Innocent Fun, Contemplated: NC State vs. UNC Football

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© Tim Peeler, 2023

By and large, the NC State-North Carolina football rivalry has been relatively prank free, likely because of an admonition given by one of the state’s foremost leaders at the turn of the 20^th century.

Writing in NC State's Red & White student newspaper, the sports editor said: “Innocent fun in all may be contemplated, but is in the highest degree reprehensible and should receive more than passing consideration.”

The scolder, writing in 1903, was future North Carolina governor O. Max Gardner, who played football at both NC State, as an undergraduate, and UNC, as a graduate law student. For the most part, students from both schools have listened to him – at least for football.

Basketball has been a different matter, as students have been much more active, generally with spray paint and stolen trinkets such as championship banners.

Students from UNC have painted NC State’s iconic and hallowed Free Expression Tunnel and the base of the Memorial Tower on Hillsborough Street so often that the NC State Student Government hosts an annual “Ram Roast” pep rally at the Brickyard before every home basketball game against UNC to protect the tunnel from light blue paint.

For years, throughout the 1970s into current times, the student newspapers printed fake editions of the other school’s paper to not-so-gently stir up passion for the rivalry. Usually, UNC’s Daily Tar Heel generates a spoof issue during football season and NC State’s Technician prints a spoof issue during basketball season for the Tar Heels’ trip to Raleigh.

Here, without in any way endorsing vandalism or violence, are some of the better pranks through the years.

• As early as 1933, NC State students banded together to steal UNC’s live mascot, an adult sheep named Rameses, from the Orange County family farm where it lived. When leadership groups from NC State, UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke got together on Nov. 14, 1933, to discuss improving relations among the student bodies, just before the State-Carolina football game, Rameses disappeared from Jack Hogan's farm. The mascot was returned before the game. Jack Hogan was a former football player at UNC. His family has provided a home for every Rameses mascot since 1925. It was at this time that NC State students began raising money to purchase a live wolf for its home football game. The school went through several of those through the years (1935, 1947, 1966 specifically), and it was never stolen. Since 2010, State has used a Tamaskan husky named Tuffy, which resembles a live wolf, to serve as its game-day mascot.
•  In 1935. State students marched two cows and a sheep onto the field of Riddick Stadium, right in front of sitting governors Ehringhaus and Gardner. The sheep was rumored to have been kidnapped from the Hogan farm, but it was not. The feisty lamb escaped from custody just before kickoff and romped around the Riddick field.
  
• In 1942, after a delegation of UNC students defaced a building on NC State’s campus with chalk graffiti, four carloads of NC State College students sneaked over to Hogan’s farm in Chapel Hill to steal the UNC mascot, Rameses III, the week before the annual rivalry. The front half of the ram was turned red with a vegetable dye, and the back half was turned blue. UNC officials were upset and threatened to cancel the annual contest. “All athletic relations may be discontinued if students from both schools lose their heads and start a serious fracas,” said UNC system comptroller W.D. Carmichael, a former UNC basketball player and university administrator who has gymnasiums at both schools named for him. State’s entire student body gathered at Riddick Stadium and voted unanimously to return the ram. Most of the UNC student body was on hand the day before the game for the sheep’s return, but another group of State students stole Rameses III from the first group of State students before it could be returned. “Our neighbors can get our ram, but never our goat,” wrote the Daily Tar Heel. Student leaders all met for dinner at a Chapel Hill restaurant. Unlike most low-budget World War II-rationed gatherings, mutton was not served. NC State responded with its second consecutive win over the Tar Heels after a 13-year winless drought.
• In November 1947 NC State students painted red “NCS” letters on seven locations around UNC’s campus, including the Institute of Government’s Highway Patrol Training area and Quonset Hut No. 8.
• Wake Forest once tried to steal North Carolina’s mascot from Hogan Farm in 1965, but got the retired version of Rameses VII, not the newly incarnated Rameses VIII. Later that year, Duke students stole Rameses VIII before the annual Duke-UNC game.
• On Oct. 15, 1982, the Daily Tar Heel published a fake edition of NC State’s student newspaper, the Technician, just before the two schools played a football game in Chapel Hill. In response, during basketball season Technician published a fake edition called the Daily Tar Hell, which included, among other things, a photo of Dean Smith laying naked at center court of Carmichael Auditorium. The next day, NC State beat the defending national champion Tar Heels in Reynolds Coliseum, thanks, in part, to a ginned up student body and an overheated Smith, who got two technical fouls in the game. The next edition of Technician read: “Dean loses clothes on Friday, cool on Saturday.”
• In 1986, the two editors-in-chief wagered on the football game, both agreeing that the winning school would be recognized by having the losing school’s newspaper printed in the color of the winning team. When NC State beat UNC at Kenan Stadium by one point, 35-34, the banner of the Daily Tar Heel was printed in red. It was State’s first win in eight seasons against the Tar Heels.
• On Feb, 25, 1996, NC State students were blamed when Rameses XXIII was repeatedly stabbed, gutted and disfigured on the Hogan family farm just before the 1996 ACC basketball tournament. However, it was later discovered the death was caused by an intoxicated man seeking food, not a college prank.
• Following a spate of light blue creativity in the early 2000s at NC State's Free Expression Tunnel that made a lot of money for Big Spray Paint, State loyalists retaliated by painting "NCS" in red on several Chapel Hill landmarks, including the iconic Old Well. After drawing widespread condemnation from administrators on both campuses, student and social media and adults throughout the state, in 2005 the NC State Student Ambassadors turned the school's traditional pregame pep rally into a twice-a-year branded event called the Ram Roast, where groups and organizations spend three-hour shifts protecting the tunnel from an azure future. It's held before the football rivalry game between the two schools and home basketball games against the Tar Heels.  Through the years, it featured players, coaches, entertainment and prize giveaways and is still ongoing.
  

