75 Years Ago
Late Autumn/Early Winter 1926
by Maurice Telleen
published in The Draft Horse Journal, Winter 2000 - 2001

 

note in the masthead that this is Volume 37 of the DRAFT HORSE JOURNAL. Holy Smoke! I have been writing this 75-50-25 years ago stuff for over half my life; reporting on the horse and mule trade, livestock prices, crops, politicians, elections, booms, crashes, wars and droughts and whatever else struck my fancy.

This time I’m going to do one differently and devote it to one man who stood out like a beacon in American life, not just in 1925 but throughout that whole turbulent decade of the 1920s. He touched the people of this country as few others ever have. He both shaped and was shaped by his time. He was a football coach.

Since this is a radical departure, I’m dedicating it to three people, both occasional readers of these columns, I understand.

The first is Brian Allen, son of well known Belgian breeders Dr. and Mrs. A.F. Allen, Plain City, Ohio. Brian is the defensive coordinator on the football coaching staff at Kenyon College, in his native Ohio. Brian also played his college football at Kenyon. After graduating from there he went to Tufts University in Massachusetts and earned a masters degree in history. The coach I’m writing about taught chemistry at Notre Dame University. So when people ask, “what good is a degree in chemistry or history?”, one can always say...”coaching football for one thing”.

Also to my old friend Miles McCarry, a frequent contributor to these pages. Mac grew up in Massachusetts but came clear out to Iowa State to get his degree in animal husbandry. So long ago that it was called husbandry, rather than science. Mac has two sons who graduated from Notre Dame and could probably still produce the cancelled checks to prove it. He also “remembers” the Holstein herd at Notre Dame some 40 or more years ago when he was laboring in the Holstein Friesian Association vineyard.

Also to Pat O’Brien who played this coach in a movie when I was about 10 years old. I think I went to it twice–a big luxury at that time.

That is enough dedicating except to a man named Jerry Brondfield who wrote a book about this coach, published by Random House about 25 years ago. I could have done this without Brian, Mac and Pat but I wouldn’t have even tried it without Mr. Brondfield.

And so, on with the story...

HIS NAME WAS KNUTE ROCKNE

He was the head football coach at Notre Dame for thirteen years, from 1918 through 1930. His Notre Dame teams took the field 122 times during his tenure, winning 105 games, losing 12 and tying 5. Fifteen of his players were named All-American (no defensive and offensive platoons and special teams in those days). Three of his teams were named National Champions, five went undefeated and six lost only one game each.

That is just the bare bones numbers of a remarkable career, a mere footnote to the man himself. Sort of like Harold Clark in the Belgian horse business. The legacies of such men are not measured by numbers but by lives affected, new directions taken, and embellished by the countless stories and legends that come to surround them.

Rockne was perfect for the 1920s. The slaughter of WWI had ended the illusion that civilization had moved much beyond barbarianism. Disillusioned by that conflict, uninspired by the politics and politicians of the time, sick of scandals, giddy with the instant communication available via telephone and radio, movies that talked, a car in every old horse stable and a lot of folks—not just the rich—playing the stock market it was, as Brondfield says in his book ROCKNE, “an era of emotional excess”. Except, down on the farm where there was little reason to call them the “roaring 20s”.

For their heroes the public turned, to a remarkable degree, to playing fields and sporting events. Babe Ruth in baseball, Bill Tilden in tennis, Jack Dempsey in the boxing ring, Red Grange in football, and (I suppose) the good guessers in the stock market since that had sort of become a sport too. The country worshiped winners. Sports figures and matinee idols replaced the generals, statesmen, preachers and prophets on many of those pedestals reserved for national heroes.

So how does a prematurely bald headed coach (rather than player) who was neither tall nor handsome and so careless about his personal appearance at times that Heywood Braun, the writer, described him as ‘looking like an unmade bed’ get into that group? Because he was a performer too; the consummate actor as well as a great teacher. He was a driven perfectionist who coached by inches. His famous Notre Dame shift was choreographed as carefully as the Ziegfield Follies, which he loved. His pre-game and half-time talks to his boys became the stuff of legends.

