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| LONGVIEW - They're in their mid-70s and many won't be able to make the big football game on Saturday when the Longview Lobos vie for a state championship in Houston.
But that's OK. Many students who attended Longview High School in 1937 are content with their memories of the Lobos' first state championship - and they can always watch it on TV. Probably the most excited of the Lobo alumni from that era is Evelyn Cloninger, 75, the mother of LHS assistant coach Larry Cloninger and a sophomore cheerleader when the Lobos on the first state title. Spirits were high for the Christmas Day game at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, she said. "My daddy didn't like to go to things like that but he did this one," Cloninger said. "Longview always had good support. All the women would dress up in their finest - hats and gloves, too." Gladys Whitaker, 76, said she remembered wearing a green velveteen dress to the game because everyone was encouraged to wear green. The fans traveled tot he championship game via trains that would often stop just outside the stadium. "I was, oh, about 16," Whitaker said. "My parents went, although they were usually in another car. They followed all the Lobo games." In fact, so may people went to the state championship game in 1937 that not many people were in Longview - even on Christmas Day, Cloninger said. Frank Slade, a cheerleader for the 1937 football team, said the trains were ignited with excitement - sometimes in more ways than one. "Going up there, it was all hustle and bustle with picnic lunches of fried chicken," he said. "Going home, there was some whoopin' and hollerin', but then someone would screw a penny in the light socket and make the lights go out. Then they'd go to neckin'." Cloninger said she won't be able to see her son lead the Lobos to a possible championship Saturday because her husband is in ill health. "I've been pulling' for them all year," she said. "I've been listening to the radio real close and hollerin' and yellin'. I've told Larry, he's gotta pull 'em through. I've already pulled my end." Whitaker said she, too, had been keeping up with the Lobos' games - especially with quarterback Jay hurst, the grandson of her school chum J.G. Hurst. Mary Elizabeth Flatt, who was voted "football queen" by the student body in 1937, said she also thinks about Hurst as she listens to the games on the radio. "I visualize what he might look like by what his relatives looked like," she said. All the students in 1937 knew "Dandy" Dick and Hardy Miller, a pair of brothers who were the star running back and team captain. Dr. A.G. Thomas, who played on the third-string team in 1937, said he remembered "Dandy Dick" as a faster runner. Longview Morning Journal publisher Carl Estes and other leaders of the community found the Miller brothers in an orphanage and brought them back to Longview to play football, he said. "Dandy Dick" was later killed in World War II, as were many of the warriors who fought on the gridiron for Longview in 1937, Whitaker said. For Thomas, who was "used as a tackling dummy" for the first-stringers of the first Lobo championship team, he will always remember the 1937 team as the best that ever was. "That team could have played teams in the Southwest Conference," he said. "That was one of the best teams to ever take the field." Their coach, P.E. Shotwell, also was one of the best Longview has seen, Thomas said. "He brought up men," he said. "Even if I didn't make the team, I learned a lot from Coach Shotwell." |