Last Team Standing

by Matthew Algeo

  “We were all concerned about the war,” remembered Harriet Doyle. “Our hopes were high but we were very concerned. It was something that we prayed and hoped for, that everything would turn out all right. Ted had a brother in and so did I. [Ted’s brother was killed in action.] It definitely concerned us all. I was very happy that my husband didn’t have to go in. It’s very selfish, but with two children—I would’ve had my hands full.”

  There were few entertaining escapes that autumn. Baseball was over, and Hollywood, awash in unctuous patriotism, offered an endless stream of banal war movies, the most popular of which, This Is the Army, starred Ronald Reagan. Popular music was similarly preoccupied (e.g., “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” by Kay Kyser). Football provided a release. After dropping off precipitously in 1942, attendance rebounded dramatically the following season, with war- and work-weary fans turning out in droves. The NFL would average 24,228 fans per game in 1943, a 33-percent increase over the previous season and the best in league history at that time.

  “Fans had found football a good way to forget the war for a few hours,” is how Bears owner George Halas explained it.

  In Philadelphia and Pittsburgh—cities where first-place teams were as common as palm trees—the Steagles’ early success excited sports fans. Suddenly, unexpectedly, they had a winner, albeit one with an unusual name and pedigree.

  “The Steagles have been a distinct surprise,” gushed Chet Smith in the Pittsburgh Press after the Giants game. Even the scribes of the Midwest, professional football’s epicenter, were impressed. In the Chicago Tribune, Edward Prell wrote that the “whispering is growing louder that here is a team which may represent the east in the championship playoffs.” When a reporter told Vic Sears that the Steagles had a good line “considering the times,” the ulcerous tackle bristled.

  “Look,” he said, “this is a good line, war or no war.”

  Bert Bell was asked if the Eagles had ever started the season with two wins.

  “Hell,” he laughed, “I don’t even remember them ever winning two games in a row before!”

  In fact the Eagles never had started a season with consecutive victories, and the Steelers had just twice, in 1936 and 1937.

  Bell could not contain his enthusiasm for the Steagles.

  “Their spirit is wonderful,” he said. “We have no great, outstanding players, but we do have what’s better. That’s a squad of players that think they can win a ball game. And by golly, that’s what counts.” As for their next opponent, the mighty Chicago Bears, Bell said, “I’m not saying we’ll beat them.” But, he hastened to add, “They can be beat…. It will be a ball game.”

  On the evening of Friday, October 15, the Steagles departed Philadelphia on a train bound for Chicago. The trip would take more than 15 hours, their longest road trip of the season by far. (The second longest were the trips to Pittsburgh for home games.) En route the train picked up the Pittsburgh contingent, including Ted Doyle and the Steelers’ radio announcers, Joe Tucker and Bill Cullen. It was reported that “quite a number” of Steelers fans boarded the train as well, even though the Office of Defense Transportation had instructed pro football teams to “restrict sales of tickets to residents of the area in which the game is played” in order to make space on trains available for soldiers and other people “traveling on war business.” Like so many wartime rules, this one was greeted with a wink and a nod. The Steelers fans could buy their tickets at the Wrigley Field box office, where no one would bother to ask them where they were from.

  Pullman cars were available for the players to sleep in, but it was still a long, uncomfortable ride. Greasy Neale didn’t mind, though. The Eagles head coach enjoyed long train trips. He believed they fostered the kind of family atmosphere he strived for among his players. On the train the players read, played cards, and hung out in the dining car. Even when air travel became common after the war, Neale preferred the rails, believing that “flying has a deleterious emotional effect on certain players which it is well to avoid.” He felt that “train travel on the whole, is much more restful, and brings the team to its destination in better physical condition, and in a more emotionally stable frame of mind” than air travel.

  “I think Greasy might’ve owned stock in the railroad,” joked center Ray Graves.

  The train pulled into Chicago around nine o’clock Saturday morning, and the team went straight to Wrigley Field for a brief workout to shake off their train legs and inspect the turf. Afterwards they checked into the Edgewater Beach Hotel on the far north side, where they ate lunch in the café. Greasy Neale was a punctilious coach, and his rules for road trips were rigid. He seems to have had a particular fixation on food.

