America in WWII - (Page 59) CARDS: AMERIC A IN WWII Football had steadily gained popularity before the war. Opposite: A 1939 college game packs the Orange Bowl, home of the University of Miami Hurricanes. The field had lights for night games. Above, center: Army defenders drive a Cornell University end out of bounds in an October 10, 1942, game at West Point’s Michie Stadium. Army won 28-8. Above, cards, clockwise from upper right: Sherman Howard, a New York Yanks halfback on this 1951 card, put in nearly two and a half years fighting in the European theater; Bruce Alford, an end for the Yanks, was a 1942 All-American before flying 35 missions with the Eighth Air Force as a pilot; Tom “Cricket” Kalmanir, a Los Angeles Rams halfback in 1951, served in the Army Air Corps; and Paul Burris, a Green Bay Packers guard, seen on a 1950 card, was a combat engineer in Belgium and the Rhine River operations. NATIONAL ARCHIVES COLLEC TION Hall of Fame career. He remembered his early days in the league with a laugh. “You’d stick your head in the huddle and the smell of alcohol would hang there till hell froze over,” he said. “But you’d just raise up and go, ‘Ahhhhh,’ and get a breath of fresh air, and then go to work. We had a lot of fun.” So did the Sunday afternoon crowds. After 60 minutes of cheering, fans spilled out of stadiums grumbling over a tough loss or marveling at an especially crunching hit. For a few hours, the war was forgotten. Not everyone was following the action with pleasure. Director of War Mobilization James F. Byrnes, for one, was “seriously concerned that at this critical period when we are exerting every effort to direct manpower into critical war industries, we find such a large number of men between the ages of 18 and 26 engaged in professional athletics of all types.” In December 1944, with American GIs and paratroopers struggling a world away to hold an icy hamlet called Bastogne, Byrnes wondered how physical defects could keep men from the battlefield, but not the football field. (According to a New York Times report, 23 of 28 Washington Redskins players had been either classified 4-F by the army or discharged for ailments ranging from trick knees to perforated eardrums.) Eyeing additional manpower and resources for the war effort, Byrnes shut down racetracks across the nation and ordered a second look at the mili- OPPOSITE: NATIONAL ARCHIVES tary qualifications of professional athletes. Byrnes’s concerns were soon moot. As the 1945 NFL exhibition season got underway, the war ended. Scores of college gridders and 19 NFL players had been killed, but most of the veterans returned. Many resumed their playing careers, older, bigger, and faster than the men who had filled their roles while they were away, and the football world soon began to make sense again. Sadly missed for two autumns, the classic annual Yale-Harvard game returned, as did Notre Dame’s dominance of college ball—after one last season of West Point perfection in 1945. Little’s speedy Columbia bunch roared back into Eastern prominence with an 8-1 record. Meanwhile, legions of new fans were driving the NFL toward its own golden age, while a new competitor, the All-America Football Conference, prepared for action. The AAFC was destined to fold in 1949 and contribute three new teams to the growing NFL. By that time, representatives of America’s gridiron game could look back fondly on the wartime weekends when they had provided anxious citizens with their own brand of war relief. A ERIC ETHIER, a contributing editor of America in WWII, is a historian and writer currently based in Georgia. He enjoys sports history almost as much as he enjoys playing hockey. OCTOBER 2007 AMERICA IN WWII 59
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