So what can I possibly add to it? Plenty. What I’m about to tell you has never been told before and I stumbled onto it by accident. It is also about coincidental intersections. The guy who introduced me to that phrase said it explained just about everything. This may not even be true...but it could be. That is why I’m calling it...

I was minding my own business, researching an article. That is a pretentious way of saying “looking stuff up.” So I’m cruising along in the 1913 International Livestock Show Album and right there it was. In the carlot division for fat cattle, Notre Dame University from Indiana had won class 202 for 15 head of grain fed steers or heifers, 2 years of age and under 3. They went on to be reserve overall champions in the division and also won the American Hereford Breeders Association award for 2 year old Hereford carload.

What, in the name of heaven, was Notre Dame doing showing steers at the most prestigious livestock show in the world at the time? Well, it turns out that the Society of the Holy Cross, which founded and operated Notre Dame, did operate a farm. A number of small church related schools did. Graceland College down in Lamoni, here in Iowa (Latter Day Saints), had a good herd of Jerseys when I was a kid. Not just small colleges but county homes, prisons, orphanages (Boys Town in Nebraska had a good herd of Holsteins) and on and on. They operated them for two reasons at least; one to grow food for the students, orphans, residents or inmates—as the case may be; and two, to provide those people with something productive to do. The Boards of Control in Iowa and Wisconsin were the largest Holstein breeders in their respective states. The College of the Ozarks (where ALL the students work) still operates a farm and livestock operation for those same reasons. The great Suffolk stud at the Colony Farm in England was originally a sort of reform school for young toughs from London. The horses were considered great therapy. So, now you know why Notre Dame had a farm, but not a college of agriculture.

When the school finally (in 1896) hired a real football coach, sides of beef from the Notre Dame farm were part of his compensation. So the farm and football had some connections early on. That coach also taught English and studied law (they did have a law school) on the side. Since eligibility requirements were more relaxed, he also played quarterback and was team captain. A versatile fellow. His name was Francis Hering and while he stayed only three years, he set a course that was to serve Notre Dame very well. He was the first of several great architects of football to coach the South Bend school.

The victory with the Hereford steers in Chicago in early December of 1913 was a fitting climax to a banner year for the little school on the shores of lovely Lake St. Marys. For just a few weeks before that the Notre Dame football team, with Jess Harper in his first year as coach and senior end Knute Rockne as team captain, had stunned mighty Army, the toast of the east, giving them a 35-13 whipping.

From here on the coincidental intersections get unbelievably serious, so you don’t have to believe it. I don’t care. That is the nice thing about fables, you can take them or leave them.

A fellow named Nels Lilljegren was the herdsman at Notre Dame. He is the fellow who selected and fed that champion carload lot. He was a young Norwegian immigrant. Knute Rockne, the captain of the football team, was also a young Norwegian immigrant. Both were from a village named Voss in Norway. Nels and Knute, with their mothers and siblings, came over on the same steamer in the 1890s. They were adventuresome little boys, driving their mothers nuts with worry that they might fall off the ship. It happened. Really. Little kids were lost at sea...not often, but now and then.

Both fathers had emigrated to Chicago a year or two before. Rockne’s father had been part of a prosperous small manufacturing business. I suppose you could call him a machinist. It was the family trade, they were a line of “Mr. Fix-Its.” Lilljegren’s father had been a farmer in Norway. That too was a family trade. His name was Ole. The two little boys became inseparable companions on the journey. Best friends as only little kids can be.

The village of Voss was a prolific producer of immigrant talent. They must have had a good gene pool. This little town would provide a governor and senator from Minnesota, a governor of North Dakota, a Wisconsin supreme court justice, the founder of a great newspaper, The Chicago Daily News, and the greatest football coach this country has ever known.

The Rocknes (the “c” was added over here) settled into a Scandinavian enclave on Chicago’s north side where Lars pursued his own trade. Since Ole had been a farmer in Norway, that family gravitated to the south side where he found employment at the Union Stock Yards. He quickly discovered that Upton Sinclair was right in his book, The Jungle. It was not a nice place to work if your name wasn’t Armour, Swift, Cudahy or Sanders...or one of their lieutenants. So when a cattle feeder from a place called South Bend, Indiana, offered Ole a job, he took it...and his family back to the country. A very different kind of country from the fir and hemlock covered slopes of Norway, but at least it was country.

