It was staggering,” Barbara would say. “In the spring, he showed up late for school in second period, all black and reeking of smoke, and was welcomed into class like a hero! He’d been out all night firing the smudge pots to warm the orchards, saving the new pears from a late frost. And he was mine! Pretty soon I felt I owned him. I remember lying spread-eagled on my bed with that easy feeling that you don’t have to worry who you’re going to the dances with.”

  Medford so loved its 1928 football team that when it qualified for a trip to Portland to play Benson High for the state championship, the town hired a private train. “We went up in the morning before the game, and came back in sleepers,” Barbara would recall, “although there was no sleeping in our cars. Did we win? Handily! Thirty-nine to nothing!” Then Bowerman helped Medford win a second title, in basketball, beating Astoria 35-14.

  Barbara would come to feel as if she lived an entire lifetime in the school year of 1928–29. “I was cheering from the stands when someone knocked his tooth out with an elbow during a basketball game,” she said. “I took him to the dentist. We shared study hall, where I was often the recipient of cryptic notes, one or two words, and I never knew what they meant, like ‘Rain today?’

  “During recess, we’d stand out on the corner and match pennies—heads or tails. He’d win all of them and loan me more, and win those. I had to get five dollars from my folks to pay off my gambling debts. I said it was for the movies.”

  Although her parents at first were worried about her being with an older boy, they were eventually reassured that Bill would not harm their daughter. “It got to be that it was one of those things. It happened, and it—us—was soon taken for granted,” Barbara would say.

  Bill was not the only one who found Barbara attractive, though, and she did, in fact, pencil in a few other boys on her dance cards. “In Medford,” she would recall, “I quickly absorbed that girls who were two-timers were looked down on. But I accepted dates anyway, with boys my cousins knew. One was Farwell Kenly, who was going to Princeton. I felt so wicked going out with him that I gave his ring back at the end of summer.”

  By then Barbara felt as if she were caught up in a literal fairy tale. She’d given her maidenly handkerchief to her hero to bear into conquest—and discovered a new realm. “In Medford,” she would say, “I found the two great loves of my life. Bill and Oregon.”

  Within a two-hour drive of Medford is every climate in the temperate zone except true desert. That year, Bill was usually off working somewhere during breaks from school, but Barbara, with family and friends, explored. They went west and camped on deserted Pacific beaches or mossy, spruce- and salal-covered headlands, where twenty people could picnic on a single old Douglas fir stump. They climbed lighthouses and looked out over the slowly surging, gray-green, kelp-thickened ocean. They swam and learned what all Oregon kids know: It is a cruel sea. If Poseidon can get you alone and unprotected for twenty minutes, he will kill you with cold. Or with a log rolling in the pretty waves. In winter, they skied and tobogganed the Siskiyou Mountains. In summer, they went northeast from Medford, up the jade and cream riffles of the Rogue River (it is considered uncool to call the blasting cataracts “rapids.”), a stream distinguished by steel-head and seventy-pound Chinook salmon runs. They hiked complicated woods, going from heat-loving Madrone through spicy cedar, sticky Douglas fir, gothic Noble fir, fat-stogie Ponderosa pine, the trees changing at every bend or lacy waterfall. The sheer forces of this place, whether slope, surf, or storm, intoxicated her.

  With Dan and Beth, Bill took Barbara to a Fossil haying and introduced her to an appraising, eighty-four-year-old Mary Jane Chambers Hoover, who surely sensed a fifteen-year-old kindred spirit. They toured the Wheeler County homesteads, and Barbara loved every horse, every barn cat. Bill even defused a raucous cowboy—and without resorting to old habits. “He was so courageous,” Barbara would recall. “He always knew how to control any situation he found himself in, by intelligence if not strength. But he didn’t like doing anything he didn’t know how to do.”

  Well, sometimes he’d parlay a little knowledge into a lot more. “The football team had gone up to work on road crews at Crater Lake National Park,” Barbara recalled, “and a ranger asked, ‘Anybody know trees?’ Bill didn’t really, but he raised his hand and that summer he cruised the park timber and marked beetle-infested trees to be cut. And three of my girlfriends and I visited and stayed at the Lodge.”