  “All meals are to be eaten in the hotel coffee shop,” players were instructed in a handout, “and checks must be signed by players. If two or more players have their meal together, each of the players must sign the check.” Among the other rules: smoking was permitted “at all times” except during meals, in meetings, in the locker room, or on the field; no gambling was permitted except for penny ante poker, rummy (“with small stakes”), pinochle (“at five cents per hundred”), and bridge (“at 1/20th cent a point”); and no drinking of beer or whiskey was permitted “at any time except when the entire squad is granted permission by the Head Coach.”

  Curfew the night before a game was 10:00 p.m., but in Chicago all the players were already in bed well before then. They knew they needed all the rest they could get. Their task the next day was gargantuan. The Bears were redoubtable; they hadn’t lost a regular season game since before Pearl Harbor. Their roster was loaded with older, experienced players, including five future members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame (Danny Fortmann, Sid Luckman, George Musso, Bronko Nagurski, and Clyde Turner). Apart from the departure of owner George Halas for the Navy, the Bears were largely unscathed by the war. It seemed a bit suspicious, actually.

  BACK IN MID SEPTEMBER, just before the start of the season, the Bears had issued a press release announcing that five more players were returning to the team for the upcoming campaign. The release also noted the jobs the players would be leaving to join the team:

  Harry Clark, a pipe fitter at a defense plant in Morgantown, West Virginia.

  Al Hoptowit, a farm worker in the Yakima Valley of Washington state.

  Dante Magnani, a pipe fitter at the Mare Island Navy Yard in California.

  Hampton Pool, a mechanic at a shipyard in Sunnydale, California.

  Clyde “Bulldog” Turner, a civilian Army employee in Abilene, Texas.

  As was customary, the release was published nearly verbatim in the Chicago papers. Almost immediately, the phone at the Chicago office of the War Manpower Commission began ringing. Callers were angry. Why were these men being allowed to leave important war jobs to play pro football? William Spencer, the top WMC official in Chicago, decided to find out. Declaring it “a matter of public morale,” Spencer said his investigation would determine whether there was any “irregularity” in the transfer of the players from essential industries to a nonessential one.

  “If rules have been violated,” Spencer promised, “I will attempt to straighten them out.”

  As part of a “job stabilization program” begun in late 1942, the WMC required a worker to obtain a “certificate of availability” from his employer before leaving a war job. This was supposed to prevent a worker from leaving his employer in a lurch when he quit. Employers were not allowed to hire a worker who did not have a certificate of availability. The goal of the program was to keep workers from leaving essential jobs without good cause—to simply go to a higher paying job, for example. In fact, it bound workers to their employers: You needed your boss’s permission to quit a war job. At issue was whether the five Bears in question had obtained their certificates of availability. Also at issue was the question of which employer was “regular” and which was “vacation.” If the football club was considered the players’ regular employer, then their war work
was merely “supplemental,” and not under the jurisdiction of the WMC. However, if the Bears were their vacation employer, that was another matter altogether.

  Ralph Brizzolara, who was running the Bears while George Halas was in the Navy, insisted the team had done nothing wrong.

  “If there has been any violation,” he said, “it was entirely inadvertent.”

  To NFL Commissioner Elmer Layden, the whole situation was keenly embarrassing.

  “The league clubs have always cooperated in the war effort,” the image-conscious commissioner said. “If there are any irregularities we want to know about them too and they will be corrected. The war comes first.”

  The possible repercussions were enormous.

  “If the players failed to obtain certificates of availability,” Spencer said, “it would be doubtful if they would be permitted to continue playing football. They might have to return to essential industry.”

  There was also the possibility that the players would be reclassified 1-A and inducted immediately. And it wasn’t just the Bears who would be affected. A negative ruling would affect the entire league, and all of professional sports for that matter, since most teams employed players who worked in war plants during the offseason. If those players were not permitted to leave their war jobs, pro sports would be out of business. It was estimated that three-fourths of all major league baseball players were doing war work after the baseball season ended.