But even before that (Chicago was such a big place) the little boys had lost touch but they never forgot each other. Both had learned their catechism in an 800 year old church in Voss that started out as a Catholic church but demonstrated its versatility by becoming a Lutheran church. These little fellows had bonded at sea on a great journey to a foreign land, not something to be taken lightly. Some twenty years later they were to be reunited at a Catholic college in northern Indiana. And they would demonstrate their versatility, just as the old church house in Voss had, by becoming Catholics.

Fast forward to the fall of 1910. The sycamores were just starting to turn color on the campus at Notre Dame. The student body numbered about 400. Knute Rockne, 22 year old freshman, was out of his element. An idyllic, almost rural campus, was not Chicago’s north side nor the main post office for that city where he had gone to work after dropping out of high school after his junior year. So there he was with little more than the clothes on his back and without a high school diploma. But he had a quick mind, had read voraciously and easily passed their equivalency test.

How did he wind up in such a place? Well, he was mad about sports, especially track, was a very good pole vaulter and a better than average runner. He had continued this in an athletic club while working the night shift at the post office...to give him the daytime for track. He had figured on taking the equivalency test at the University of Illinois after he had put some money aside. But when two of his track friends invited him to go along with them to South Bend, he went. His Lutheran parents were startled by that decision.

Notre Dame was eager for good students and Father Cavanaugh, the president, found him a job as assistant to Father Niewland in the chemistry department. Niewland wound up calling him the most remarkable student he ever knew. Father Cavanaugh concurred, saying that Rockne was a case of brain hunger. When he was a senior he taught a chemistry class to underclassmen. He loved the theatre and was not a bad actor. He choreographed student productions. He would audit classes he wasn’t taking for credit. Always eager to pick up a buck, he sent home for his flute and made the orchestra, because the members got a dollar for every concert. And he played it for the rest of his life. He went out for track and football. As a junior he would clear more than 12’ in the pole vault and set the American indoor record and as a senior he was named to Walter Camp’s All-American third team in football. The smallest end to be so honored in some 20 years. By that time he stood 5’8” tall and weighed 160 lbs. But he was an All-American student from the git-go. Knute Rockne, as they say, really blossomed into something special at Notre Dame.

Nels, his little shipboard buddy, had also grown to young manhood. He had, with the move to the farm, taken to farming and stock raising like a duck takes to water. He became well versed in the way of soils, crops, weather and the ways and wiles of animals. He, too, learned a lot from his mentors. And after graduating from high school he heard that the little college over in South Bend was looking for just such a young man to be in charge of the livestock on their farm. Nels applied and got the job.

Nels had already been on the job for about a year when Father Cavanaugh, the president, sent young Rockne out to the farm to pick up a side of beef. It was probably a perk for the basketball coach. Well, you can imagine the reunion. The two little shipmates were reunited after years of separation, both were on the cusp of distinguished careers.

It was as though they had never been apart despite their disparate interests. The old friendship was rekindled and they thrived on one another’s company.

Both that stunning victory over Army on November 1, 1913, and the winning carlot of steers at Chicago, about a month later had their birth in this special friendship. But that was still down the road a little ways. We must take things in sequence, for that is the nature of both fables and coincidental intersections.

Notre Dame football meanwhile had also grown up, along with Nels and Knute. Slowly and steadily they had become a football power in the midlands. In spite of, or perhaps because of, its small student body with an administration that insisted that every student be taking a physical education program. Every residence hall had its own football team. As Jerry Brondfield says in his book, ROCKNE, “...as many as possible worked out the obligation by playing on one of the hall football teams.” So you might well have 300 students playing Hall football. That is, in fact, how Knute Rockne started playing. If any showed promise you can be sure that a promotion to the varsity was likely. It also engendered tremendous student body loyalty to the football program and Notre Dame became a giant killer on the gridiron. Success breeds success and the school started attracting some of the best prep players in the country–not with a huge recruiting budget, but simply with the tradition of winning. Rockne’s roommate for four years, Gus Dorais, was an example of this. He had come to Notre Dame for the express purpose of playing football, as well as getting an education.