  Crater Lake stuns everyone who makes the pilgrimage into cowed spirituality. If the ancient Greeks had passed there, it would have been an oracle. Only 7,000 years ago, the top half of 14,000-foot Mt. Mazama exploded with the energy of dozens of Mt. St. Helenses. A pilgrim coming over that granite rim today comes face-to-face with a huge open maw, six miles of hypnotic sapphire, and must fight the urge to leap and plummet. The crater’s cliffs plunge 1,000 feet to the surface, another 2,000 to the bottom. Its waters seep through the rock of the grinding Cascades until they rise to begin the Rogue. A drink from Crater Lake is cold and clear, tasteless in its purity, a sacrament in remembrance of the fire and violence of creation.

  Climbing awestruck through its gnarled firs and, later, skiing above the deserted lake would become the most intense of their intertwined memories. “Forever after, we went there,” Barbara would say. “It would be ours.”

  It seems only natural. The greater one’s sense of the human condition—and there is no more potent reminder than Crater Lake—the greater the urge to grab hold of a true friend. That’s what Barbara felt she had in Bill and Bill in her. And they were right, but it would be years before they could turn to each other whenever they felt the need.

  “The night he graduated from Medford, we went to a party,” Barbara would remember. “He was going to work at Crater Lake that summer, and the next morning we talked about our life after that.” Barbara’s idea, she would say, came out of a clear blue sky.

  “Couldn’t we get married?” she began.

  Bill said, “I’m going to college. I’m going to Oregon. Maybe pre-med.”

  “But what about farming?” Barbara bleated.

  Barbara at seventy regarded Barbara at fifteen as tragicomic. “I was devastated,” she would say. “I thought, I’ve found Bill and he seems to have found me, so why do we have to go to school?”

  Never a cajoler, Bill didn’t try to explain why college was right for him. Lizzie insisted that her kids get degrees, emancipating degrees. She had set the example herself after the divorce and scrimped until they were in tatters so he could afford to enroll. Moreover, Bill’s high school résumé and football renown had won him eager acceptance from Oregon. And his coach, Callison, would join the Oregon football staff the same year.

  So Bill and Barbara didn’t exactly swear each other eternal love. “I realized, having read enough of them,” she would say, “that if this was a real fairy tale, the path could not be smooth. I had to go through all kinds of agony before I got to heaven. So this is how it should be. I would have to go to college and be miserable.”

  The Young family cooperated and piled on her pain. They were moving to Southern California and dragging her with them. Two weeks later, her whole family went for the weekend up to Crater Lake, where Bill was working in the woods. One night after dinner, they cast back over everything they had shared in their year of destiny, as Barbara would call it. And then, she would remember, “two people, with the voices of Nelson Eddy and Jeannette MacDonald, stood on the rim and sang ‘Indian Love Call.’ It was chilling with power. It cemented the wonder of the place for us.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The University of Oregon

  IN SEPTEMBER 1929, BILL TOOK THE BUS THE 180 MILES FROM MEDFORD TO Eugene, got off on Onyx Street, and found the University of
Oregon. Photos of the time suggest the campus had been recently logged over. The portly, Victorian hulks of Deady and Villard halls stood hot and unshaded in pastures dotted with Queen Anne’s lace.

  When he reached Fifteenth Street, he put down his bag and slowly pivoted from one wonder to the next. Strange, roofed grandstands—looking more like covered bridges than bleachers—hunched over an emerald football field and cinder running track. Behind the stadium, tussocky practice fields and embankments mounted to the rear steps of a blocky, new basketball arena. Ivy was just beginning to climb two-year-old MacArthur Court’s concrete walls. The catacombs in its basement would be Bill’s locker room, infirmary, laundry, classroom, and lair.

