28.

The Tall Firs

28 Laddie Gale

Forward	6-4	195	Senior	Oakridge, Oregon
GP: 34	FG: 145	FT: 117	Points: 407	Average: 12.0

After turning down overtures for most of the 1939–40 season, Gale relented and played eight regular-season and three playoff games for the Detroit Eagles of the National Basketball League. Although he joined the Eagles late, his scoring average (7.5) led the team, barely beating out teammates Slim Wintermute (7.2) and former LIU star Irv Torgoff (6.6).

Gale was set to become Oregon’s freshman team basketball coach in 1942 when he entered the service instead and became an instructor in water survival and a basketball coach for the U.S. Army Air Forces, including in Santa Ana, California. Following his release from the service, he played for several AAU teams. Moving to Oregon’s capital of Salem in 1950, he ran his own gas station, owned a bread distributorship, and sold cars. In the mid-1960s, he briefly lived in Eugene, selling cars for Dunham Motors, and then entered the real-estate field in, first, Florence, and then Gold Beach on the Oregon coast, with his Sportsman’s Realty.

Thanks in part to the tireless advocacy of Howard Hobson, Gale was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1977, and the first call of congratulations he got was from his former college coach. “Hobby actually spent half the time apologizing that Slim (Wintermute) didn’t make it too,” Gale said that day. “I agreed, and it was kind of funny because most of the time we were talking about how it was too bad that some of the other guys couldn’t be honored, too. It was the type of team that made it awful hard to pick out one guy.”

Gale retired in 1980, and in 1989, Gold Beach saluted him with the naming of a fir tree—yes, a Tall Fir—in his honor on the new Schrader Old Growth Trail. He died at age 79 in July 1996, and mourners were startled, but pleased, when his funeral service ended with a rousing playing of “Mighty Oregon.” His ashes were scattered beneath the tree.

22 Slim Wintermute

Center	6-8	195	Senior	Longview, Washington
GP: 31	FG: 124	FT: 61	Points: 309	Average: 10.0

The Webfoots’ renowned center averaged 7.2 points in his single season with the Detroit Eagles. He also played for several semi-pro and AAU teams, including the Portland Indians, ran his own leasing company, and worked as an analyst for Boeing in Seattle.

On October 21, 1977, when he was 60, he and a friend, Jerry Caldwell, took out his 37-foot boat from the Lake Union Yacht Club. Subsequent reports said that in the afternoon, Caldwell awoke from a nap and realized Wintermute was gone. The boat by then was on the Cozy Cove inlet in Lake Washington, meaning it had been taken through the strait connecting the two lakes. Wintermute’s body never was found. His son, Scott, said there was no suspicion of foul play and that his father had suffered a heart attack earlier and undergone heart surgery. Scott theorized that he either had suffered another heart attack and had fallen overboard or had slipped over the rail. Scott dived under the lake surface, trying to find his father’s body, but was unsuccessful in water that was as much as 200 feet deep.

18 John Dick

Forward	6-4	200	Junior	The Dalles, Oregon
GP: 34	FG: 90	FT: 49	Points: 229	Average: 6.8

In his 1939–40 senior season, when he also was Oregon’s student-body president and served on the athletics board, Dick led the PCC in scoring and was a consensus first-team All-American. He didn’t talk about any of that much because the team had a disappointing season. “He still felt years later that he let the team down, because he played well, but not well enough,” says his son, John Michael Dick.

After his graduation, Dick played for an AAU team in Seattle and held down a nominal job as a parts manager for the team’s sponsoring company. He looked at it as holding time until he decided what direction he would go in the workplace. On December 7, 1941, everything changed. The next day, Dick—and many, many others—lined up to enlist in Seattle. “I was still in great shape because I was still playing ball, and the Lieutenant Commander who was in charge at the place I enlisted called me aside,” he recalled. “He told me he had seen the results of my physical and said they desperately needed men in good physical shape in Naval aviation, so he asked me to go in that direction. I was a little surprised, but told him I would go wherever they needed me.”