In 1911, Rockne and Dorais’ sophomore year, they won six and tied two games. In 1912, they went undefeated and at the end of the season Rockne was elected team captain for his senior year, 1913. Rockne’s father had died shortly after that undefeated season and Rockne had to seriously consider leaving school to help out the family.As Brondfield says in his book, “Only the dogged insistence of his older sister kept him on the campus.” His friend Nels also encouraged him to stay and he did.

At that same time, Notre Dame got a new coach. His name was Jess Harper. He had been coaching at nearby Wabash College. It was not far from Crawfordsville to South Bend, so Harper made sure he spent some time on the Notre Dame campus in the spring of 1913 to meet this new team and get his sea legs at the new place. The relationship between Harper, the coach and Rockne, the team captain, proved to be another great coincidental intersection. The rapport between the two men was immediate and life long. Good thing because what happened on November 1, 1913 (that shellacking of Army) could not have happened without those spring meetings. I’ll explain.

Shortly after the successful football year of 1912, Knute’s good buddy Nels–herdsman out at the farm–came to Rockne with a proposition. He said, “Rock, I’ve never missed coming to the games unless we were filling silo. I’ve been as faithful to your football obsession as a dog is to his master. And I still don’t understand the game or your devotion to it. I think it is turnabout time. Father Cavanaugh has given me a few days off to go up to the big stock show in Chicago the week after Thanksgiving. You guys are through bashing your heads on the football field, why don’t you go up to Chicago with me and see the kind of competition that gets my juices flowing. You could see the stock yards where my family wound up after getting off the boat and see your own family in the north end. It would be fun.”

Rockne didn’t think the stock yards would be fun but his friend had a point. He had been faithful to a fault, ever cheering, cheering for old Notre Dame and all the while he had expressed no interest in the things that turned Nels on. He agreed to go.

So that’s how these two Fighting Irish of Norwegian extraction found themselves at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago in early December of 1912. Rockne couldn’t, for the life of him, see how anyone could spend so much time just looking, looking, looking at cows. They all kind of looked alike to him. And he said so. So Nels gently said, “That is what football looks like to me. One big pile up of bodies after another.”

But Rockne was sensitive to those around him and said, “Nels, if this means so much to you, why don’t you bring a load of steers up here next year. Low key as you are, I can tell there is a fierce competitor in those Scandinavian bones. And if you won, it wouldn’t hurt Notre Dame either.”

Nels admitted that in his daydreams he had, indeed, thought about exhibiting at Chicago, but felt the administration would regard it as foolish. Like most Scandinavians, he hated to look foolish. Rock said, “You give up too easily. I’ll try to pull a few strings with Father Cavanaugh. He likes you and he is really a great guy, even if he isn’t Norwegian or Lutheran.”

Nels replied, “Well, Rock, it wouldn’t very well do to have one of Martin Luther’s boys at the head of Notre Dame, would it?”

“You missed the point, Nels. This is about steers and publicity for the school and the fact that he thinks you are a good person. Let me work on him.”

“Okay. But it won’t work.”

But that isn’t even the most important thing that happened in Chicago in 1912. The old International liked to nurture its ties with the ranching west. Sort of play cowboy. So that year, they had a cowboying demonstration in the amphitheater one evening. They turned some calves loose in the arena and cowboys on horseback roped them. The lariat wasn’t a spiral pass to anyone in that crowd except Rockne. The calf, going on a dead run as the lariat came down over his head, wasn’t a pass receiver to anyone in that crowd except Rockne. Then there was bulldogging. These guys, some of them weighing no more than he did, would bring down a calf and tie his legs. It was all leverage and split second timing–not brute strength. There were no movies in 1912. So Rockne had never seen anything like this in his life. He was absolutely enthralled. He wanted to see more, so they extended their stay through the next evening.

