Lagniappe

Here is my parting shot to the Fiesta Bowl, which for the rest of my life and probably for yours, will rank right up there as the sporting event in which I could take the most pride.

This one is about an Oregon State connection to the Fighting Irish that didn't get much media play before or after the game.

This connection has nothing to do with subtle insults or nasty penalties or "juco" players or who has the most athletic tradition. It's much more positive than that, and it happened a long time ago.

It has to do with Knute Rockne because the truth is, during the 1920s, this most powerful man in college football was a faculty member at Oregon State. That's right. Faculty!

Lecturing in room 323 on the third floor of Strand Hall, then proceeding out to Bell Field for full-contact demonstrations by real football players or sometimes by the "coach" himself, Notre Dame's famous football icon taught "Knute Rockne's Football Method" for two weeks each summer from 1925 to 1928 as a member of Oregon State's summer session faculty.

Leaving Bell, he would proceed to OAC head coach Paul Schissler's office and to a desk just a cuspidor away from Schissler's. There he would "hold court" with the many players and coaches who were constantly dropping by. Loud talk and laughter would fill the air, and Rockne, always in the thick of it all, always the instigator. At his desk, Schissler would grumble about needing some quiet to get some work done.

All this, of course, begs the question: why Oregon State? Better yet, why was Oregon State the only place Rockne would work in the west? Why not San Francisco or Los Angeles, a bigger city with all the amenities?

Certainly he liked the campus, for he once told a reporter from the Oregon Stater: "What do I think of the campus? I think it is a splendid one. And say, you know, these new buildings are surely going to put it on the map. I have noticed a vast improvement just in the four years I have been coming here to teach at the summer session."

Part of his motivation, too, maybe a big part, had to do with his respect for three OAC coaches: Schissler, former Beaver football boss and Notre Dame alumnus Sam Dolan, and OAC track coach Michael "Dad" Butler.

Dolan, who coached the Orange from 1911 to 1913, was a star at Notre Dame in the early 1900s and was still affectionately known to Rockne as "Rosie." He picked at the likable Dolan all the time.

"Dad" Butler knew Rockne as a boy in Chicago and was actually his athletic trainer at the Chicago Athletic Club. As an aside, Butler served as one of three ring-side judges at a 1939 heavyweight championship fight featuring Joe Louis. He had left Corvallis a few years earlier for a similar position at the University of Detroit.

Of the three, Schissler may have been the strongest attraction for Rockne. The two had first faced one another as head coaches in 1923, when Schissler's Lombard (Ill.) College eleven lost a hard-fought game to Notre Dame, 14-0. It was the only defeat he would suffer at the small school of 350 graduates.

A short time later, Rockne wrote a letter of recommendation for his young friend for the Oregon State job. In 1926, when the Beavers played New York University in Yankee Stadium, Rockne made the 180-mile round-trip from South Bend to Chicago's Soldier Field to visit the Beavers during workouts the team had scheduled for midway in the journey.

Expected to be back in the summer of 1929, Rockne had to cancel because of a severe case of thrombosis. For the summer of 1930, the cycle was repeated; Rockne appears on the summer faculty list but his doctors said "no traveling."

On Feb. 21-22, 1931, Rockne paid his last visit to Corvallis. He was on a 25,000-mile tour sponsored by the Studebaker automobile company. Schisssler picked him up at the train station in Albany, and that weekend the two reached an agreement to meet on the gridiron in 1933. Notre Dame would do the traveling.

He also promised Schissler he would be back that summer to teach his football course and said that he missed his friends, the campus, the town.

In March, there was a plane crash near Bazaar, Kansas. Rockne was killed. The game was never played. Oregon State's administration ordered all flags on campus flown at half staff. gpejr

George P. Edmonston Jr.
Editor