"The closest thing to war in times of peace is football." Admiral Jonas H. Ingram, Annapolis Director of Athletics 1925-30
It was war, and everything had changed.
Monk Matthews got down in his lineman's stance, raised his head a little and found himself face to face with Bernie Gallagher.
Gallagher was Matthews' teammate at Penn just a year earlier, in 1942. Now they were lined up opposite one another on Franklin Field, Matthews in red and blue, Gallagher in orange and black.
It was Sept. 25, 1943, and on that day the Red Army recaptured Poltava in the Ukraine and Mussolini reestablished a fascist government in Italy.
Back at Penn, away from the fighting theaters of World War II, it was the first game of the football season, Gallagher's Princeton at Matthews' Penn. It should have been a clash of rivals, a not-so-friendly, not-so-bloodless contest, a virtual war on the gridiron.
It wasn't.
"I had to block Bernie out," recalled Matthews, 58 years later. "But he was making me laugh."
Laughter and joking on the field? This was a Penn-Princeton football game, right?
Nominally, yes. Realistically, no. The war saw to that.
Of the 75 non-seniors on Penn's football team in 1942, the only ones still around at the start of fall practice in 1943 were Joe Kane, exempt because he was a chemical engineer; Bob Odell, who was awaiting his call for aviation duty in the Navy; Walt Bubien and John Makar, who were in the V-12 program (Officer Candidate School preparation on college campuses); and Ray Stengel, who was deferred to 4-F (unfit for military service) because he had perforated ear drums.
The grand Penn returnee total was five. Meanwhile, four Princeton players in that 1943 opener, including marine V-12 Gallagher, had been at Penn a year earlier.
The Pennsylvania Gazette called that ratio "something that made many old grads of both institutions gasp."
But such was life at that time, Matthews recalled, and sure it made a difference, "but we still put 70,000 in the stands."
In reality, Penn averaged 45,000 fans for its eight games in 1943, but those fans were not all the same sorts of fans who frequented Franklin Field two or three years prior. The local elite still made their weekly Saturday pilgrimage -- "If you weren't at the game, don't go around to your country club because you won't be accepted," former Sports Information Director Bob Paul said -- but the primary undergraduate cheering section was now the Naval Flight Unit.
And the players, according to an Edwin Pollock article in Franklin Field Illustrated, were "freshmen under 18 years of age and physical rejects."
In fact, the breakdown of football candidates at the start of the 1943 season was as follows: 16 V-12 men, 10 from the V-5 program (specialized and technical training on college campuses), six from Naval ROTC, one from Army ROTC, six 17-year-olds, one 16-year-old and eight civilians.
Things were so disjointed that Penn football coach George Munger admitted he "asked every student in the University who ever played football or who would ever like to play football" to try out for the team.
In many ways, it might be more accurate to say a team of Navy men that played its home games at Franklin Field went 6-2-1 in 1943, and not the Penn Quakers.
But most still didn't feel that way.
"Penn was still Penn," said Bernie Lemonick, who went into the service in 1946 and played football at Penn from 1948-1950.
Nearly 60 years later, America is involved in another military conflict. But as of now it's not quite war, and the repercussions, while certainly not miniscule, are nowhere near those of World War II -- at least not on the Penn campus.
Anthrax scares and other assorted terrorist-related concerns pepper this West Philadelphia university today, but Penn remains fundamentally unchanged.
Not so during World War II, when the University basically became a military training base.
That was certainly evident academically. A three-term school year was established in 1943 to allow students to complete their degrees in less than three years, thereby making them available sooner to serve in the war.
Meanwhile, Liberal Arts-type classes were dropped and science and engineering classes were added. German and Japanese language courses were expanded and courses like "Camouflage" were introduced.
It was difficult to see the University as an isolated haven for academics anymore. In 1943, at the height of the war, Penn's 5,000-person campus included 3,500 people in the military. And those 1,500 other students mostly included 16- and 17-year-old freshmen, too young to serve in the military.
Everything else changed, too.
Traditional Penn buildings were transformed into military buildings, as Houston Hall's dining space was turned over to cadets, while 26 fraternity houses were used as army dormitories.
Most activities and clubs, Mask and Wig excepted, were suspended or drastically reduced. The Glee Club, in existence for 79 years and through World War I, disbanded temporarily in 1943. Penn's yearbook, The Record, didn't publish in 1944 and 1945. And The Daily Pennsylvanian, founded in 1885, became weekly starting in the fall of 1944 and changed its name to The Pennsylvania Bulletin for the time being.
But people needed some form of entertainment, and that's where football fit in.
Back in 1941, post-Operation Barbarossa -- the German invasion of Russia -- but pre-Pearl Harbor, attendance was on the rise at college football games.
"[The public] wants to get its mind off the war," Eastern Intercollegiate Football Association Commissioner Asa Bushnell said at the time.
And even after Dec. 7, that sort of sentiment remained most everywhere -- and certainly at Penn.
It may be difficult to fathom today, but the Quakers regularly led the nation in attendance during the World War II era, averaging more fans per game in 1942 (53,000) than they drew in five home games last year combined (50,068).
Attendance dropped ever-so-slightly at Penn in 1943 and 1944 -- to 45,000 fans per game -- but interest certainly didn't.
"Soldiers, sailors and marines returning from distant points ask first the scores of college football games," said Joseph Labrum, Penn's Athletic Communications director during World War II.
Football may have functioned as an escape for some, but it was still virtually impossible to divorce the sport from the war.
Tickets at Franklin Field in 1943 all featured aggressive war images -- tanks, jeeps, boats, planes, all of which were firing weapons -- while the popular Yellow Cab Company taxi service suspended game-day services because it was "so busy handling the essential transport of this Arsenal City."