Told he needed letters of recommendation, he got working on that, and one of the first came from Washington coach Hec Edmundson. Accepted in the program, Dick went to Corpus Christi, Texas, for flight school. He played intra-service baseball, too, and when major-league pitcher Johnny Sain offered up a fastball that Dick drove off the scoreboard, he saw nothing but curveballs from Sain again and was reminded why he wouldn’t have made it as a pro baseball player. (That damn curveball . . . ) Then when he suffered a leg injury when spiked in a game, he was held back in training and eventually was assigned to serve a stint as an instructor, a common occurrence that underscored the rushed nature of our training. Many pilots, both in the Navy and the Army Air Forces, were held back to teach what they had been taught to those in the next wave. Then he was dispatched to the Pacific, where he flew Grumman F8F Bearcat and F6F Hellcat fighters in support of ground missions or bombing of ground targets. Immediately after the Japanese surrender, he was among those assigned to fly around the Pacific Theater, scouting for Americans stranded and abandoned in prisoner-of-war camps. He later told his sons that he got help from “flexible” Navy authorities, since he likely was taller and heavier than the pilot maximums. He admitted he generally didn’t wear his parachute, because that would have made the cockpit too cramped, and stowed it under his seat instead.

Dick decided to remain in the Navy. “He didn’t say he did any soul-searching,” John Michael says. “He just said he loved flying, and they had taught him to fly. He wanted to stay in and fly.”

He married the girl next door (truly) from The Dalles, Fran, in 1946. Eventually their family would include three sons and a daughter.

In the Korean War era, after being trained in another Grumman naval fighter, the F9F Panther jet, he was set to go out on his first sortie in the afternoon when the word came that the war was over.

In the 1960s, he first was chief of staff for naval air operations, and he obtained a master’s degree in international relations from George Washington University while stationed in Washington. He often played basketball in the Pentagon gym, sometimes enlisting his visiting son, John Michael, as his teammate in two-on-two “make it, take it” games against younger players that could leave the opponents astounded about what the “old man” officer still could do on the floor, especially with running hook shots with either hand.

He was the primary flight officer on the USS Intrepid and the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise, plotting the schedules and logistics in the launch and recovery of the planes. Transitioning to the captain’s bridge, Dick was captain of the USS Washburn, an attack cargo ship, and the super-carrier USS Saratoga from September 1967 to April 1969 during the Vietnam War.

He retired as a rear admiral in 1973. As his teammates died, one by one, he became even more the spokesman for the 1939 champions as years passed. John Michael most vividly remembers one television interview when the questioner asked his father what it felt like to be the leading scorer in the first-ever NCAA championship game. The Admiral’s response: “You shouldn’t make so much of that. We were a smart team and all we were doing was taking advantage of what the defense offered.”

Fran passed away in 1999.

Rear Admiral John Dick died in Eugene on September 22, 2011.

32 Wally Johansen

Guard	5-11	155	Senior	Astoria, Oregon
GP: 34	FG: 74	FT: 45	Points: 193	Average: 5.7

Johansen and his fellow Flying Finn, Bobby Anet, indeed played the 1939–40 season for a new Eugene AAU team, which turned out to be sponsored by Rubenstein’s Furniture and called the Rubenstein’s Oregonians. They won the state title and then, after picking up Oregon seniors John Dick, Ted Sarpola, and Matt Pavalunas after the Webfoots’ season ended, lost to the Colorado Springs Jewelers in the quarterfinals of the 1940 national AAU tournament in Denver.

Johansen was studying law as a post-graduate when his father’s illness caused him to step away from school and return to Astoria, where he landed a job as a sportswriter for the local paper. “He was trying to help his family along,” says his son, Kirk. When the U.S. entered World War II, Johansen joined the Navy in 1942 and was a gunnery officer on a transport vessel in the Pacific Theater. He and his girlfriend, Betty, were married in June 1945 in San Francisco, and they sent a wire to Bobby Anet telling him the news.

After the peace, Johansen re-entered graduate law school and he and Betty lived near the Oregon campus, on what they jokingly called “Poverty Alley,” and their next-door neighbors were Oregon quarterback Norm Van Brocklin and his wife, Gloria. In 1948, Johansen joined the McKeown and Newhouse firm in Coos Bay, Oregon. Successful and respected, he became a partner in the firm and was president of the Oregon State Bar Association in 1967–68.

On September 10, 1971, he had just finished a fishing expedition on the Rogue River with Kirk and was headed back to the family vacation home near Bandon when he suffered his third heart attack. This one was fatal.

He was 54 years old.

Kirk scattered his father’s ashes in the Rogue.

20 Bobby Anet

Guard	5-8	175	Senior	Astoria, Oregon
GP: 33	FG: 56	FT: 67	Points: 179	Average: 5.3

After briefly working as a graduate assistant coach under Hobson, Anet—who had turned down a chance to join Gale and Wintermute with the Detroit Eagles—went to the Los Angeles area in 1940 to work for Lockheed and play basketball on the side.

