ACC 101: Yes, Duke Hosted the Only Rose Bowl Played Outside of California

© Tim Peeler, 2019

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1942 Rose Bowl

Durham, N.C.
Jan. 1, 1942
Oregon State 20, Duke 16

• Less than a week after both Oregon State and Duke finished their regular seasons, and both had accepted invitations to play in the 1942 Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, throwing the United States into World War II.
• As Pacific Coast Conference champions, Oregon State was allowed to invite its own opponent to the game. The Beavers were 7-2, winning the conference title thanks to a 12-7 win over arch-rival Oregon.
• Ideally, Oregon State would have invited top-ranked and undefeated Minnesota, but the Gophers, like all Big 10 teams, were barred from playing postseason games. (A similar ban in the Southern Conference is the main reason seven schools, led by Maryland and Clemson, broke away to form the ACC in 1953.) It also invited both Fordham and Missouri, but those two teams had secretly accepted take-it-or-leave-it offers to the Sugar Bowl. Duke was fourth choice.
• Duke was undefeated and untied, with a perfect 9-0 record and a No. 2 national ranking. Its last three wins of the regular season were against in-state opponents Davidson, North Carolina and NC State (56-0, 20-0 and 55-6, respectively).
• The folks in Southern California didn’t like Duke coach Wallace Wade because of his antics following the 1939 Rose Bowl, to which the Blue Devils brought a team that was unbeaten, untied and unscored upon. Southern Cal won the game 7-3 by scoring a touchdown in the final minute and Wade refused to shake hands with the Trojan quarterback.
• Following the Dec. 7 Japanese attack, military leaders convinced the governor of California to abandon both the Tournament of Roses Parade and the football game, for fear of an attack on the million-person parade crowd or the 100,000-seat Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena.
• It was a controversial decision to play the game at all, even if picked up and moved to Durham. Among others, The Charlotte Observer wrote a scathing editorial in favor of canceling the game, calling football a silly distraction to the new war effort. “In the light of this historic and unprecedented crisis,” it said, “the nation needs to turn itself to more practical pursuits than those of any program of pleasure.”
• Oregon State’s contingent traveled to North Carolina by train, called the Beaver Express. It took six days and the Beavers stopped in Nebraska, Chicago and Washington to practice on other college campuses (Stagg Field) or professional football stadiums (Griffith Stadium). They arrived on Christmas Eve, greeted at the downtown train station by North Carolina governor J. Melville Broughton Jr. and Durham mayor William F. Carr and the Durham High School marching band.
• OSU brought the coaching staff and 31 players, but one teammate was left behind: sophomore reserve end Jack Yoshihara, a native of Japan who moved to Oregon at the age of 3. Not long after the decision was made to move the game, the FBI showed up at Oregon State’s practice in Corvalis to tell Yoshihara that he would not be allowed to travel with the team, as all people of Japanese descent were prohibited from traveling more than 35 miles from their homes. He eventually ended up in the Minidoka internment camp in Idaho.
• It was a big money saver for Duke students, many of whom were already begging their parents for the same $181.81 paid by students in 1938 to go see the Blue Devils play in their first Rose Bowl appearance, with a side trip to the Grand Canyon. In Pasadena, the 1938 crowd greeted parade grand marshal, 10-year-old Shirley Temple.
• Duke players actually voted not to play the game in Durham. They wanted to go somewhere with warm weather, according to the late Tommy Prothro, the Blue Devil quarterback who was later head coach at both Oregon State and UCLA.
• The game was moved to Durham, the grand Tournament of Roses parade was reduced to seven teenaged girls riding down Pasadena Boulevard in front of empty grandstands and 33 small floats driving around in a hotel parking lot.
• Durham embraced the game, offering Oregon an unrelenting furry of Southern Hospitality. Christmas dinner included unlimited servings of Virginia baked ham and North Carolina sweet potatoes. Two days before the game, the Beavers were treated to a huge meal of Eastern North Carolina, pit-cooked barbecue, with hushpuppies and Brunswick stew, at Josh Turnage’s restaurant in Durham.
• The bowl gift for the visiting players included locally made cigarettes, plug chewing tobacco and some silk women’s stockings and men’s socks made at a local textile manufacturer.
• Duke coach Wallace Wade played in the 1916 Rose Bowl for Brown, and coached in the game three previous times, twice at Alabama and once at Duke.
• Duke was not exactly happy about moving the game, for good reason. It was cold, windy, foggy and rainy on Jan. 1, 1942, in Durham. It was a balmy 78 degrees that day in Pasadena.