Now John Clay, the head of the greatest livestock commission house in the country and a member of the board of directors of the show, was, like Nels and Rock, an immigrant. But he had come from Scotland and never quite gotten over it. So the Scottish influence was more than a little evident at that stock show. For one thing, the show had its own bagpipe band which performed every evening. As an added feature on that second night, Clay had arranged for a demonstration, not of cowboy ropers but of Border Collies, those tireless and matchless little herding dogs that gathered and penned the sheep off the misty moors of Clay’s homeland. His cast was simple. One shepherd, two dogs, fifteen wild range sheep, a small pen and a few gates and hurdles they had to move through to get to the penning.

At first Rock was disappointed. And he told Nels so. He said, “Let’s go. I can see all the dogs I need to on the streets of South Bend.” Nels was adamant. This was his day, not Rockne’s. So he said, “No, hang around, you will be amazed at what you see.” So he hung around and was amazed at the ability of those canine rockets as they anticipated every ovine move, blocking their escape routes, intimidating them with that “look” as they darted, crouched, slouched and ran. It appealed to his sense of choreography. Their speed, balance, ability to change direction and to anticipate the foe’s next move enthralled Knute. He turned to Nels and said, “It is a question of balance, leverage and speed, isn’t it?” Nels said, “Yeah, they are good.” In the 1920s, Rockne would coach some of the smallest guards that ever suited up for a major university. Go figure.

That brief visit to the 1912 International would have far reaching consequences. It could not have come at a more timely juncture.

Flashback to 1905. Teddy Roosevelt, the “Rough Rider,” was president of the United States. He was no sissy. He had even done some cowboying for real before leading that charge up San Juan Hill. He received the nomination for vice-president in 1900, not in the way of a promotion, but to “bury” him in a meaningless office. Whoops. An assassin’s bullet ended the life of William McKinley and that “wild man” was president after all.

Roosevelt led and preached the vigorous life. But by 1905, football had gotten too vigorous for even him. There was talk of outlawing the game. The straight ahead, flying wedge type of play was turning the public off, or at least a large segment of it. Roosevelt got into the act and forced rule changes in the game to open it up. The rule makers did so by allowing the forward pass in 1906. It didn’t make much difference.

The rules, in retrospect, seem ludicrous. The pass had to cross the line of scrimmage in the ten yards in the middle of the line–5 yards each way of the center. It couldn’t travel more than 20 yards. Fancy that it you were an official, or a pass receiver.

So, to help the men in striped shirts, the field was chalked off into 5 yard squares. That gave the receiver (the backs and ends were eligible receivers) about 10x15 yards in front of the line of scrimmage to receive the ball, assuming that the passer was 5 yards behind the line of scrimmage. It also gave rise to the expression: gridiron. Can you imagine a whole field chalked off into 5 square yard sections? Birds would circle football fields, mesmerized by the geometric pattern of the field. Some would crash and others would get sick and vomit. So did a lot of the coaches.

With restrictions like that, the forward pass didn’t sweep the country. Can you imagine being a pass receiver and camped in that small area? The defensive players couldn’t either, so your chances of getting decked before the ball ever arrived were promising. So for six years, the forward pass lay, more or less, dormant. But in 1912, the rule makers did away with the gridiron business and invented pass interference. Now you could catch it anywhere on the field and were supposed to be off limits to the defense until the ball arrived.

Two young men at Notre Dame took note. They were the roommates, Knute Rockne and Gus Dorais. Dorais was the quarterback and Rockne an end and they were headed into their senior year. The ball wasn’t exactly made for passing, kind of round, but it wasn’t impossible. Gus Dorais, for one, was able to throw perfect spirals.

So before the summer layoff leading up to the 1913 season, these two asked the new coach, Jess Harper, to give them a couple of footballs to take with them to their summer jobs at Cedar Point, Ohio, a resort sort of place where they clerked, bussed tables, etc. When they weren’t working they were conditioning themselves by running in deep sand on the beach and inventing their passing game. They experimented with various passing routes, short, medium and long. When practice opened at Notre Dame for the 1913 campaign, they demonstrated to coach Harper and he was pleased with what he saw. He was also smart. Some of their early games were breathers so they were careful not to reveal too much. They didn’t have to. But they did test out their patterns and work on their timing. They intended to ambush Army. The Army coach sent an assistant to scout them in one game. They threw only three passes during that entire game.

