A Veteran Affair

Front Row (Left to Right): Bob Edwards, June Cheek, Paul Gibson, Al Phillips, Fred Miller, Bob Courts, Buck Blomquist, Graham Spencer, Billy Smith, Tom Gould, Taylor Moser, Curt Ramsey, Burt Dressler, Ted Dostanko. Second Row: Fred McGrath, Charlie Musser, Ralph Burnett, Ralph Barksdale, Tom Joyce, Fred Wagoner, Bernie Watts, Dick Peacock, Harold Saunders, Hiram Sykes, Bob Gibson, Charlie Richkus, James Reese, Jim Gibson, George Allen. Third Row: Bob Durant, Winston Naugler, Bill Stanton, Howard Turner, Oscar Bozeman, Harry McLeod, Ogden Smith, Gordon Goodman, Gwynn Fletcher, Bob Bowlby, Footsie Palmer, Harloe Sheets, John Wagoner, Bill Moser. Not pictured: Bill Manning.

NOTE: If you enjoy reading "One Brick Back" and would like to help offset research expenses for stories such as this one, please make a small donation to the cause and help keep posts like this free of ads. This story appeared in the Sept. 28 football game program, when NC State hosted Central Michigan.

© NC State University Athletics, 2013

By Tim Peeler

RALEIGH, N.C. – It was the year that the Wolfpack was supposed to fade away.

Instead, the 1946 NC State College football team did exactly what its head coach promised when a preseason nickname squabble erupted.

“We’ll field a growling, rip-snorting team no matter what the mascot,” said Beattie “Big Chief” Feathers. “So the choice [for a new nickname] better be good to keep pace with the boys.”

By the time the season ended, with the growling Pack headed to Jacksonville, Fla., to face Oklahoma in the first bowl game in NC State College history, the Wolfpack was stronger than it had been before the first great war, back when the teams were still known as “Farmers”, “Aggies” and “Techsters.”

At issue prior to the 1946 season was the football team’s 25-year-old nickname, “The Wolfpack.” Chancellor John W. Harrelson, a U.S. Army colonel who served in both world wars, didn’t like the moniker, because of its association with the German U-boat fleet.

“[It] should have never been chosen in the first place,” Harrelson said. “The only thing lower than a wolf is a snake in the grass.”

Since 1921, when an anonymous alumnus derisively suggested “Wolfpack” as a nickname, the football team was the only sports team on campus to use that canine name. All others were known as the “Red Terrors.”

Feathers, the former Tennessee standout and the first running back in the history of the NFL to rush for 1,000 yards, didn’t really care about the name. The third-year coach just wanted to build a winning football program, using the single-wing offense he helped made famous with the Volunteers as a hall of fame tailback.

His first two seasons were successful – especially given that NC State was drawing from a small pool of qualified athletes. The Pack went 7-2 and 3-6 during those seasons, led by the exploits of speedy half back Howard “Touchdown” Turner of Rocky Mount, N.C., even though the team pulled from just 700 college and military 4-F (medically unqualified to serve) students.

(This is why NC State and North Carolina didn’t play during these years, because NC State was an Army training center during World War II and the Army didn’t allow its trainees to participate in intercollegiate athletics. North Carolina was a Navy training center during the war and allowed its trainees to play sports. NC State chose not to face any opponents, including the Tar Heels, because of such a clear disadvantage.)

Feathers had high expectations for his third edition of the Wolfpack, but the opposition did not: State was chosen as the Homecoming patsy for Clemson, Wake Forest and Virginia Tech.

The season started with a difficult task – facing the mighty Duke Blue Devils of head coach Wallace Wade at Riddick Stadium. The Pack hadn’t beaten the Blue Devils since 1932 and was outscored 359-32 during its 12-game losing streak to Duke. Just three years earlier, in the Blue Devils’ last trip to Riddick Stadium, it whipped the Wolfpack 75-0.

In a rare occurrence, the Big Four neighbors opened the season against each other. It was the first time since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that the Wolfpack fielded a team drawn from a fully stocked student body that had swelled to nearly 5,000 recent high school graduates and discharged war veterans.

Howard "Touchdown" Turner

Turner, a two-time All-Southern Conference player who was eager to have a big senior year, and junior tailback back Charlie Richkus were two of just 14 lettermen who returned for Feathers’ Wolfpack.