Knowing his father, a member of the Astoria draft board, had promised that his sons would be among the first young men called up, Bobby enlisted in the Navy and was officially inducted in January 1942. He started out as a chief specialist in physical training at the Naval Training Station in Dearborn, Michigan. He managed to play semi-pro ball on the side with the Detroiters. In one doubleheader, he and the Detroiters faced the Eber-Seagrams and the Harlem Globe Trotters faced the New York Rens. Eventually, Anet went to the Pacific Theater where, beginning in late 1943, he served on ships as a lieutenant commander.

In San Francisco two months after the war ended, Wally and Betty Johansen announced to a visiting Anet that they had a friend named Paula they wanted him to meet. Raised in Walnut, Kansas, the future Paula Anet taught school briefly before deciding to join two of her aunts in San Francisco after the outbreak of the war, and she found work as a secretary in an architect’s office.

Paula and Bobby were married in the spring of 1946. Wally and Betty Johansen stood up for them at the ceremony.

Anet had been accepted to attend graduate school at Harvard, but instead moved back to Oregon with his new wife. He spent most of his professional life as a lumber broker in the Portland area. He died in July 1981, and he was the third starter from Howard Hobson’s most famous team that the retired coach had to memorialize. “Bobby was a great floor leader and always led the fast break,” Hobson said. “I think people known as fast-break artists today would be slow walkers compared to Anet. He’s the best I’ve ever seen, before or since. Other players did our scoring, but Bobby was clearly the director of the team.”

40 Bob Hardy

Forward	6-3	180	Senior	Ashland, Oregon
GP: 30	FG: 46	FT: 22	Points: 114	Average: 3.8

As the Webfoots’ ace pitcher, Hardy was 7-0 as a senior in 1939, and he and basketball teammate Ford Mullen led Oregon to the 1939 PCC Northern Division baseball championship. Hardy signed with the Detroit Tigers, receiving a bonus of about $1,500, and was sent to Beaumont of the Texas League. But as happens to so many hard-throwing left-handed pitchers, he was derailed by shoulder and arm trouble in his short minor-league career. He also served in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific during World War II, then returned to his native Ashland and purchased the family grocery store from his father. Next, he founded a lumber company in Happy Camp, California, and it did well. After his retirement, he lived on the Oregon coast at Brookings, and he died in 2006.

25 Ted Sarpola

Forward	6-2	160	Junior	Astoria, Oregon
GP: 27	FG: 37	FT: 17	Points: 91	Average: 3.4

Sarpola stepped up to become a starter the next season, too, and he and John Dick were the Webfoots’ leading scorers. After his graduation, Sarpola served in the Coast Guard, and then had a long teaching and coaching career in Oregon high schools, including in The Dalles and Astoria, and was renowned for playing serious AAU ball well into his 50s. He retired in 1981, but continued coaching on a volunteer basis in his hometown and Knappa, Oregon. He died in his Knappa home in 1986.

11 Matt Pavalunas

Guard	6-0	170	Junior	Raymond, Washington
GP: 33	FG: 38	FT: 12	Points: 88	Average: 2.7

The reserve guard who made the championship game box score entered the service before Pearl Harbor and eventually coached the 363rd Engineers basketball team to many service championships, including of the entire Middle East command. A picture of him shaking hands with the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, was among the family archives. After leaving the Army, he became a well-known high school coach in Washington, starting out in 1949 at Sequim, on the Olympic Peninsula, where he was head coach in basketball and baseball and an assistant in football. In the late ’50s, he became friends with Jack Elway, a young coach at nearby Port Angeles High School. Pavalunas specialized in basketball after he moved on to Centralia and Auburn high schools, and he was inducted into the Washington Interscholastic Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 1977. He died of a heart attack in Ocean Park, Washington, in 1991.