On November 1, 1913, they unleashed all their aerial weapons. They stunned the Cadets, the toast of the east, with a 35-13 whipping. Gus Dorais passed 17 times with 14 completions and 243 yards. It was the first time the forward pass had ever been used with such a devastating effect. The game of football was changed and has never been the same since. With the constant threat of the pass came a loosening up on the part of the defense. Notre Dame’s running game prospered against Army’s much bigger line.

The public interest in football soared. A game that had been predicated to a great extent on brute strength became a game of position, balance, speed, mobility and leverage. It still paid to be strong, but you had to be more than strong.

When the Notre Dame team returned to South Bend, they did so as conquering heroes. It is said that the entire student body and town turned out to welcome them home.

Hanging back in the crowd because he was shy and diffident and really didn’t get worked up about this game of football was Nels, the college farm herdsman. But he was happy that his boys had won. And he wanted to embrace and congratulate his old friend, Knute.

When Knute finally shouldered his way back to him, he had tears in his eyes. He gave Nels a big bear hug and said, “Thanks, old buddy, you pointed the way.” Nels, confused, said, “What the hell you talking about, Rock?” Did you suffer a concussion or something?” And Rockne responded, “Nels, you and those calf ropers, bulldoggers and Border Collies are the reason we whipped Army. They showed me the way the game of football could be played. And now we’ve done it. Beaten the best team of the east and we can beat anybody.”

“Oh, that’s okay, Knute. We had a good time in Chicago, didn’t we?”

“Yes, Nels, we did and we are going back next month and watch your carlot of steers beat all those hot shot cattle feeders from Iowa and Illinois and the big ag schools and the rich hobby owners of cattle. You do have your entries in, don’t you?”

“Oh, yeah, but golly I don’t know. That’s the International you know. It doesn’t get any tougher than that. Maybe we shouldn’t take ‘em.”

“Nels, you will take them and you will beat the best cattle feeders in America, just as we beat Army. Nobody can beat Notre Dame!”

That is the real story. I’ve never told it to anyone before. But you can find the results of the 1913 International Livestock Show in the old Breeder’s Gazette of that time. I did.

It isn’t the whole story, of course. I have a copy of the first PERCHERON REVIEW ever published in our country. It came out in the spring of 1916, when Rockne was serving as a professor of chemistry and assistant football coach to Jess Harper. It starts out with a long “lesson” in how to raise big purebred Percheron colts and keep them sound...by Brother Leo, who was apparently in charge of Notre Dame’s Percherons. He knew something about raising and handling colts. Can we assume that the young football coach learned a thing or two about handling high spirited youngsters from Brother Leo as well? Why not? This is, after all, a fable. We can do as we please. So let it be noted that the young assistant football coach also picked up some useful information from Brother Leo, who hung out in the horse barn. That too, you can look up in that 1916 PERCHERON REVIEW on pages 6 & 7.

On June 15, 1914, Knute Rockne, 26 years old, was graduated magna cum laude in chemistry and he had decided what he wanted to do with his life. He was going to become a medical doctor. Notre Dame had no medical school and Rockne had no money. Harper, his coach, wrangled a high school coaching job for him in St. Louis where he had been accepted in medical school. He needed the job to pay the freight. He reported early and was told flat out that he couldn’t take a medical course while coaching on the side.

Back to South Bend he went and Harper went to work, politicking the chemistry department to take him on as Father Niewland’s assistant and as Harper’s assistant coach. The football job had pitifully little money attached to it and Niewland had visions of Rock putting his considerable intellectual gifts to work in his department...not on the football field. It was an arrangement where neither “boss” got the whole Rockne, but with his energy, there was enough to go around. Oh yeah, he was also to coach the track team. Between the jobs, his salary was $2,500 a year, just enough so that he and Bonnie could marry.

