4.
John Henry Dick’s story was quintessential Oregon, and he passed along details of his family history to his three sons.
His father, Franklin, was a young, successful chicken farmer in Iowa who became ill and visited a country doctor. He was told: Mr. Dick, sorry to break the news, but you have consumption. You have perhaps six months to live. Facing that diagnosis of tuberculosis with bravery but determination, Franklin decided to see more of the world in his time left, sold his chicken farm, visited the East Coast, and, running low on money, returned home. He visited another doctor for a second opinion, or at least for an update on his timetable and prognosis. The second doctor was incredulous. Consumption? No, what you have, Mr. Dick, is an ulcer. We can fight, and maybe even control, that!
Bolstered by the new diagnosis but determined to get a fresh start, Franklin took the money he had left, jumped on a train, and headed west. Deciding his cash wouldn’t last all the way to the coast, or long in Portland or any other major city, he disembarked in The Dalles, the small farming community at the eastern end of the Columbia River Gorge. Franklin landed a job as a clerk in a local lawyer’s office. Showing an aptitude for the work, he studied and passed the bar examination, becoming a small-town lawyer himself. He married a J.C. Penney seamstress, Louise, and started a family, and John was the second oldest of the four Dick sons, behind big brother Bill. The twist was that because both Astoria and The Dalles were on the south bank of the Columbia, in theory, if young John Dick had dropped a bottle with a message into the river, young Bobby Anet or Wally Johansen eventually might have been able to fish it out as it was about to reach the Pacific.
Dick discussed his upbringing and more in a lengthy interview with Oregon athletic department official Jeff Eberhart for the Order of the O newsletter, distributed to former lettermen. Only part of the interview ran in the newsletter. Eberhart graciously passed along an entire transcript.
“Sports and the local trials were the biggest things in town,” Dick told Eberhart. “The entire business district would close an hour before a high school football game and wouldn’t reopen until about an hour after the game had ended. We had 5,500 people in The Dalles at that time and we’d seat about 4,000 to 4,500 people at those high school games.”
When John was a sophomore and big brother Bill was a junior and star of the team, The Dalles High lost a playoff game and the townsfolk were distraught. Bill Dick told his father that his “little” brother, John—already a shade over 6-foot-4 but still a string bean—showed promise but wasn’t yet tough or strong enough. Franklin owned farmland he intended to turn into a wheat ranch. Part of it was still heavily wooded. Every day over the next summer, Franklin drove John to the farmland, handed him a lunch, and left him behind to work on clearing the acreage. When The Dalles High School opened again the next fall, John was beginning to look a lot more like the powerful forward who played for the Webfoots. In the next two years, both with Bill as a teammate and after Bill graduated, John became known as a football star playing end and linebacker.
Howard Hobson and John Warren recruited Dick for basketball, and they insisted he could be a college star in the sport if he put his mind to it. They knew they had a leg up in the recruiting because Bill was at Oregon, playing both football and baseball. (He eventually transferred to Willamette University.) John Dick went to the Oregon campus several times to visit his brother and attend games.
“I wanted to be a student at the university long before I came here,” John said. “I was also recruited to play baseball and football at Oregon, but you couldn’t play any other sport if football was giving you the scholarship. I chose basketball because I knew we were going to have a pretty good team, and it also gave me the chance to play baseball, which was great because ‘Hobby’ was the baseball coach as well.”
Dick was charismatic and a natural leader, and he was elected the freshman class president. He remained involved in student-body politics and spread thin and reluctantly gave up baseball after his freshman year. But his baseball connection allowed him to become friends with former Webfoot infielder Joe Gordon, then in the Yankees’ minor-league system and about to reach the major leagues. The friendship lasted decades.
“Managing my time became an issue, so I chose to concentrate on one sport,” Dick said. “You have to remember that these were the Depression years, so we had to work for our scholarships. Our room, board and tuition were paid for, but we had to buy our own books.”
Dick joined the Sigma Nu fraternity, which had several members from The Dalles and also many athletes, including his eventual basketball teammates Wally Johansen, Bobby Anet, and Ted Sarpola—three of the Astoria boys. Dick made pocket money stocking campus cigarette machines. Despite the lingering effects of the Depression, the good-times mood was prevalent on campus, and Dick unabashedly joined in the partying. The students didn’t have to hide it, either, in the wake of the December 1933 end of Prohibition. As Dick became one of the most-liked men on campus and a student government leader, his attitude was reflected in what he later told his own sons: “You can’t have too few enemies and too many friends.”