13 Ford Mullen

Guard	5-8	165	Junior	Olympia, Washington
GP: 20	FG: 18	FT: 9	Points: 45	Average: 2.3

Bobby Anet’s backup decided to forgo his final season of basketball eligibility and, like Bob Hardy, signed with the Detroit Tigers after the Webfoots’ 1939 baseball season. Mullen played several seasons of minor-league baseball from the Class D to the Class AAA level. After a brief run with the Pacific Coast League’s Seattle Rainiers in 1942, he retired from baseball and taught and coached at Eugene High for a year. But with the ranks of players thinned out by the war, he rejoined the Rainiers at the end of the 1942–43 school year. He spent the 1944 season playing second base with the Philadelphia Phillies, hitting .267 in 118 games and becoming a cult figure as “Moon” Mullen. He was drafted into the Army, too, but was kept back at Fort Lewis in Washington and both played on and eventually managed the base’s powerful baseball team. Leaving the service in 1946, he went to spring training with the Phillies in 1947, but didn’t stick with the big club and spent four more seasons in the minors, finishing up as the Boise Pilots’ player-manager in the Pioneer League. He returned to his hometown and for 27 years was a fixture as a biology and zoology teacher and coach at his alma mater, Olympia High School. He was the final surviving member of the 1939 Webfoots and the oldest living former Phillies player when he died in February 2013.

15 Red McNeeley

Guard	6-2	180	Sophomore	Portland
GP: 18	FG: 9	FT: 5	Points: 23	Average: 1.4

After playing two more seasons for the Webfoots, McNeeley drew what he later laughingly labeled “a nice low number” in the draft lottery. In a discussion taped for family posterity, McNeeley said: “I decided that I didn’t want to pack a rifle in the mud.” He enlisted in the Navy in late 1941, before Pearl Harbor, and took his first training flight on December 31, 1941. On a leave in Portland, he married his college sweetheart, U of O sorority girl Jean Pauling, who was from—small world—Astoria. As a pilot of floatplanes and seaplanes, McNeeley was stationed at Attu Island in the Aleutians for 14 months before returning to the mainland for more training. By then, he was considered one of the Navy’s most experienced “new” pilots and was given his pick of carrier-based aircraft. He ended up in a new squadron, piloting a Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bomber with a radioman and a gunner. Eventually, the squadron went to the Pacific, assigned to escort the fuel tanker fleet. After six months of that, the squadron was deployed to the Battle of Iwo Jima. The squadron flew Marine observers over the island to gather information about the status of the battle and try to spot Japanese troops, and the observers tended to ask the pilots to get lower . . . and lower. McNeeley became squadron commander when his predecessor’s plane was shot down. His planes were hit twice by enemy fire, but he made it back to the carrier. In the second week of the battle, again carrying an observer, his plane was nailed again, more seriously, and he managed to land on the steel-matted runway the Marines had just finished. He became more directly involved in the battle, dropping torpedo bombs into caves on the northern side of the island and also destroying a Japanese blockhouse. For his work in the Battle of Iwo Jima, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

After he left the service, he and Jean settled in Astoria, where Red served a stint as mayor and sold insurance for over 50 years. He died in 1994.

36 Earl Sandness

Center	6-4	190	Sophomore	Astoria, Oregon
GP: 12	FG: 4	FT: 0	Points: 8	Average: 0.7

The backup center played two more seasons for the Webfoots, and then also entered the Navy. Serving through the Korean War, he rose to the rank of lieutenant commander. He coached and taught in Alaska and then in Portland, and late in life went into the charter boat business in Ilwaco, Wash. He died in 1984.

Also Saw Action

According to the final statistics published in the Register-Guard on March 29, 1939, two of the other nine players considered part of the full 20-man team that season appeared in varsity games. Sophomore Don Mabee, who made the eastern barnstorming trip as an extra body, played in five games. Junior Wellington “Wimpy” Quinn appeared in one. Both also were better known for their prowess in other sports. Mabee played only that single season with the Webfoots in basketball, but was a three-year letterman as an end and halfback in football. He served in the army in World War II and became one of Oregon’s top high school football coaches at LaGrande (five years) and McMinnville (25 years). He died in 1996. Quinn, nicknamed after the character in the “Popeye” cartoons, was a standout third baseman for the Webfoots in baseball and played professionally for Vancouver of the Western International League and the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League. The Chicago Cubs liked his arm enough to bring him to camp as a pitcher in 1941, and pitching coach Dizzy Dean said: “With my brain and his arm, they’ll never get him out of the major leagues.” Ol’ Diz was wrong about that. Quinn also was in the service during the war and then was a player-manager in the minor leagues as late as 1951, but died at age 36 in 1954.

Honorable Mention

Sophomore Toivo Piippo, the fifth player on the full 20-man team from Astoria that season, went into the Army Air Corps in July 1941. Piloting B-26 bombers during the war, Piippo flew out of Braintree, England, and among his many decorations was the Distinguished Flying Cross. After leaving the service, he taught and coached at Marysville High School in Washington, and then spent over 30 years as a beloved middle school teacher and coach at Chief Joseph Middle School in Richland, Washington. He died in 2003.