  During orientation, Bill pledged the Beta Theta Phi house for its sporting tone and chance to sling hash for meals. He registered for the required freshman classes in math, English, and physical education. He also signed up for biology although he didn’t expect to like it; high school chemistry had been the worst course ever. To his surprise, as he would recall, “the teacher, named Houston, made it live, made it pretty damned exciting. Houston said to me, ‘You’re a pretty good biology student.’ And I said, ‘Well, you are a pretty good teacher.’”

  He took journalism too, but found he already knew the basics. The next year, he added business courses. His grades were good, but he begrudged accounting its nitpicking precision. “To this day,” Bowerman would say in his seventies, “when someone whines, ‘Your account is ten cents short,’ I haul out a dime and give it to them.”

  He wrote weekly letters to Barbara, but sometimes urgency drove him to the Western Union office at Willamette and Oak. On September 28, 1929, he wired, “Pledged Beta. Glad you like school. Like see you. Bill.” An April telegram read, “Easter Greetings, Sweetheart. Wish I might be with you.”

  The stock market crashed the second month he was in school, which didn’t make finding part-time jobs any easier. “Bill split wood for a family named White,” Barbara would remember, “and when he knocked to say he was done, Mrs. White said, ‘Please don’t ever come to the front door again.’ He had to get paid his twenty-five cents an hour out of the servants’ entrance.”

  Any and all frustrations—Barbara’s absence being the keenest—he jammed into freshman football. It would, of course, be forty years before the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) would let student athletes go straight from high school to a college varsity. Bill felt so at home, he didn’t care. Prink Callison was now on the Oregon staff, and he kept an eye on Bill, kept him learning the game, using his head, thinking about what plays he would call and why, and, on defense, what the movements of one blocker revealed about the intentions of everyone else.

  Callison was a remarkable teacher. In his six years of coaching at Medford he’d won forty-five of forty-nine games and brought much talent to Eugene along with Bill. Of the twenty-one players on Callison’s 1928 Medford squad, eleven went on to play college ball at Stanford, Army, and Oregon State, among other schools, and two who came with Bill to Oregon would play professionally.

  When these stout freshmen were thrown into scrimmages against the varsity, Bill at once grasped the nature of his head coach. Doc Spears was dictatorial, abrasively vocal, and resembled a bloodthirsty infantry commander. He loved to see the bodies fly.

  “The varsity had a good team, almost in spite of him,” Bowerman would recall. “Spears was cruel. Spears was a windbag.” This intense dislike of blowhards had to be related to the loathing that came over his mother in the presence of aggressively powerful men. That detestation ran deep in Bill, and Spears brought it out as had few before him. The man’s bellowing insistence on being called Coach turned Bill against the word forever.

  As if to balance the scales, Bill made another acquaintance. A weathered gentleman in shirtsleeves and suspenders, while tightly taping Bill’s ankles in the training room before practice, noticed they shared a name.

  “But I hear people call you Colonel,” said Bill Bowerman.

  “Just call me Bill,” said Oregon’s head athletic trainer and track coach, sixty-two-year-old Bill Hayward.

  Hayward had invented state-of-the-art splints, casts, straps, pads, slings, and braces to keep injured bodies in the lineup or allow them some movement and protection while they healed. The devices fascinated Bowerman, who got to know Hayward while listening to him explain the anatomy that his wire and leather prosthetics supported.

  Hayward had been Oregon’s track coach since 1903 and had coached two US Olympic track and field teams. Nevertheless, he was under orders not to scout fall practice for spring talent: It was Doc Spears’s edict that no football player should run track. “That was stupid and I knew that was stupid,” Bowerman would say. “But I didn’t want to test how stupid Spears really was by challenging him on it and getting tossed.”

  Bill had never run an official race because Medford had no track or track team. But he’d usually finished near the front in wind sprints in conditioning and PE classes and had thought he’d like at least to try the 220. Hayward opined that the 440 might be better for him, but he’d understand if he didn’t come out.

  His first spring at Oregon, Bill learned that track could be more dangerous than football. Word came that his friend and quarterback back in Medford, curly-haired Al Melvin, who’d gone to a California college, had broken his neck in a high-jumping accident and been killed.