"The Brown-And-White From State..."

 

Aerial view of the Cotton States and International Exposition. [Photo by Fred L. Howe.]

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© Tim Peeler, 2023

When 75 students from the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts left Raleigh for Atlanta to play in the five-year-old school’s first out-of-state football game, the players had no idea who the opponent was going to be.

That means no scouting report, no berating college yells, no opposing-color ribbons to wear on the fans' lapels.

That’s because there was no one scheduled for the Oct. 25, 1895, game at the Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta’s acclaimed world’s fair that hosted nearly 800,000 people during its 100-day run in what is now called Piedmont Park.

At the time, there were enough teams of this emerging new sport making their own trek to the South’s new capital to make all necessary arrangements once they got there. So Bart Gatling, the UNC- and Harvard-educated Raleigh lawyer who moonlighted for three years as A&M’s football coach, found representatives from a military school from Virginia and asked if they were free the next day.

This was an important moment in the history of North Carolina’s technical school, traveling two states away for an athletics contest on what was unofficially declared “North Carolina Week” at the exposition. The students and three accompanying professors even skipped all four days of the North Carolina State Fair, which at the time was within walking distance of the two buildings that comprised the state’s land-grant institution.

The Cotton States and International Exposition was a big draw. President Grover Cleveland opened it by flipping a switch remotely from his home in Massachusetts and made a train trip from Washington the day before the A&M-VMI football game to see the wonders of the fair. Booker T. Washington gave his controversial “Atlanta Compromise” speech a few weeks earlier. There was a “Coochee-Coochee” burlesque show just outside the main gate. [Photos from the exposition.]

The traveling students, pretty much the entirety of the school population, could see the Liberty Bell, which was delivered from Philadelphia via train and wagon. They could take in one of Buffalo Bill's daily Wild West Shows. They could see a remarkable motion-picture projection device or visited villages representing Japan, Egypt and several countries of South America. If they had too much fun, they could try a new headache and hangover remedy that was being served in Atlanta drugstores called Coca-Cola.

When the football team made it to town after a lively train ride, which included properly chaperoned students from Raleigh’s three women’s colleges, they again broke out their newest school colors, brown and white, which replaced the original pink-and-blue colors that were established with the first team in 1892.

The found representatives from the much more experienced program at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia. The VMI squad had already won four games, all played at home, by a combined score of 118-0. There was little hope for the inexperienced A&M squad, which lost 36-0 to the North Carolina scrubs and tied Wake Forest 4-4 earlier in the week, the opportunity to even score against such a mighty foe as the Keydets was dim for a roster full of farm boys and someone who is likely the first native of Japan to play college football, Teisaku Sugishita.

