The Willamette University Football Team, Part 2

When the U.S. Engineers took over Punahou School, the National Guard took over the security. However, the Guard was overtaxed, and the stranded football players from the Shrine Bowl helped out.

Shirley Hadley, whose father helped train the boys recalls, "The guard duty was interesting because the football team didn't know much about guns. They were lucky that they didn't shoot each other."

A Willamette player remembers, I"d never even seen a rifle before. They gave us a World War I Springfield rifle with a bayonet on it. We would patrol the school and say ‘Halt, who goes there" and ‘Stand and be recognized".

Shirley Hadley said, "I worked at Tripler [Army] hospital helping the injured children eat and I read to them until their family located them. Supposedly the kids were on their way to Sunday school and were hit by stray shrapnel," she said.

The teams finally left Hawaii on December 19 aboard the SS President Coolidge. The Coolidge was a luxury oceanliner that had arrived in Hawaii with evacuees from the Philippines. As soon as it got to port, it was commandeered to transport gravely wounded servicemen, most of whom were badly burned or amputees back to the mainland.

Willamette coach, Roy ‘Spec" Keene and Douglas McKay (McKay was a state senator from Salem, who would later become governor of Oregon and a member of President Eisenhower's cabinet.)persuaded the ship's captain to take the team and their fans back to the mainland in exchange for assisting with the wounded.

There were approximately 1,200 people on board the ship that was designed to carry 800, and the normal four-day trip took seven days because of the zigzagging route required to avoid Japanese submarines. On Christmas Day the ship landed in San Francisco.

Hadley recalled, "We helped with the wounded that were in the bowels of the ship. They were very badly injured — one was a baseball player, he was wondering how he would pitch with only one arm. The ship was overloaded. . . We had destroyer escorts from Hawaii and switched halfway with destroyers from San Francisco.

"We stayed in steerage because that was all that was available. We heard that there were ships being torpedoed and that didn't make you feel very good."


Jacobson said, "As we got closer to San Francisco we could get radio, and we heard of ships being sunk by the Japanese subs. On that last night into port, I don't think any of us slept."

Almost the entire team enlisted in the service. Bill Reader (identified in caption as Bill Reder) was the only team member killed in action during WWII.

The team was inducted into the Willamette University Athletic Hall of Fame on Sept. 13, 1997. Also inducted that year were Wayne and Shirley Hadley, longtime supporters of Willamette athletics who were with the football squad in Hawaii.


PHOTO: S.S. Coolidge, October 1942, sunk in Vanuatu

NOTE: Tom Wilson, a contributing writer to D3football.com, is the publisher of Rowanfootball.com. Contributing: Cliff Voliva.