Franklin Field, meanwhile, was not merely an athletic facility during the war years. For eight days in June of 1942, the stadium hosted a war show to benefit the Army Emergency Relief -- a show that drew 300,000 spectators. Instead of football players on the turf, there were jeeps, 30-ton tanks and flame-throwers. Needless to say, the field was in pretty bad condition by the end of those eight days, although it was readied by the start of football season.
The games themselves were also dictated by military matters. Penn opened its season in 1942 with an exhibition against the Georgia Naval Aviation Cadets out of convenience, and the Penn-Army contest that year was moved from West Point to Franklin Field because the Cadets' field was being used for military drills.
Players, too, were jostled and dictated by the war.
When the 1942 season ended, 14 of Penn's 15 seniors were awaiting calls to the military. The lone exception was Joe Laws, whom Labrum said "would join any service and has tried them all" but was rejected each time because he was missing "a number of fingers on one of his hands."
Thus began the fluidity of college football rosters during the war years, a fluidity caused directly by military matters. Players who were drafted or enlisted, if they didn't quit football altogether, would often move to a different campus to train, meaning they'd be playing for a different university. Such was the case for Gallagher, and such was the case for Cleo Calcagni.
Calcagni was elected as one of Penn's captains for the 1943 season, but he had to transfer to Cornell because he was a V-12 marine and the Penn campus didn't harbor marines.
As a result of this forced fluidity, nothing became sacred, not even the traditional bans on freshmen in athletics in the schools that later formed the Ivy League.
Out of necessity, seven soon-to-be-Ivy schools scrapped that ban, temporarily, in 1942. Penn followed suit in 1943, a move that eventually led to the Quakers' all-frosh, four-man backfield in 1944.
One of those freshmen, Anthony "Skippy" Minisi, transferred to Annapolis for military reasons the next year and helped Navy defeat Penn by catching a touchdown in the corner of the end zone.
But Minisi was back in the red and blue in 1946, as the war had ended, and he scored three touchdowns in Penn's victory over Navy.
Fluidity -- it was everywhere in Penn football during the war.
The Quakers ostensibly began practice at 4:30 p.m. in 1943, but military obligations often prevented the majority of the team from arriving until 5:15 or later. And Munger had to end training at 5:50 for the players to make to the mess hall in time for dinner.
It was rare for Penn to practice for more than 45 minutes a day, and with military matters taking precedence, it was even rarer for the entire team to be at practice.
"You never knew who you're going to have," Paul said. "You might be shipped out to Siberia."
Fluidity abounded. But maybe the only position without fluidity was Munger's, Penn football's head coach. Helming the Quakers from 1938-53, Munger was noted for wearing his uniform on the sideline and his thick, round-rimmed glasses.
Munger would have left his coaching position in a second to enlist in the navy if not for those glasses.
"His biggest disappointment was not getting into the service because of his eyesight," said Bill Talarico, who played at Penn from 1946-48. "He told me that, as far as he's concerned, the Navy would come first."
Essentially, the Navy -- along with the Army and marines -- always came first during those war years.
Football didn't have to continue, but it did because it was useful to the military, and not just as a diversion -- it was also a training device for the services.
"Football provides the finest non-military training," Columbia coach Lou Little said in 1942.
Indeed, regular attendance at football practice was counted as physical education credit in 1943.
But football wasn't the only athletic activity at Penn that was encouraged during the war years. The University also implemented a swimming requirement in accordance with military wishes.
"Guys on the day of graduation were at the pool," Matthews recalled. "They were trying to tread water for a certain amount of time, trying to swim underwater for the length of the pool."
As for the other intercollegiate sports, only one, crew, was a war-time casualty.
Penn decided, after the 1943 spring season, that "rowing conditions on the Schuylkill River are not conducive to the proper conduct of the sport... transportation facilities are not available to and from the boathouse in Fairmount Park... [and there was a] lack of time on the part of the undergraduates to devote to the sport."
Other sports continued to compete, albeit with some minor changes. The basketball team was forced to play at the Convention Center, since the Palestra had been converted to a mess hall. Penn's wrestling team moved practices from Weightman Hall to what used to be the rowing room in Weightman's basement. The Penn swimming team had to wait each day until the military finished using Hutchinson Pool before it practiced.
But sports at Penn still continued.
"Soldiers and sailors and marines want to hear about sports," Labrum said. "Even through more than 60 of the [Office of War Information] bulletins were devoted solely to sports, the men were not satisfied."
So the Office of War Information continued to send out sports releases, but they didn't generally release the real sports news, the fact that collegiate teams became even more disheveled and diluted as the war continued.
Most football candidates were military candidates, and most military candidates were already in Europe or the Pacific by 1944.
Only five football letterman from Penn's 1943 rag-tag group were still around for spring practice in April of 1944, and only one, lineman Walter Stickel, was still at Penn and in the starting lineup for the 1944 season opener.
But the Quakers survived that season and even had a winning record of 5-3.
Germany surrendered in May, 1945, and Japan in August. Football season started in September, and things started to return to normal.
Former Penn players, like 1942 freshmen halfbacks Bob Evans and Don Schneider, were back from the war and back on the football team.
Princeton, which had a year of "informal football" in 1944, returned to a full slate of games.
And Yellow Cab Company was back in the business of providing service to and from football games at Franklin Field.
By 1946, a full return to normalcy had nearly been achieved. Enrollment at the University was back to pre-World War II levels, and even though more than half of Penn's football team was comprised of war veterans, you wouldn't know it by listening to them.
"We talked very little of World War II, even though everybody had been in it, had some part in it," Talarico said.
War was over, and everything had changed.
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