The star player for the A&M team was Syd Alexander, known today as the namesake of Alexander Residence Hall, but the resumes of the other players on the team are mostly lost to history.

The game was called for 2:30 p.m. on Friday afternoon at the Atlanta athletic fields. The next day and the following Friday, teams from UNC and Georgia met for two games at the same location. Among the other games played during the course of the exposition was Georgia's season-ending contest against Auburn.

Cadets from both schools marched to the bleachers in formation and a total of approximately 1,500 fans ringed the sidelines for the game  

On the opening kickoff, VMI fumbled the ball and A&M player W.R. Vick picked it up and ran for a touchdown to end VMI’s scoreless streak, a hopeful start to the first road game in school history.

However...

“The six was made on a fluke—one of those accidents that happen even in as scientific a game as football,” wrote the Atlanta Journal. It turned out to be the only score of the day for the boys from Raleigh.

In fact, according to the account in The Atlanta Constitution, it was the only time AMC crossed midfield the entire game. The rest of the game – played in two 35-minute halves, with a 10-minute break in between – belonged to VMI’s cadets. They scored seven consecutive touchdowns to win the game 42-6.

VMI cadets still wear red-lined capes as part of their first-class uniforms.

“The Virginians were out in force, with their voices, their red-lined capes turned wrongside out, and their tin horns, and a better backing football team never got. In the second half, the Tar Heels never got the ball, but were crowded unmercifully all over the field,” the Constitution wrote, referring to the A&M school with the nickname used for all schools from North Carolina. “They had virtually given up at this point.”

On the way home the next day, the train carrying the A&M players, students and professors stopped in Charlotte, just long enough for the football team to post a 0-0 tie against the team from the Charlotte Commercial College at Latta Park, the team’s fourth game in a week. That game is not recognized in the NC State record books.

“Within the past week A&M has played four games, in which several of her best players were disabled,” wrote The Charlotte Observer. “Also during the past three nights the men have lost much sleep, so that they were not in good condition.”

Charlotte Commercial College was a business training school located in downtown that eventually merged with Raleigh’s King College in 1901 to become a for-profit business technology and health-care training school. It closed in 2018 due to low enrollment.

It was a fairly devastating week for AMC football, with a two losses and two ties. The students decided they no longer wanted brown and white as school colors. A poll of students in November, settled on red and white, perhaps remembering those inside-out capes worn by the VMI cadets. The faculty adopted the change, but emphatically admonished the Athletic Association that this decision must stand, “unless reversed by a vote of two-thirds of the student body.”

Such a vote has never been taken.

A month after the end of the football season, the Board of Trustees issued a short-lived ban on all intercollegiate athletics, similar to the one Wake Forest passed on its campus immediately following its 4-4 tie with A&M. While Wake’s athletic ban lasted 18 years, while A&M’s decision was reversed quickly, in time for a 1896 baseball season and a one-game football season.

 

Piedmont Park during the Cotton States and International Exposition.

ACC 101: Charlie 'Choo Choo' Justice was a Movement

© Tim Peeler, 2019

NOTE: If you enjoy reading "One Brick Back" and would like to help offset research expenses for stories such as this, please make a small donation to the cause and help keep these posts free of ads.

Choo Choo Justice at NC State's Riddick Stadium.
[Hugh Morton photo.]

• Charlie “Choo Choo” Justice was the first Russell Wilson, a talented guy with a big heart who was just too small to make it big in football. He did it anyway.
  
• The spindly 165-pound halfback remains the most popular and accomplished football player the state has ever produced (with apologies to Wilmington’s Roman Gabriel and Sonny Jurgensen) and ranks with David Thompson, Michael Jordan, Richard Petty, Catfish Hunter and maybe Floyd Patterson as the most accomplished athletes born in the Old North State. In 1999, Sports Illustrated ranked him the No. 14 best athlete from North Carolina, which is utter bull----.
• He was the first person elected to the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame, as part of the class of 1963.
   