• It turned into a community-wide effort, long before Duke, UNC and NC State formed the Research Triangle Park. Duke Stadium had seats for just 34,000 spectators – about one-third of the number of seats at the Rose Bowl. Duke actually borrowed about bleachers holding about 20,000 additional fans from both UNC’s Kenan Stadium and NC State Riddick Stadium to increase its capacity to 56,000 for the game. NC State player Dick Watts, who had played against the Blue Devils the weekend before, was on the Duke scout team to help replicate the Beavers’ offense. NC State's Red Coat Band performed at halftime.
• Every ticket was sold within three days, though there was some controversy. Unlike all other home games, Duke did not plan to sell tickets to African-American fans to the game. After the city's black newspaper, The Carolina Times, editorialized that Duke would sell tickets to Japanese-American fans, but not African-American fans, Duke came up with 140 tickets for a segregated section in the previously sold-out stands.
• Reportedly, Hollywood star Bing Crosby bought 271 tickets by phone, but no one knows if he ever showed up to watch the game.
• Duke’s single-wing offense had scored at least 34 points in each of its nine games. Oregon State’s defense had allowed 33 points all season long. Still, an NBC radio announcer said the Blue Devils could beat Oregon State by just throwing 11 helmets on the field. Wade’s team entered as a two-touchdown favorite.
• Duke fumbled the opening kickoff, the first of its seven turnovers in the game. Both teams scored touchdowns in the first half, but Duke clearly had too many missed opportunities.
• Oregon State head coach Lon Stiner’s impassioned halftime speech was interrupted by a drunken Duke fan looking for a place to pee.
• The game was tied 14-14 in the third quarter, when Oregon State quarterback Bob Dethman threw a 68-yard touchdown pass to back Gene Gray, giving the Beavers a 20-14 lead. Duke closed the gap to four points with a safety on a mishandled punt snap and crossed the 50-yard line three times in the fourth quarter, but ended the drives with two interceptions and a fumble. On the final play of the game, Prothro’s pass into the end zone was intercepted by OSU’s Dethman.
• Oregon State celebrated its win by stopping for a couple of days in New Orleans. But it also dropped off several of their players in their hometowns on their trip across the country so they could visit their families one last time before going to war.
• Most of the players in the 1942 game were in the military by the time the 1943 game was played back in Pasadena.
• In the winter of 1944, Wallace Wade was a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel serving in Belgium. During the Battle of the Bulge, he ran into a young infantryman making coffee in a battlefield mess tent, they got to talking and Wade discovered that the young soldier was Oregon State tackle Stan Czech. They fondly remembered the game in Durham, and after three days without food, Wade finally had something to eat.
• Duke’s Charles Haynes, who grew up in Durham, and Oregon State’s Frank Parker served beside each other in 88^th Infantry Division rifle platoons in Italy. They met up with each other on a boat crossing the Mediterranean and often reminisced about the game in Durham. During a fight one day near the Arno River, Haynes was wounded by shrapnel and left for dead on a hill for nearly 17 hours. Parker, fighting on a hill nearby, heard about it and raced back to rescue him. Both survived the war. “If it hadn’t been for Frank Parker, I wouldn’t be here,” Haynes told a newspaper reporter just before the 50^th anniversary of the game. “I was dying. No melodramatics about it: I thought I was dead.”
• Three Duke players and one Oregon State player died during the war. Three of them were wearing their 1941 Rose Bowl rings when their bodies were recovered. Duke running back Walter Griffith never saw 1943; he was killed in the Pacific Theater 11 months after the game at Duke Stadium. Running back Al Hoover dived on a hand grenade on Peleliu Island in September 1944, saving many of the lives in his platoon. Star tackle Bob Nanni was shot on Iwo Jima in March 1945, three weeks after U.S. Marines raised the flag on Mt. Suribachi. Oregon State’s Everett Smith drowned while attempting to take a Pacific Island.
• Maybe the saddest story was Oregon State’s Gene Gray, who caught the game-winning 68-yard touchdown pass against Duke. As a Navy pilot, he more than 30 bombing missions over Germany, but after the war, as a test pilot in Panama, he was in a plane crash and lost both his arms.
• Finally, Yoshihara, the reserve end who was not allowed to travel with the team and spent time in a Japanese internment camp, received his Rose Bowl ring in 1985 and an honorary degree from Oregon State in 2008.

SOURCES:

There’s an excellent book, written by Brian Curtis of Fox Sports Net and Sports Illustrated, called "Fields of Battle: Pearl Harbor, the Rose Bowl, and the Boys Who Went to War.”

https://www.amazon.com/Fields-Battle-Pearl-Harbor-Rose/dp/1250059585

Review of Fields of Battle.

https://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2016/12/02/pearl-harbor-book-curtis-fields-battle

From the Duke Alumni Magazine:

https://alumni.duke.edu/magazine/articles/war-and-roses