  “It goes without saying, of course,” wrote New York Herald Tribune sportswriter Arthur E. Patterson, “that if these men were frozen to their war jobs, there just wouldn’t be any baseball in 1944.”

  One pro sports team, however, had no such concerns. Since the Steagles required all players to hold war jobs, the issue to them was moot.

  “We turned our practices upside down to make sure that the men would not let their war work suffer,” Harry Thayer said, rather smugly, in reference to the investigation of the Bears. “I venture to say that by the time we open our regular season … every man on the squad will be in fact a full-time war worker and a part-time football player.”

  Ralph Brizzolara met with William Spencer at the WMC office on September 23, just three days before the Bears opened the season in Green Bay. Elmer Layden met with Spencer the next day. Pending the outcome of the investigation, Spencer ruled that the five Bears in question would be allowed to play football. The team, meanwhile, launched a public relations counteroffensive. On October 8, it made a show of announcing that it would soon be losing four players to the military. Bill Geyer, Bill Osmanski, Johnny Siegal, and Bill Steinkemper would all be joining the Navy within three weeks.

  GEORGE HALAS NOT ONLY OWNED the Chicago Bears, he coached them, too. Except for three seasons in the early 1930s, when Ralph Jones took the reins, he was the team’s only head coach from its founding in 1920 until the Navy recalled him halfway through the 1942 season. In his absence, Halas delegated the coaching duties to Luke Johnsos and Hunk Anderson, two former Bears who had also served as assistant coaches under Halas before his departure. Johnsos was in charge of the offense and Anderson oversaw the defense. It was an arrangement similar to Walt Kiesling and Greasy Neale’s, with one added benefit: Johnsos and Anderson actually got along.

  “The division could have caused trouble, but didn’t,” Johnsos recalled. “Neither of us told the other what to do.”

  Even without Halas at the helm, the Bears were nearly unstoppable. Since he’d left they’d lost just once, a 14-6 heart-breaker to the Redskins in the 1942 championship game. After opening the 1943 campaign with a 21-21 tie in Green Bay, the Bears defeated the Lions and the Cardinals by a combined score of 47-21. One of the Bears’ stars was Bronko Nagurski, who’d retired at the end of the 1937 season, but was lured back in 1943. In his prime, Nagurski was a powerful fullback, so strong that more than one tackler was knocked unconscious trying to bring him down. He was nearly 35 now, older even than Bill Hewitt, and not as fast as he used to be, so the Bears moved him to tackle, where he acquitted himself nicely.

  “Bronk was still as strong as a bull,” writes his biographer, Jim Dent. “It took two strong men to move him, much less block him out of the play.” Nagurski returned to the Bears out of loyalty to Halas, as well as for the money: $500 a game, more than he’d ever made before.

  The 1943 Bears continued Halas’s tradition of playing smash-mouth football: “a crushing ground game and a weekly accumulation of sizeable penalties,” as the Tribune’s Edward Prell put it. But they could also throw the ball. Quarterback Sid Luckman was leading the league in passing, and seven of the Bears’ ten touchdowns so far in 1943 had been scored through the air. Luckman was a Columbia grad with a golden arm. He couldn’t throw the ball very far or very hard, but he could throw it with stunning accuracy.

  “He couldn’t throw too good,” said Luckman’s longtime teammate Clyde “Bulldog” Turner, “but he’d complete ’em.”

  The Bears’ increasing use of the pass led some to claim the club had “turned sissy” by “subordinating their running game to an aerial attack,” a charge that Luckman emphatically denied.

  The Steagles-Bears game was rife with subplots. It would be a battle of the only two teams in the league running the T formation. Greasy Neale had learned the T by studying film of the Bears; now he hoped to give them a taste of their own medicine. The game also pitted the league’s two best defenses against each other. The Steagles were No. 1 in run defense and overall defense, while the Bears were tops in pass defense. The game would also be a homecoming of sorts for Bill Hewitt, who had started his career with the Bears before being traded to the Eagles. Hewitt had not distinguished himself with his play in the Steagles’ first two games and he was determined to make an impression against his old friends. The bookmakers favored Chicago, but the Steagles were confident and the Bears were wary.

