A life-altering weekend for Cougs and the world alike

The weekend of Dec. 6-7, 1941, dawned brightly for students on the Washington State College campus.

The big event of the weekend was a football game against Texas A&M, informally dubbed the Evergreen Bowl, to be played Saturday at 1:30 p.m. at Tacoma’s Stadium High, something the city hoped to make an annual happening. If you’ve seen the 1999 movie “Ten Things I Hate About You,” you’ll recognize that school and stadium; it remains an iconic Tacoma landmark today.

The highly anticipated game was sold out weeks in advance of the actual game day. After a slow start, WSC had worked their way into the running for a Rose Bowl berth, although Oregon State would take that bid.

Events were to start Friday in Tacoma with a rally at the Olympus hotel cabaret, broadcast statewide over the radio. Saturday morning was a parade through the streets of Tacoma, led by the 85-member WSC marching band and its five majorettes. In the evening, after the game, a dance was to be held in Exposition Hall.

Though a small number of students owned cars by that point and made the cross-state drive over and back, that was not an option for most students, so a special train was arranged. For $8.50 roundtrip ($12.50 if you wanted a sleeper berth), students could board the train in Pullman at 7 p.m. Friday evening and arrive in Tacoma just 13 hours later at 8 a.m.

The game itself proved tense, but a last-second interception ended the Cougars’ hopes in a 7-0 loss to the Aggies in front of more than 25,000 fans. Cougar students poured into the streets of Tacoma to make what they could of the night, and those who’d taken the special train checked in at the station for a midnight departure, to arrive back in Pullman at 1 p.m. Sunday.

Harold “Ole” Olsen, with his future wife and several of his TKE buddies, had driven over and spent Saturday night at a party with enlisted WSC friends at the Fort Lewis Officers’ Club. Sleeping in late Sunday morning, they were still in their Tacoma hotel rooms a little after 12:30 p.m. when reports started coming in over the radio.

Students who’d made an earlier start back talked about stopping for food at Ellensburg or Moses Lake along the way and learning the news; this was an era before most cars had radios, and so only when stopping for meals or gas did travelers reconnect with the world. For students taking that special overnight train home, the reports just barely beat them to Pullman; they learned as they arrived in the station, stopping inside the Pullman depot to listen to the news.

Needless to say, those noon reports brought the news that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. Wherever they were when they learned, from Tacoma to Pullman and beyond, in those few minutes every student’s life changed as all knew they or their friends were invariably bound toward the war that had been raging for the past several years, half a world away.

One can only imagine the car rides back, with no radios to distract them, as students discussed their path through their changed futures, or riding in concerned silences.

About 250 Cougars, past or current, would lose their lives in service during World War II — across the country, more 400,000 would die. Each has a story, from Chester Kelleher, who enlisted as soon as the term ended and was killed the next day in a car accident while on his way to Spokane to report; to former quarterback Archie Buckley, posthumous Bronze Star recipient who heroically stayed at his post to warn and protect his shipmates in the face of an oncoming kamikaze plane. Hundreds upon hundreds more served, and those students who did not serve still had their lives irrevocably altered on one afternoon that, in a better world, would have just been remembered as the final football weekend of their school year.

O’English is the University Archivist at WSU Libraries’ MASC.