• A native of the Emma community in Asheville, Justice achieved legendary status at Lee Edwards High School, as he led the team to back-to-back state championships, in which the team outscored its opponents 300-6. In 1942, he averaged 265 rushing yards per game. In his high school career, he averaged 18.6 yards a carry.
• Choo Choo never wore a facemask, in high school, in college or in professional football.
• For a couple of years after his playing career was over, Choo Choo joined North Carolina’s Woody Durham on the Tar Heel Network as a play-by-play analyst, but he just didn’t have the natural booming voice needed to make it on the radio. “Charlie’s biggest problem was not that he didn’t know football,’’ Durham said Friday. “But he had a real high-pitched voice, a voice in the minds of a lot of people that didn’t fit the legend.’’ Even his voice was too small.
• During World War II, Justice enlisted in the U.S. Navy and he became a football star at the Bainbridge Naval Training Center in Maryland. That’s where he got the name “Choo Choo,” because of his ability to avoid tacklers. “He looks like a runaway train,” one of the officers said, “we ought to call him Choo Choo.” And they did.
• After the war, Justice was already a star, even though he had yet to play college football. He turned down a professional contract and considered Duke, UNC and South Carolina, but ultimately went to Carolina because it was the only school that agreed to his recruiting demand: His tuition would be paid by the GI Bill and his athletic scholarship would go to his wife Sarah.
• He entered UNC as a 22-year-old freshman and became one of the most highly decorated and, some say, highest paid, walk-ons in college football history. He wore No. 22 throughout his college and professional careers.
• Justice ran, threw and punted his way to UNC greatness in head coach Carl Snavely’s single-wing offense. He owned more than 80 of UNC’s football records after his four-year career ended. His total offense records lasted until 1994.
• He led the nation in punting in 1948 with a 44.1 yard average and helped the Tar Heels reach the highest ranking in school history, No. 3, with a 9-1-1 record. His greatest game came against Georgia, in which he amassed more than 300 yards in total offense.
• He was more than a performer. He was a movement. “It was the perfect time,” he said in a 2000 interview with the Charlotte Observer. “Carolina needed a star. Everyone had been through a war. Confined. There had been gas rations. The war was over, and people wanted to turn it loose a little.”
  
• When Choo Choo announced he was going to North Carolina after the war, NC State pretty much conceded any chance of being successful in college football, even with the surge of GI Bill enrollees. Instead, the school hired Indiana high school coach Everett Case to build a basketball dynasty. He immediately won nine of 10 conference championships (six Southern Conference and the first three Atlantic Coast Conference titles, a record that has never been matched in the South). That forced North Carolina, Duke and Wake Forest to find their own big-name basketball coaches to compete.
   
• He was named the Most Valuable Player in the 1950 game between the College All Stars and the Philadelphia Eagles, leading the college kids to a 17-7 win over the professionals.
• He was twice named consensus All-American and was twice voted runner-up for the Heisman Trophy. Army’s Glenn Davis, Stanford’s Andrew Luck and Justice are the only players in Heisman Trophy history to be runners-up in back-to-back years. Davis was runner up in 1944 and ’45 and then won it in 1946. Justice was runner up in 1948 and ’49, while Luck was runner up in 2010 and ’11, but neither ever won the Heisman. Justice helped the Tar Heels go to two Sugar Bowls and the Cotton Bowl.
   
• Author Frank DeFord always denied that his novel, and the movie it inspired, called “Everybody’s All-American” was based on Justice’s life, which was a natural assumption given the main character, Gavin Grey, is an All-American and Heisman Trophy winner who played at UNC but struggles with depression and alcoholism in his post-football life. The movie, which stars Dennis Quaid and Jessica Lange, was going to be shot in Chapel Hill, but UNC’s administration turned down the studio’s request to film on campus. The movie’s setting was changed to LSU, which started rumors that the movie was based on the life of Tigers’ Heisman Trophy winner Billy Cannon. “Never met either of them,” DeFord said. “Don’t know anything about them.”
• Justice was so popular in North Carolina he could even fill up NC State’s Riddick Stadium. He never played there in his four years of college – even the Wolfpack’s home games during that era were moved to Kenan Stadium because of a lack of seating for the rivalry game. However, when Justice played for the Washington Redskins, NC State’s Wolfpack Club sponsored an NFL exhibition game between the Skins and the Green Bay Packers on Sept. 11, 1954. Carolina fans filled about 16,000 of the stadium’s 22,000 seats to see their football hero play, but Lisle “Liz” Blackbourn’s Packers whipped Joe Kuharich’s Redskins 31-3. Justice broke loose for a 21-yard gain, but Green Bay’s defense pretty much kept him under wraps. The game was sponsored by NC State’s Wolfpack Club, meaning Choo Choo raised money to help Earle Edwards’ program beat Carolina three of the next four years. State hosted four other NFL exhibition games in 1967, ‘68 and ’69 when its news home was called Carter Stadium and in 1989 when it was called Carter-Finley Stadium.
• Charlie and his wife Sarah were already married when they arrived in Chapel Hill. They lived at the Carolina Inn, which at the time was the school-provided housing for married couples at UNC. They had two children, Ronnie and Barbara. In the years after, following his professional football career, following his time in Greensboro as an insurance salesman, even as his iconic presence began to fade, that’s where they stayed when they returned to Chapel Hill.
  
