Run like the wind He was red-headed and freckle-faced, a Californian born in Hope, Rhode Island, on Dec. 31, 1911. He moved West with his family in the 1920s and became a high school football sensation for the storied Long Beach Poly Jackrabbits. Packed into his 5-8, 165-pound frame was a talent for playing football like few around Oregon State had ever seen, a triple-threat athlete who could pass with pin-point accuracy, punt for great distance, and run like the wind. Opposing coaches preparing for the Beavers and their brilliant left halfback, Norman "Red" Franklin, would always warn their players not to let him have any wiggle room in the open field because the consequences could be deadly.

They were right.

In 1933, for example, he ran back the opening kick-off 95 yards against San Francisco (Oct. 12) to lead Lon Stiner's team to a 12-7 victory. Four weeks later he did the same thing, same distance, against powerful Fordham University in New York City's Polo Grounds, in a 9-6 OSU victory that both stunned East Coast sports fans and secured a first-team All-American spot for Stiner's gifted runner, the fourth in school history after Herman Abraham (1916), George "Gap" Powell (1921), and Howard Maple (1928). It was Powell who recruited Franklin to Oregon State and even drove the young lad all the way to Corvallis from Los Angeles in his (Powell's) personal car to enroll.

Playing from 1932-34, his greatest fame would also come in '33 when he was one of the leading stars of the famous "Ironman" eleven which snapped USC's winning streak of 25-straight by holding the defending national champion Trojans to a scoreless tie using only 11 players the entire game. Franklin's punting kept USC bottled up in its own half of the field most of the game.

Franklin graduated from what was then Oregon State Agricultural College in 1935 and at the time of his death in 1947 at age 36, he and his wife owned and operated a small grocery store in Lacomb, Ore. He was the first of the Ironmen to pass away.

Photo courtesy of Don Stevenson, Albany Oregon.