Paul Simon, the son of the Eugene Lutheran minister and briefly a Register-Guard sports writer, became an Illinois newspaper publisher, a congressman, and a U.S. senator, and unsuccessfully sought the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination. He was renowned for his bow ties.

Simon’s former boss, Dick Strite, remained sports editor of the Register-Guard until he died of a heart attack in 1965, at age 61. Also known as an expert fisherman, his fishing companions over the years in Oregon included longtime state resident Bobby Doerr and his Boston Red Sox teammate, Ted Williams; and Yankees and Indians second baseman Joe Gordon, the former Webfoot.

Strite’s friend and Portland rival, L. H. Gregory of the Oregonian, retired in 1973 and died two years later in a Portland nursing home.

Wayne Morse, the U of O law school dean, was elected to the Senate in 1944 as a Republican. He served four terms, leaving the GOP to become unaffiliated and then a Democrat, before being unseated in 1968 by Republican Robert Packwood. He ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960 and was one of two senators to vote against the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which led to the widening of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

Oregon Daily Emerald co-sports editor George Pasero became a longtime Portland sports editor and columnist with the Oregon Journal, and then sports columnist for the Oregonian after the Journal folded. He wrote the feature on the first championship team that appeared in the official program at the Final Four in Portland in 1965, but didn’t mention that he had been on the U of O campus at the time.

Wendell Wyatt, Beta Theta Pi fraternity brother of Matt Pavalunas and Red McNeeley, was a prominent Portland attorney and a five-term Republican congressman from Oregon’s 1st District. The federal building in downtown Portland is named after him and fellow U.S. representative Edith Green.

Miami of Ohio coach Weeb Ewbank went on to greater fame in football, coaching the Baltimore Colts of the NFL and the New York Jets of the AFL to world championships.

Associated Press Writer Drew Middleton, who so badly imitated New Mexico A&M star Kiko Martinez’s accent, joined the New York Times and became a celebrated war correspondent during World War II, and in later years was the newspaper’s chief military correspondent.

New York Times sportswriter Arthur Daley took over the “Sports of the Times” column from John Kieran in 1942, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956, and stayed in the position until his 1974 death.

Metropolitan Basketball Writers Association president Everett B. Morris, of the Herald Tribune, was a beachmaster in the D-Day landings and then, as a naval reserve officer, was recalled to active duty during the Korean War era.

Ohio State captain Jimmy Hull was a longtime orthodontist in Columbus. He practiced until suffering a stroke in 1990 and died the next year, at age 74.

Long Island star Irv Torgoff played in the National Basketball League, American Basketball League, and Basketball Association of America through 1949. He then was a fabric and yarn salesman and died in Florida in 1993.

Bradley Tech standout Charles Orsborn went on to serve as, first, Bradley’s coach and then the school’s athletic director.

St. John’s coach Joe Lapchick was the New York Knicks’ head coach from 1947 to 1956, working for Ned Irish. He went back to St. John’s and finished up his career with a nine-season stint with the Redmen.

Texas Longhorns reserve Denton Cooley became a surgeon and performed the first artificial heart implantation in the world and the first successful human heart transplant in the U.S.

After playing for Colorado in the invitation tournament and then for the Steelers in 1938, Whizzer White headed off to a year of Rhodes Scholar study at Oxford. He returned to the NFL with the Detroit Lions in 1940. President John Kennedy, the son of U.S. ambassador Joseph Kennedy, appointed White to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1962 and he served until his 1993 retirement.

Charles Buxton, the young Oregonian reporter who traveled with the team to Evanston and back, and covered the trip and the national championship game, served in the military in World War II. Later, Buxton joined the Denver Post as a reporter and ultimately was the newspaper’s editor and publisher from 1970 to 1977.

U of O president Donald Erb died of pneumonia in 1943, at age 43. The Erb Memorial Union, honoring him and Oregon students killed in World War II, opened in 1950 at 13th and University streets and remains the school’s student union.

Star Idaho forward Steve Belko became one of Howard Hobson’s successors, serving as Oregon’s head coach from 1956 to 1971. He later was commissioner of the Big Sky Conference.

Shortly after making the rounds of the New York and NCAA tournaments, Dr. James Naismith died on November 28, 1939, in Lawrence, Kansas. He was 78. His game lived on.