The rest of the lineup was stocked with newcomers, like lineman Barney “Killer” Watts, a Pacific Theater Marine veteran, who anchored the offensive and defensive lines at just 168 pounds; Texas-born George "Buck" Blomquist, who had played basketball on one of the Everett Case-coached Iowa Pre-Flight basketball teams during the war and followed Case to Raleigh to play end for the football team; dangerous fullback and punter Leslie “Footsie” Palmer and speedy tailback Gwyn Fletcher, who joined Turner in the high-scoring backfield.

Others, like twins John and Fred Wagoner, had played football at State long before Feathers arrived and returned to complete their careers. John later became a longtime star in the Canadian Football League, and later in life he and Fred operated a Greensboro Christmas tree lot. Team captain Curt Ramsey first enrolled at NC State in 1938, missed a year because of a broken leg, played semi-pro baseball in his native West Virginia, enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1940, spent three rugged years serving in Belgium and France and returned to NC State to play football and baseball and earned a degree in textiles in 1949. [Read more about veterans who played on that team in this NC State Magazine story.]

Blomquist wasn’t the only contribution Case made to the football squad– the coach’s top assistant, Carl “Butter” Anderson, was also an assistant football coach for the Wolfpack, along with Lyle Rich, Bob Suffridge and Babe Wood.

The Blue Devils were again coached by Wallace Wade, who had enrolled in the Army soon after coaching Duke in the 1942 Rose Bowl. He returned expecting to continue his team’s roll over the Wolfpack. Early in the game, that seemed likely, as the Blue Devils scored on its first possession to take a 7-0 lead.

The Wolfpack defense held for the rest of the game, and Richkus quickly became a hero by throwing a 33-yard touchdown pass in the third quarter and then scored the winning touchdown with just 10 seconds to play to give his team the upset victory.

The Wolfpack won its next three games – over Clemson, Davidson and Wake Forest – and rose to No. 12 in a national football poll. Even after it lost two of its next three games – road losses at Virginia Tech (14-7) and Vanderbilt (7-0) – the Wolfpack was still in position to have its best season in years.

For Homecoming, the Pack rolled over Virginia at Riddick Stadium, then traveled to Tampa, Fla., to whip Florida 37-6. It closed out the regular-season with a 28-7 win over Maryland, giving State eight regular-season victories, the most since the 1927 Pack won the school’s only Southern Conference championship with a 9-1 overall record.

The entire school and Raleigh community responded to the Wolfpack’s opportunity to play the powerful Sooners in Jacksonville, Fla., in the second-annual Gator Bowl. Special trains with school officials traveled to Florida just after Christmas. A train full of State College students left Raleigh at 10 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, celebrated the change in calendar on the rails and arrived just in time for the 3:30 p.m. game.

More than 10,000 people squeezed into Municipal Stadium, which at the time had seating for just 7,600 spectators. The Wolfpack, unaccustomed to postseason play, was led onto the field by State College’s Red Coat Band, which had previous bowl experience, having entertained the crowd at halftime of the 1942 Rose Bowl between Duke and Oregon State that was played in Durham.

Oklahoma, which entered the game a three-touchdown favorite under first-year head coach (and UNC graduate) Jim Tatum, scored in the game's first two minutes, but the Wolfpack answered with a 58-yard touchdown pass from Turner to Al Phillips.
 The Sooners scored three times in the second quarter to seize the game’s momentum and the Pack squandered three more scoring chances. Every member of the Wolfpack roster went to his grave believing that Tatum's team had somehow acquired a copy of Feathers' playbook and capitalized on that knowledge to thwart three State scoring opportunities.

Palmer scored on an 8-yard run in the third quarter, but the Sooners answered for a 34-13 victory that fulfilled the odds makers' prophecy to the point in Oklahoma's first ever bowl victory.

It was the first of three appearances in the Gator Bowl for the Wolfpack. On New Year’s Eve 1992, in a stadium shrouded in a thick fog, Florida rolled to a 27-10 victory over Dick Sheridan’s Wolfpack. And on New Year’s Day 2002, in perhaps the greatest bowl performance in school history, the Wolfpack trounced Notre Dame, 28-6, behind the passing of Philip Rivers and the hard-hitting defensive play of linebacker Dantonio Burnette.

The legacy of that first bowl season, and the Case-coached Southern Conference basketball championship that followed that spring, was that Harrelson’s charge to change the school’s nickname fell flat on its snout.

Students eventually voted overwhelmingly to continue calling the football team the “Wolfpack,” with all other sports team adopting that nickname at the beginning of the 1947 school year.

You may contact Tim Peeler at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.