Following the 1917 season, Jess Harper felt compelled to return to Kansas to operate the family business, a ranch in the Flint Hills. He urged Father Cavanaugh to appoint Rockne as his replacement. Cavanaugh hesitated, thinking him too young and, who knows, maybe too headstrong too. Harper also threw in the fact that Michigan State (then A&M) was also interested in Rockne...just for insurance. Harper finally had to tell him that he had “promised” Rockne the job. With that, Cavanaugh said, “Well, Jess, in that case I guess we better give it to him”...or words to that effect. So in March of 1918, at the age of 30, Knute Rockne became the football coach, athletic director, track coach and continued to teach one chemistry class for $5,000 per year.

Although Rockne remained at Notre Dame until his death, his salary never exceeded $12,000 per year. In the 1920s that wasn’t nearly as bad as it will sound to those with their own teeth and good wind. As his fame grew that was not, however, an earnings cap. He became an excellent public speaker, a syndicated writer, a play by play commentator on the radio and was possibly the first to conduct coaching clinics. The Studebaker Automobile Company, located in South Bend, was making extensive use of him in their sales department. Just being Knute Rockne had become a business in itself.

One of the wildest things he ever did was charter a Cunard liner to the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam, Holland, for football coaches and their families. En route, he conducted his famous coaching school.

The following paragraph is from Brondfield’s book, ROCKNE.

"My God!" rumbled his old adversary Pop Warner. “Only Rock would come up with a stunt like that! I can see the news report now: ‘Joe Smithers, football coach at Old Siwash, spends too much time at ship’s bar and falls overboard during Knute Rockne’s football drill!" I suspect it was a free passage to Amsterdam for Rockne and his family.

He became such a celebrity that Will Rogers, the great cowboy entertainer of that era, once spied him in the crowd and lassoed him from the stage and pulled him up to the stage. The 1920s really ushered in the “age of celebrity” and Rockne was very much a part of it. I think he loved it.

Because he was at Notre Dame for 20 plus years, as a student, assistant coach and finally head coach, one might assume that it was one big long honeymoon. There were two serious flirtations with “better jobs”, one at Columbia University in New York City and one with Ohio State. Both would have paid considerably better. Both, especially the deal with Columbia, caused him considerable pain and embarrassment. But in both cases he decided to stay put. He truly loved the place. He was no job hopper.

It wasn’t all money. In the 1920s, football was calling more attention to Notre Dame than anything else. Their stadium was small. So he lobbied for a much bigger stadium, a house befitting the giant he had created. Other buildings, of an academic nature, took precedence. The administration, too, was concerned that the reputation of the university was suffering from the “football factory” label. Rockne resented the “football factory” label and, I suspect, justifiably so. He was one coach with great respect for academics and his student-athletes knew that.

In 1929 he finally got his big, new stadium. Here again from Brondfield’s book: “It was going to be a strange season for Notre Dame in 1929. The grandstands on venerable Cartier Field had been torn down; the steelwork for Knute Rockne’s dream stadium was in place and everything was proceeding on course for a glorious dedication in the fall of 1930.”

Notre Dame was going to play every single one of its nine games on the road while the new stadium was being built at home. They opened against Indiana at Bloomington. Football is a contact sport. You can get hurt playing this game or, as was demonstrated in that game, you can also get hurt coaching this game. When a Hoosier ball carrier was hit by two big green shirts close to the sideline, the momentum carried them into the Notre Dame bench and over their coach. He shrugged it off but the pain did not go away. It got worse and turned into a very long season for Rockne with his doctors confining him to bed as much as they could. They grounded him as much as possible. It was thrombophlebitis...nothing to fool with. A blood clot breaks loose and Notre Dame needs a new head coach. He was not a patient sufferer and drove the MDs crazy...I’m sure the doctors were relieved to see the season end and happy that the administration had imposed a “no post season games” rule a few years earlier.

