November 29, 1941: OSC at Oregon (Civil War)

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The nation would be at war within ten days, but the only reflection of a war footing in the ’41 Civil War program is a mention of Mike Mikulak, backfield coach, who was called up to active duty and replaced by Manny Vezie.  Otherwise, this is a big program at 32 pages that supports the importance of the game: An OSC win would put them into the Rose Bowl for the first time in program history. (Win they did, 12-7 over an injury-riddled Duck squad; but the December attack on Pearl Harbor forced the relocation of the game from Pasadena  to Durham, North Carolina.)

ASUO business manager Jack Saltzman’s team really stepped up its game in 1941. The year’s program is loaded with a variety of ads; besides the obligatory full-color cigarette pages, there are dozens of half- and quarter-page ads for local business, national entities like Pepsi and Longines, and even pages without display advertising contain single-line text ads in the footer.

The cover art is by Howard Brodie, who would go on to widespread acclaim as a battlefield artist and later as a courtroom illustrator at high-profile trials such as the Chicago Seven and My Lai court martial.

A humorous “Glossary of Football Terms” is not all that out of date when looked at 70 years later. (“Quarterback – Nitwit who couldn’t hear the instructions you shouted to him during the game.”)

 Center roster spread:

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October 23, 1937: OSC at Oregon (Civil War)

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The headlines screamed of scandal.

“VANDALS MAR HAYWARD FIELD TURF”, read the Register-Guard banner of October 22, 1937.  “Letters O-S-C Burned in Sod.” Apparent retaliation for the “daubing of paint” on some Corvallis buildings, the vandals used heavy black crude oil to etch ten-foot block letters on Hayward Field’s newly restored grass. The hooliganism continued all weekend. (Monday’s headline: “OSC INVADES EUGENE: WAR FOLLOWS”.. “Well over 200 students from the State college were thrown into the icy waters of the mill race.” Oh, those nutty college kids.)

The program for the 1937 Civil War at Hayward Field – for some reason played at midseason, and won by the Aggies, 14-0, their second consecutive shutout of the Ducks and first win in Eugene in ten years – sports a lovely Lon Keller watercolor, contrasting the changes in styles between old-time and modern football and fashion. This is one of my favorite covers.  (Keller, a renowned commercial artist who designed hundreds of college and high school program covers, is best known for designing the New York Yankees  “bat-in-the-hat”  team logo for the baseball club in 1947, still in use today. )

Content of the program continues to evolve. Tobacco advertising almost certainly helped cover the cost of the color pages. Unfortunately, other than the cover, all the color enclosed is used in tobacco advertising. The quantity of local advertising is significantly increased; clearly, this is a region emerging from the Great Recession. And, we start to see names that are familiar to modern readers, at least of a certain age – Eugene Farmers Creamery (then managed by Ken Kesey’s father Chuck, later Darigold), Northwest Cities Gas Co (now NW Natural) and Kennell-Ellis Photographers are still in business today.

Overall, it’s a few pages bigger, but the model of the 1930s-era programs holds: Some photos, a few paragraphs of text, and as many ads as can be sold.       

• The hypesters were in fine form for the game preview.  Apparently, OSC had “a combination of versatile sophomores who have literally ‘raised the devil’ in their performances this season.” (Literally? That must have been some halftime show.) There’s a posed action shot of OSC fullback Elmer Kolberg on page 9 that shows real style.  But the rosters show that this was a pretty scrawny bunch of locals; Oregon had only three players weighing over 200 lbs in 1937, which likely contributed to the 4-6 record of Prink Callison’s last team of Webfoots.

• Pages 4 and 5 offer a grid that must have been fun to hand-letter (and that would be a real challenge now) – the score and opponent for every game ever played by Oregon.  It’s a nice reminder that, a hundred years ago, the Webfoots absolutely ruled the military-industrial complex of the state of Washington.

• There are two ads for “Galli-Curci, the world’s best known soprano!”  Amelita Galli-Curci was indeed a prima coloratura soprano, but by 1937 she was 55 years old, on the wrong side of laryngeal surgery, and well past her prime. It’s hard to imagine how she would have sounded in McArthur Court under modern conditions, but it can’t have been good under the circumstances. She apparently retired from the recital circuit shortly after this performance.

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October 13, 1934: Washington at Oregon

— Click to embiggen — This year, the program has an official name, “The Oregon Goalpost.”

So many cool things that we take for granted now first appeared in 1934.  Flash Gordon.  The Three Stooges.  The Soap Box Derby.  Bart Starr. Hank Aaron.  Sofia Loren. Wink Martindale.  And the nation’s new-found optimism under FDR, or socialist hysteria depending on one’s perspective, marked the beginning of the end of the Great Depression – the estimated unemployment rate would never be as high again as the 21% idled by mid-summer.

Clearly, at least one person was gainfully employed in the area of Oregon athletic program design, or maybe employed as a student intern from the Department of Art, as the 1934 UW-UO folio shows a definite upgrade in layout and graphic content. There’s a beautiful cover painting by “Shawl”. There are nice Art Deco touches throughout – note the faux-woodcut “Huskies” and “Ducks” logos, as well as the stencil-effect helmeted head here and there. Photo quality is improved over 1932, and there was enough room in the budget for a full-page team shot, a list of 1934 rules changes, and a blurb for “Challenge Day” (“Each year.. a group from one city or the other has, on the Tuesday preceding the game, created a maximum of disturbance in the other metropolis.” I can’t read this without thinking of Eugene’s contribution to the anarchist riots at the World Economic Forum in Seattle a while back.)

Blitz Weinhard was an advertiser.  And there is another subtle but foreshadowing sponsorship encroachment – a full color, back-cover ad for Chesterfields. A toe in the water, perhaps..  but Richfield couldn’t be expected to cover the cost of all that color forever.

Oh, the game? Sadly, Oregon’s string of six consecutive shutouts against UW came to an end, with the visitors rolling to a 16-6 triumph on the toe of one Elmer Logg, who kicked three field goals and an XP.

Center spread (click to embiggen)

I can’t mix orientations in the scrolling window, so in the interest of avoiding a wrenched neck, below are the two landscape pages (clickable)..