When NC State Invited Tennessee to Its Happy Jubilee

 

NC State running back goes around end againt Tennessee.

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By TIM PEELER, © 2024

The week of Sept. 29, 1939, was unlike any other in NC State College history. It was the plucky little school’s Golden Jubilee, a celebration of the 50^th anniversary of the Oct. 3, 1889, opening of the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, as it was originally called.

And the best college football team in the nation was on its way over the Great Smokey Mountains by train to face the Wolfpack at Raleigh’s Riddick Stadium.

Defending national champion Tennessee, under the guidance of Robert Neyland, had recorded the first of three consecutive undefeated regular seasons in 1938 and beat Oklahoma 17-0 in the Orange Bowl, a team that is still regarded as one of the three best in college football history. This was the middle of Neyland’s three tenures at Tennessee, back when the College Football Hall of Fame coach known these days to everyone in Knoxville as “The General” was still only a major.

If anything, Neyland’s 1939 team was even better than the year before. It was the last team in NCAA football history to not allow a point during the entire regular season, part of a 17-game, 71-quarter shutout streak that are both still NCAA records.

And they started the ’39 season in Raleigh, arriving on Thursday morning on “The Volunteer Special,” a chartered train that carried a traveling squad of 37 players, 10 coaches and support personnel, and some 500 half-bear, other-half-cat fans. Somewhere as they straddled the North Carolina-Tennessee stateline, they might have seen the actual Rocky Top knob of Thunderhead Mountain (elevation 5,441 feet) that they have sung about since the early 1970s.

That was a long-anticipated week for the agricultural and technical school in the North Carolina capital. Fifty years before, it had opened its doors to the state’s agrarian and manufacturing population, ripping land-grant college status from the longer-established University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, an unforced turnover that has never been fully forgiven by the classicists in Orange County.

A large celebration was in order, despite the ominous happenings on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, where both Germany and the Soviet Union had both just invaded Poland and Europe was on a collision course to World War II.

On Thursday of that week, however, there was a campus-wide pep rally, broadcast live on radio station WPTF-AM with no thoughts that both schools would soon be sending their best and brightest into harm's way before too long. There were Homecoming festivities planned, welcoming back a half century of alumni and faculty, plus all the current students. Four of the first graduates in the Class of 1893 were on hand, including initial enrollee Walter J. Mathews of Goldsboro.

The Dean of Administration, Col. John W. Harrelson, was standing guard to welcome anyone who wanted to celebrate with him.

Both the football stadium and the basketball gymnasium were decorated red-and-white and orange-and-white, the colors of the two opposing schools in the football game in their first meeting since 1911.

Technician, NC State’s student paper, published a commemorative 50-page edition detailing the history of the school, including a comprehensive athletics summary. History professor David A. Lockmiller published a 255-page book about the school’s founding and development, from a simple idea of the Watauga Club to a thriving campus on the outskirts of Raleigh.

There was a Homecoming Dance planned for after the 3 p.m. Friday game, with all of Tennessee’s players and coaches invited to attend. The Duke Ambassadors, a famous swing band that began at the Durham college and went on to serve as the touring band for Doris Day and Bob Hope, were the featured performers.

Just so things didn’t get out of hand, NC State’s football staff, athletics administrators and student support staff were on hand after the game to serve as chaperones.

Homecoming decorations.

The crescendo of the celebration was on the Tuesday morning following the game, when NC State alum, ex-football captain and former governor of North Carolina O. Max Gardner, addressed administration, dignitaries and students at Pullen Hall, exactly 50 years after the doors of the college opened. Gardner, one of four N.C. governors produced in the school’s history, had also spoken at the 25^th anniversary in 1914.

Raleigh Mayor Graham H. Andrews had declared Oct. 3 “State College Day” and Gov. Clyde Hoey (Gardner's brother-in-law), UNC System President Frank Porter Graham and Duke President William B. Pew were all on hand to celebrate the semicentennial accomplishments of the maturing school.

To be honest, though, the football game played at recently completed Riddick Stadium was the biggest deal of the entire celebration, drawing a near-sellout of about 14,000 fans. (Riddick Field opened in 1906, added its first concrete grandstands in 1918 and added a section per year until the Great Depression. Construction was completed at the same time as the Memorial Tower, by the federal works programs the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration.)

Neyland agreed to open his team’s national championship defense as a favor to NC State coach Williams “Doc” Newton, who had been an assistant on Neyland’s 1931 team. That’s the same year Tennessee produced its third consensus All-America player, a guard still considered one of the best in program history.

That player, Herman Hickman, was now an assistant coach on Newton’s 1939 Wolfpack staff. Walter “Babe” Wood, hero of the Volunteers’ Orange Bowl victory over Oklahoma to end the 1938 season, had just been hired by Newton as an assistant coach for the Wolfpack freshman team. (Another Tennessee legend, Bettie Feathers, would later become NC State's head football coach.)

The coaching staffs, if not the players, were quite familiar with each other, well enough at least to play some mind games in the papers leading up to the contest. Tennessee suggested its star halfback George “Bad News” Cafego might not play because of a phantom knee injury and NC State floated that its top two guards and top two backs were also suffering. In fact, halfback John Savini was in the school infirmary with “a severe case of boils.”

Newton revealed to the Raleigh papers that he had some special practices to defend one of Tennessee’s greatest strengths.

“Tennessee has a bad habit of running back punts and putting the ball into a fine scoring situation,” Newton said on Tuesday before the game. “We’re going to take every precaution against these boys getting that kind of an advantage.”

As it turned out, the Volunteers had virtually no punt return yards in the game, but on the opening kickoff of the much-anticipated contest, Tennessee captain Sam Bartholomew caught the ball on the 14-yard-line and dashed 80 yards through the middle of the field before being knocked out of bounds by State’s Dick East at the 6-yard line.

Three plays later, halfback Box Foxx, went around the end for the game’s first touchdown. Savini, exposed boils and all, blocked the extra point, leaving Tennessee with a 6-0 lead two minutes into the game.

On its third drive, Tennessee had Cafego, one of the greatest pre-WWII players in college football history, carry the ball five times on six plays to gain 51 yards. He then threw an 18-yard pass to substitute back Breezer Andridge to account for the Volunteers’ second touchdown of the day, just nine minutes into the game.

While it looked like the rout was about to be on, nothing much else happened in the game. NC State had a first down in each of the last three quarters, but that was about all it had to brag about against the most stubborn defense in the history of college football.

The 13-0 loss was a victory of sorts for Newton’s Wolfpack, which played 17 sophomores in the game and didn’t give up anything of significance after the first nine minutes. Despite the leadership of quarterback Art Rooney and the play of All-America end Ed “Ty” Coon, the Wolfpack finished the season with a miserable 2-8 record, its only wins against Davidson and Furman.

That jubilee celebration game was the third meeting between the two largest schools of neighboring Southern states from 1893-1939. Remarkably, there has been only one meeting since, the 2012 Chick-Fil-A Kickoff Game at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, a game Tennessee captured 35-21.