The Grayback Boys

In the 1940s all Oregon high school principals were ex-coaches. Simple reason: academic teachers did their post-grad college studies in their academic disciplines while coaches did theirs in administration.  School boards hired administrators to run the schools.

Frank Thomas was Principal of Grants Pass High School when I was a student there in the late '40s and he had a belief that the way to assure getting voters to approve school budgets was to have winning athletic teams.  In my freshman, sophomore and junior years our football teams were not winners. Scores against traditional rivals Medford and Klamath Falls would be like 72-0 and 56-0. The final humiliation came my junior year when we lost to Roseburg for the first time in 30 years.

So Frank Thomas hired the Roseburg coach, Mel Ingram, a full-blooded Native American graduate of Gonzaga University where he had been an all-star letterman in three sports.  Coach Ingram was not soft-spoken and he detested losing.

His first move was to gather together prominent leaders of the business community and pick their pockets for some serious dollars.  He then took volunteer work crews to the Grayback campground in the Siskiyou mountains that had been constructed by Franklin Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) in the 1930s.  The CCC barracks were swept clean and filled with cots.  Refrigeration was brought into the kitchen of the mess tent and stocked with food. The playground became a football practice field and the beaten-down Grants Pass High School football players were rounded up, put on a bus and shipped off for two weeks of boot camp hell.

Reveille was at 6:00 AM for a turnout to calisthenics led by a coach (coaches of all the sports were in camp) then a fallout to breakfast. And what a breakfast! The full Monty.  Bacon, eggs, fried potatoes pancakes, milk, OJ.  Most of us had never seen such a display of food. And every meal was like that.

After breakfast came chalk talk with open playbooks and coaches explaining the new system (T-formation). Mel Ingram officiated college football games for the Pacific Coast Conference on Saturdays and he brought back innovations he saw there in both offense and defense to incorporate into his own schemes. At 10:00 we would put on pads and scrimmage until noon. The first couple of days were fairly light drills aimed at getting everybody into shape but then things got serious.

After lunch it was more chalk talk until 3:00 when we would suit up again (slimy wet pads from the morning sweat) and get back to full speed hitting.  Twelve days of that.  Not everyone made it through to the end.  One night a car might go down the mountain taking a drop-out to Grants Pass and in the morning there would be an empty cot in the bunk house.  My bunk mate, Shifty-hips Pollock, was a running back who dazzled the creatures, particularly the turtles, who watched our drills from the surrounding forest (his time for the mile today at his home in Bend, Oregon is just under forty-five minutes).

The team Mel Ingram led off the mountain went into the season of 1947 with no fear of any opponent. A loss to Marshfield (Coos Bay) killed a chance to go on to the state playoffs.  However, the next year the Grants Pass Caveman went all the way to win the state championship, starting long years of winning seasons. Today's football Cavemen play their home games on Mel Ingram field.

And Frank Thomas kept passing his school budgets, which led to construction of a spectacular college-like campus for the high school.