Brondfield has this wonderful description of that Army-Notre Dame game, played in Yankee Stadium where Rockne loved to play. But this time he was home in South Bend. “There was color and anticipation enough in this head-on clash between two great teams. Even though the stock market had its frightful and historic crash just a couple of weeks earlier, tickets were being scalped for as much as $75 each. A couple dozen Army planes flew into Mitchell Field on Long Island carrying a hundred or more top Army brass from all over the nation. Several hundred red hot fans from South Bend had come on two chartered trains. An early winter sent the thermometer plunging to 10 degrees by game time, but more than 80,000 fans were there, wrapped and cosseted against the numbing cold.”

Rockne, in touch by phone, told them to get rubber soled basketball shoes so they would have some traction. The shoes hadn’t come so he then told them to go to stadium maintenance and get as many files as they could and file their cleats as sharp as they could to penetrate the icy turf. Then he talked to every starter on the phone, one by one. And then he listened to the ball game on the radio. When his boys had won 7-0 he was exhausted and turned off the radio which his MDs had forbidden him to listen to. To make a long season short, the 1929 team went undefeated and their coach survived, in spite of himself. And the doctors promptly shipped him off to the Mayo Clinic.

Rockne was feeling pretty good by the following September and to make another long season short we will just say that Rockne and Notre Dame got their two undefeated seasons back to back. After the holidays the doctors again shipped him off to Mayo. The man was hard to slow down but they did get him to go down to Florida and lay around in the sand with his wife and kids for a few weeks.

Then...A RENDEZVOUS OF A DIFFERENT KIND IN THE FLINT HILLS OF KANSAS, MARCH 31, 1931.

Rockne liked to fly in airplanes because he was always the adventurer...and to save time. By 1931 he had become sort of an industry in himself. He was a syndicated writer, a much sought after dinner speaker and a spokesman for the Studebaker Automobile Company which was located in South Bend. Except for his health, he was in tall cotton at 53 years of age.

On March 31, 1931, he was flying from Kansas City to Los Angeles to sign a film contract, be inducted into the Los Angeles Breakfast Club, help one of his fellow passengers open his new sporting goods division and make another speech for Studebaker.

It was an F-10 Fokker plane carrying six passengers, a pilot and co-pilot and lots of bags of mail. This one didn’t get far from Kansas City, no further than the Flint Hills, that great cattle country of eastern Kansas. Farmers and ranchers of the Flint Hills were accustomed to seeing these single wing mail/passenger planes en route from Kansas City to Wichita. But they were not accustomed to seeing one sputter, lose a wing and crash into the ground. Nor of seeing five bodies fall free from the plane. One of the victims was found clutching a rosary in his hand. It was Knute Rockne. Due to the rural nature of the place and muddy roads, it took more than an hour for medical help to arrive. It wouldn’t have made any difference if a group of medical doctors had been having a picnic 50 yards away. The bodies were terribly mutilated. Positive identification of Rockne was made within a few hours at nearby Cottonwood Falls by two men who knew him. One was William L. White, author son of the famous editor, William Allen White. The other was a rancher named Jess Harper...Rockne’s coach at Notre Dame who hired him as his assistant coach and was the man Rock succeeded as head coach. This was the last of the coincidental intersections for Knute Rockne and Jess Harper.

When the funeral train pulled into South Bend station it was reminiscent of the Lincoln train pulling into Springfield, or the FDR funeral train heading north from Warm Springs. There was a great outpouring of real grief. Some legends are phony. Some are manufactured. And some are the real thing. Rockne was the real thing.

A few years back, Jeannine and I visited the farm where the plane went down. There were some nice Hereford cattle on the place. Nels Lilljegren would have approved of them. He probably would have encouraged the owner to enter a load in Chicago because, “you know, anything can happen, little guys beat the big guys if they are good enough.”

I wish I could write an epilogue on Nels but the written record is pretty sketchy on him. But you can be sure of one thing. When that train pulled into South Bend with the body of his good buddy on board, a strong man wept unashamedly. And so did a legion of coaches across the country who had learned their craft from the master.

Elaine Jones, Matfield Green, KS, the ‘discoverer’ of this picture tells me that following this tragedy all the F-10 Fokkers were grounded and a full scale investigation was launched by the FAA to determine what structural weaknesses they might have...she says it was the first of many such investigations. It was certainly one of the first commercial airline tragedies.