  “Al was one of the guys who’d come out with Bill to see me at the pear ranch,” Barbara Bowerman would recall. “One of the gang my cousins said were so corny and sweet they left goop marks on the porch. Bill took the loss to heart, then and forever. The safety of the high jump would always be an issue for him. Later, he was concerned about Dick Fosbury hurting himself jumping backward. He always made sure the jumpers had big, thick landing pads.”

  During Bill’s second year, Lizzie coalesced her family again, moving up from Medford and renting a two-story house on Fifteenth Street, across from what had been known since 1919 as Hayward Field. (The honor to the track coach and trainer must’ve galled Doc Spears no end.) The place was so close to thwacks and grunts wafting from across the street that the entrepreneur that always simmered in Lizzie came to a rolling boil.

  As Barbara would tell the story, “Bill’s mom had her degree in home economics. It was the Depression, and all these impoverished football players were hungry, so she cooked for them. She reigned in that kitchen, turning out meat and potatoes and hot apple pies, threatening them with her chef’s knife to keep them out of the cookie jar. They loved her. And she them! It ran so counter to her hatred of men that it was fascinating.”

  Bill, duly concentrating on football, became a starter midway through his sophomore year in 1930. On offense he played end or quarterback, which in the single-wing formation of the era called upon him to hand off and become the team’s most vicious blocker. He threw an occasional pass. On defense, his quickening grasp of the game often got his legs to carry him to a point where a running back or pass was bound to arrive.

  It would help when Spears let him use what he learned. In a huge battle against the hated University of Washington, played in Seattle, the defensive coach, a man named O’Brien, told Bill to watch for a certain move by one of the Husky receivers. At halftime, Bowerman would remember, “Spears grabs me and says, ‘What the hell are you doing? I don’t want you going out there like that.’ But in the second half, O’Brien said go with that guy, so I stuck with him, and they drove down to our five-yard line and threw the ball to my guy.” Bill picked it off. “There was only one Husky between me and the goal posts ninety yards away,” he said, “and I think I ran over him.”

  Bill took it down the Oregon sideline. Washington tacklers gained on him all the way, but he collapsed across the line for a touchdown, a reward for O’Brien’s reading of the opposition.

  That night, in the hotel elevator going down to dinner, Bill’s teammates were regaling him about his performance. Bill Hayward’s voice came from t
he back of the elevator car: “Did you hear me?”

  “What do you mean, hear you?”

  “I was trotting with you down the sideline,” said Hayward, “yelling, ‘Lift your knees! Lift your knees!’”

  Bill asked Hayward to help him work on his stride. Hayward agreed and they had a deal.

  The next morning, in the bright kitchen of a tall house in a leafy section of Portland, the Jay Bowerman family was reading the Sunday Oregonian. Wayfe and the former governor were deep in the editorial pages; daughters Jayne and Sally, fourteen and thirteen, were poring over the sports section.

  “Dad,” said Jayne, “Bowerman’s not that common a name, is it?”

  “No, not really.”

  One wonders whether fifty-five-year-old Jay felt a little trickle of fear just then, because neither Jay nor Wayfe had ever told their daughters that he’d had a family before their own. Jayne turned the page so he could see a photo of Bill, his helmet off, his face full of easy, celebrant grace, and said, “Is there some chance we might be related to this beautiful man?”

  “Jayne, Sally,” said her father, after one of the more pregnant pauses of all time, “there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

  The sisters froze at his voice. They turned to their mother and found her ashen. Wayfe looked to her husband, and to heaven and back, then nodded her acquiescence.

  “He’s your brother,” said Jay. “Actually your half-brother.”

  Years later, Jayne Bowerman Hall would remember the moment first for its shock and wonder. She felt no resentment at being kept so long in the dark. Her father was a Bowerman, after all, and so never volunteered more than necessary. She and Sally demanded the whole story. Jay got it out amid disbelieving whoops (“three kids!”) and questions. He omitted mention of the awkward timing of their marriage and the death of Bill’s twin. Both Jay and Wayfe said they were sorry their daughters had to hear about it this way and apologized for not telling them sooner.