  
• Justice played only 43 NFL games in an injury-hampered career. He was still named one of the top 70 Redskins of all time.
• In 1970, the University of North Carolina dedicated a section of its athletic center in his name, calling it the Charlie Justice Hall of Honor.
• Justice Street in Chapel Hill is named after him.
• The day after his death, the 22-yard-line at Kenan Stadium was painted blue in his memory and became a longtime tradition. It wouldn’t be surprising in the least if Brown, in his second stint with the Tar Heels, revived that tradition.

1952 Bowman football card.

A few nice things people said about Choo Choo when he died on Oct. 17, 2003, at his home in Cherryville, a day before he was supposed to attend a reunion of his “Justice Era” teammates. These appeared with the obituary I wrote of Justice for the Greensboro News & Record.

UNC teammate Bob Koontz

“He was a great athlete. He was a man of tremendous character. He was respected by every single man on our team, from the water boy on up. Throughout his career, he was one of the most unselfish athletes you would ever encounter. He would always deflect praise from himself to someone else. He was a friend of every man this squad. I think he was the greatest football player to ever come out of North Carolina and probably ever will.”

Former teammate Art Weiner

"Pound for pound, he was the best player there ever was. He was fearless.’’

Governor Jim Hunt

“I am deeply saddened to learn of the death of Charlie “Choo Choo” Justice,’’ Hunt said. “He was my hero as a boy, even though I was an N.C. State fan. He was a great friend to me and to North Carolina during my time as the governor. He was North Carolina’s hero, probably the best athletic hero we ever had, certainly until David Thompson and Michael Jordan came along.’’

UNC football coach Mack Brown

“It's a sad day for the University of North Carolina and the state of North Carolina to lose a guy like Charlie Justice. Seldom do you ever come across someone who gave as much of himself as Charlie did, and he gave more than he ever took. He gave people -- me included -- so much. He can't possibly be replaced.”

UNC All-America tailback Don McCauley

“When I first go here as a freshman from New York, being a bit green and not reading the sports pages, I got down here and called back after the first week of practice.
I said to my dad, ‘Who’s this Charlie Justice guy that everyone is talking about?’ With that, my father said ‘Jeez, I hope I’m the first guy you mentioned this to. If not, be prepare to be tarred and feathered and dragged out of the state on a horse.’ That’s how big Charlie was. He was bigger than life to me. As I got to know Charlie over the years, my junior and senior years we had an opportunity to spend some time together and again, he was just an inspiration to me. Probably the greatest lesson I learned from Charlie was to put the team before yourself personally. I always admired how his teammates respected his abilities, but how thankful he was to be on the same field as his teammates. Over the years, he got stronger and stronger and the name got
as big as life. He will be missed.”

Former UNC golfer Harvie Ward, a classmate of Justice’s during the 1940s

“We had the archeology course one year and it was one of those course that didn’t have to spend a lot of time on. If the weather was good, Charlie and I would go down to the YMCA so we could watch the pretty girls go by. If it was a rainy day, we had to go to class because there was nobody out. I remember one day we tried to sneak into class after it started, and the professor noticed us and said “I’d like to introduce you all to Mr. Harvie Ward and Mr. Charlie Justice.’ They all just sat there and stared at us. I bet we hadn’t been to that class three times all year. Charlie was a great man. I never saw a bad side of him.’’

ACC Commissioner and former UNC athletics director John Swofford

“I’m not sure anybody ever made the connection between greatness and humility as well as Charlie Justice. If anybody has ever transcended generations in sports (at UNC) it is Charlie Justice.’’