  “They’ve got a tough ball club,” Bears assistant coach Paddy Driscoll said a few days before the game, “and we know we’ve got to get together and go to the limit on Sunday.”

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 16, 1943, was a red-letter day in Chicago. At 10:48 that morning, Mayor Edward J. Kelly snipped a red, white, and blue ribbon to formally open the city’s first subway, a 4.9-mile stretch of tracks running underneath State Street. Chicago had wanted to build a subway since the turn of the century but couldn’t afford to until FDR turned on the federal money spigot during the Depression. With a $23 million grant, the city constructed the most modern subway in the world, with a state-of-the-art ventilation system, escalators, and fluorescent lighting. A single, 3,500-foot platform, one of the longest in the world, connected every station between Lake and Congress streets. The stations themselves were designed in the Art Moderne style, each with a color scheme revealed in accents like light fixtures. And a ride cost just ten cents.

  The ribbon-cutting ceremony took place in the Madison Street station. On the street above, thousands of Chicagoans braved a chilly north wind to witness a spectacular hour-long parade. The subway was a remarkable feat of engineering, given the city’s soft, sandy substrate. It was also hailed as a way to take pressure off the city’s overcrowded elevated trains, which carried up to a million passengers every day.

  October 16 was a red-letter day in Chicago for another reason: it was on that day that William Spencer, the regional director of the War Manpower Commission, ruled that the five players who had left war jobs to join the Bears had not violated WMC regulations. Spencer ruled that the players were “under contract to the football club and subject to recall at the start of the season.” He also ruled that their “principal occupation” was football, so “any jobs accepted by the players during off-season periods constitute supplemental employment, not subject to WMC regulation.” In other words, it didn’t matter whether they had certificates of availability. Spencer also pointed out that none of the players’ employers had complained to the WMC about their leaving at the start of the football season, “indicating they understood the services of the pla
yers were only on a temporary basis.” The five were free to keep playing ball, as were all other professional athletes who worked in war plants during the off-season. Bears fans were delighted. The team itself—indeed all of professional sports—was simply relieved.

  The Bears did get a bit of bad news that Saturday, however: their star tackle Bronko Nagurski had to hurry home to International Falls, Minnesota. His mother was ill, two of his farmhands had quit, and his father’s grocery store was short of staff. To the Steagles, of course, this was very good news.

  The next afternoon, nearly 22,000 curious fans ventured to Wrigley Field for a peek at the two-headed monster called the Steagles. Today it seems an unlikely venue for football, but Wrigley Field was the Bears’ home for fifty seasons. When the team, then known as the Staleys (after the starch company that originally sponsored the team), moved from Decatur, Illinois, to Chicago in 1921, George Halas met with William L. Veeck, Sr., the president of the Chicago Cubs, to discuss renting Wrigley Field from the baseball team. Veeck wanted what was to become the standard rent for NFL teams in major league ballparks: 15 percent of the gate receipts and all concessions. Halas agreed, happy he didn’t have to pay a fixed rent. With temporary bleachers erected in the outfield, the ballpark accommodated about 46,000 fans for football. After the 1970 season, the league passed a rule requiring all teams to play in venues with a minimum seating capacity of 50,000, forcing the Bears to move downtown to Soldier Field. Football and Wrigley Field were a good fit—but a tight one. A gridiron barely fit within the “Friendly Confines.” In the outfield, one corner of the end zone came within inches of the brick outfield wall, which wasn’t covered with ivy until 1937. Bronko Nagurski once crashed into the wall headfirst after scoring a touchdown. Back on the sidelines, Nagurski is said to have told Halas, “That last guy gave me quite a lick!” A corner of the opposite end zone actually went into the first base dugout. The Bears eventually padded the outfield wall and laid foam rubber in the dugout to protect players.