San Jose State University is playing the University of Hawaii football team on Saturday, and there’s an amazing connection between the two schools that I thought readers would enjoy.
The San Jose State football team was on Oahu to play UH when Pearl Harbor was attacked on Dec. 7, 1941, 76 years ago.
Twenty-five members of the then San Jose State College football team, and 27 football players from Willamette University in Oregon, along with coaching staff and family members boarded the Lurline on Nov. 27, 1941, bound for the islands.
One of the San Jose players was Gene Kasparovitch, who had grown up in Hawaii.
Three football games were scheduled among the Rainbows, Spartans and Bearcats. The games were fundraisers to benefit the Honolulu Police Department, said Lawrence Fan, the San Jose State sports information director.
They were the final games of the season for the teams, but few realized it would be nearly a month until the first players returned home.
The teams disembarked at Aloha Tower on Dec. 3 and were driven to the Moana Hotel, where they looked forward to swimming at Waikiki beach and relaxing. “What they would find out a few days into the trip was beyond anyone’s wildest imagination,” Fan said.
Hawaii beat Willamette, 20-6, on Dec. 6. The Honolulu Stadium crowd of 24,000 included men and women in uniform, many of whom were stationed at Pearl Harbor.
The boys on the team later wondered how many servicemen watched them on Saturday and then died on Sunday, said Gloria Goodman, whose husband, Marv, played for Willamette.
San Jose was scheduled to play Hawaii on Dec. 13 and Willamette on Dec. 16, according to a 2011 article by Frank Marqua in the Santa Rosa (Calif.) Press Democrat newspaper.
On the morning of Dec. 7, most of the players were having breakfast at the hotel. A bus trip around the island was planned after that. What they initially thought were aerial maneuvers taking place offshore interrupted their meal.
“We were watching these planes fly over the water, dropping bombs,” Ken Jacobson said. “I remember saying, ‘Look how real they are. Those shells are really bringing up water.’”
Player James Fitzgerald soon realized it was more than an exercise. Oahu was under attack. “It was a lot of smoke and noise in the air from the direction of Pearl Harbor. I saw these planes flying overhead; they had a red ball under one wing. I knew they were Japanese.” he said.
“It took us a long time to absorb all this even though it was going on right in front of us,” said Jack Galvin of Redwood City, Calif., in a 2011 interview for Comcast SportsNet. He would be the last survivor from the 1941 team. Galvin died in 2012 at the age of 90.
“We went outside to see what was going on. Just then, a couple of American soldiers came out and set up a machine gun right next to the porch of the Moana Hotel facing outward toward the sea.
“Here we were, just a bunch of kids, really, but we grew up quick. We had to. The second night out, some trigger-happy Territorial Guardsman put a .30-caliber slug through our bus when the driver didn’t see the signal to stop.
“Nobody was hurt, but the Marine sergeant who commanded the bus was highly indignant,” Bert Robinson said in a 1991 San Jose Mercury News interview.
“Police in Honolulu, working with the U.S. military, sought volunteers to help secure the island,” Marqua continued. “They had a ready source of able-bodied men — two visiting football teams.
“Curt Wiedenhoefer said his father, Hans, told him that ‘one of the commanders basically inducted the football teams,’ each player pairing off with a soldier or a Honolulu police officer to go on patrol. They were given weapons from World War I.”
“When it hit me was that evening,” said Earl Hampton, a freshman on the team.
“There were military guys on the beaches digging trenches and putting up barbed wire. They gave us rifles with bayonets and told us that if the Japanese came back, we were going to defend the island. Hell, we couldn’t have defended anything.”
San Jose State’s Robinson later said that there was a degree of humor in this rag-tag bunch of patrolmen.
“Looking back, it was kind of funny,” he told the San Jose Mercury News in 1991. “Some of us were just naive kids. We had never even shot a gun. We were probably more dangerous to ourselves than to any lawbreaker.”
The San Jose State players worked with the Honolulu police force, while Willamette’s players guarded Punahou School, where ammunition had been moved by the the Army Corps of Engineers.
“Ken Stanger helped deliver a baby the night of December 7,” Fan says.
“A woman was in labor. It was well past curfew and full blackout was in effect. The regular HPD officer and I helped her deliver. It was a baby girl, but I don’t think they named her Pearl,” said Stanger, who joined the Navy soon thereafter.
For 10 days, not much changed. The scheduled Dec. 13 and 16 games were forgotten.
An opportunity to return home came with the arrival of the SS President Coolidge. The ocean liner had been taken over by the military and arrived with wounded men from the Philippines.
Servicemen injured during the attack on Pearl Harbor were placed on the Coolidge for transport to hospitals in California.
Willamette coach Roy Keene negotiated with the military for the two teams to watch over the injured men on the Coolidge in exchange for passage home. Each player was assigned a wounded soldier to stay with.
The Coolidge departed Honolulu on Dec. 19, Marqua said, in a heavily guarded convoy. Twenty-eight days after the Lurline had left San Francisco, the weary Willamette and San Jose State teams again sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge.
“We sang ‘California, Here We Come,’ and that was particularly moving,” Shirley McKay tearfully told ESPN. “It was very touching.”
They had returned on Christmas Day.
Some opted to stay
Many of the players enlisted and saw combat during the war. Don Allen, Chet Carsten, Fred Lindsey, Jack Lercari, Bill Donnelly, Paul Tognetti and Stanger opted not to return to the mainland, Fan said. They joined the Honolulu police force on a full-time basis earning $166 a month (about $2,700 a month today).
“Some of us got together and said, ‘Hey, let’s stay here,’” Tognetti said, “and we all joined the police force and the rest of the team went back. So, for 3-1/2 years, we were on the Honolulu police force.” Tognetti married an island girl and made Hawaii his permanent home for more than 60 years.
50th reunions
On Nov. 16, 1991, the 50th anniversary of the event that changed all their lives, was celebrated. The UH team came to San Jose, and at halftime, 17 surviving Spartans from the 1941 team were honored.
And in December of that year, 17 Willamette Bearcats returned to Hawaii for a more peaceful visit this time. And, added Debra Fitzgerald, whose father James was on the team, “they finally got their bus tour.”
Bob Sigall’s “The Companies We Keep 5” has just arrived in the islands and his first and second book have also been updated and reprinted. For more information, see www.CompaniesWeKeep.com or contact Bob at Sigall@Yahoo.com
