Mel Bashore

Mel:  You’re the third one I’ve interviewed who played for the Lions.  We had four here in Utah that played on the Lions in that championship year.  How did the Lions find out about you?  How did you get on with them?

 

Elmer:  Well, I guess that the Lions, I would imagine that Frank Christensen, who played at the University of Utah and Jack Johnson was a year ahead of me in college—I think they may have had some reference to why the Lions contacted me.  They contacted me and gave me a chance to play for them.  I wanted to try to have a three-game contract to go back.  It was during the Depression time and money was scarce.  So as a result of being contacted with them, I communicated with them and we did get together and I went back and tried out.  I’m sure the fact that I made the NEA first team All-American, it had some effect with regards to them giving me a contract.  But there was Frank Christensen, Jack Johnson, Dutch Clark who played with them in 1934 on the team from the intermountain country.  After I got back there, Potsy Clark was very kind to the former employees that he had coached from the intermountain country.

 

Mel:   Potsy had coached here in the area?

 

Elmer:   No.  Potsy didn’t coach in the area.  He came from Indiana.  Then he was a coach of the Detroit Lions.  He was the only coach we had.  Dutch Clark helped him out in the backfield.  Then we sort of done a lot of community coaching together.

 

Mel:   What’s community coaching?

 

Elmer:     Well, you talk about your own position.  For example, I played middle linebacker as well as center.  So you would communicate with your guards and your tackles and your ends.  Our basic play on the pass was rush.  That was our basic play.  So we knew that the ends were going to crash in the rush.  We had to keep a little wider outside.  That’s what I meant by community coaching.  We talked over quite a bit about strategy.  You played both offense and defense in those days.

 

Mel:   You said you were guaranteed a three-game contract.

 

Elmer:     Yes.

 

Mel:   You tried out, but even if they decided you weren’t going to make it you were going to get paid for three games?

 

Elmer:     Yes.  We weren’t talking a great deal of money.  They paid our expenses while we were back there and our game contract was $135 to $165 a game.  We weren’t talking an awful lot of money involved in it.  But you know it’s quite an experience to come from an intermountain country.  All my experience playing here was in the Rocky Mountain Conference.  Colorado, Denver, and Montana.  I felt like we had some real good boys on our team.  I loved the sport of football.  When you actually go back and try out, you’re trying out with other names that you’ve read in the paper who made All West Coast conference teams and All East Coast conference teams and made other All-American teams.  When you get on the field, as far as any new rookies trying out, you naturally kind of look them over and see how you’re going to fit into it and see how well they play.  Well, I wrote my dad a letter.  When I left home, he said, “I don’t expect to see you back.”  I said, “Well, I don’t expect to be back, but I’m sure the competition will be tough.”  After I’d been there a week, I wrote him and told him I wouldn’t be back.  They was, I think, nine or ten of us they recruited that came in that year that stayed with the team.  Very enjoyable experience.  I would say most, I don’t want to say lucky, because we had an outstanding team, but a very nice opportunity to be among players that we lived together as a family and as a group and then being able to be part of a world championship team in 1935.  That don’t come along every day.  It was wonderful.

 

Mel:   You say there was nine rookies that made the team.  Who were some of the veterans who might not have made it?  Were they at the tryouts, too?  How did that work?

 

Elmer:    No.  What had happened is that the old veterans that he was going to keep, other than those that got injured during camp, they had been let go to some other teams.  So he had 48 new recruits that came in.  He was going to fill some positions from that.  There was a couple of others.  Beattie Feathers came in later on in training camp.  Aldo Richins from Salt Lake came in late from another camp.  He wasn’t in the tryout.  Bill Shepherd came to us a little bit later on from another club.  Bill turned out to be a tremendous player.  We ended up when we finished with the season, we only had 22 players on the roster.  In those days, it was a 25 or 26-man roster.  Expenses were getting growing.  We traveled mostly by train.  Going to Green Bay and Chicago, Boston, and New York.  I think it was the year after that that the Redskins moved from Boston down to Washington.  In those days, Chicago had two teams.  The Cardinals and the Bears.

 

Mel:   Did you room with any of the players?

 

Elmer:    Oh, yes.  When I first went back, I wasn’t married.  I went back single.  Frank and Jack and I went back in a bus.  We went back and then we had the camp.  During that camp period, you stayed at the hotel there in Detroit.  I roomed with Big Chris, George Christensen and Regis Monahan from Ohio State.  He was an All-American from Ohio State.  We lived in a kind of a family complex back there as well as at the hotel.  Gosh, we knew all the fellow’s wives.  Dutch’s wife, Dorothy.  Jack Schellner and his wife. Ernie Caddel and his wife and Butch Morse and his wife.  It was just sort of a family affair.  Before my wife came there, we were over to dinner and back and forth.  I was in most of the places where their wives and families were there.  We just knew everybody.  It was a great place socially.  And pretty well communicated together even to this day.  There’s nine of us left.  I just got a letter the other day from Butch Morse and his wife.  There’s only nine of us.  There’s really just eight of us.  I got notice that one of the fullbacks, Knox, Dutch Knox, passed away.  It’s been a close relation.  We had two or three or four annual get-togethers. In 1985 was the last reunion.  Detroit put on a tremendous welcome.  Later on I’ll show you the book that was made up from that reunion that they sent to me.  I kid my wife.  She’s got more pictures in the book than I have.  I lost my first wife to cancer.  She went back with me when the season started a going.  She was a lovely girl and traveled with us.  We went from here back when we won the world championship.  We went down to the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood and stayed for a month and got to meet Joe E. Brown and we got to meet Bing Crosby.  We met all the celebrities.  We were helping them do some charity drive work.  Then they was talk of us making a film.  We stayed there for a month.  Then after that we went over to Hawaii and played Pop Warner’s All Stars.  Stayed there with all expenses paid for three weeks.  In fact, while we was playing Green Bay, down in Hollywood after the season’s over, I don’t quite understand what Mr. Richards who owned the Pontiac agency and the radio station back there, did this.  But he scheduled a game with Green Bay, who we were contentioned for the world’s championship.  And so, I conjecture from my own thought is the fact that Mr. Richards and the owner of Green Bay, with joshing back and forth, challenged one another for another game because being the fact that we had already won the world championship and Green Bay was the runner-up in our division and the Giants were the winners of the Eastern Division, so we played off with the Giants.  Evidently they had a conversation and they says, we’ll play a game down in California.  So we played down there.  That’s where I got my knee hurt.  That’s the first time I got my knee hurt before I went over and played with the Pop Warner All-Stars.  We won the game down there.  I think it was 14 to nothing, something like that.  But here we were, had been the championships, and had really everything to lose and nothing to gain as a result of the game.  But it helped financially.  It helped.  We’d been having a lot of fun for a month in Hollywood and met an awful lot of nice people and they sure entertained us down there.

 

Mel:   Did you expect to do all this after you’d won the championship or was it kind of a spur of moment kind of thing?

 

Elmer:    Well, there was some conversation about us making a movie.  That’s when we went down to Hollywood.  We got down to Hollywood and there was some contacts made and word come along that we were going to go over and play Pop Warner ball with the All Stars.  Well, when we got to California, down there, Mr. Richards, he was sort of an eccentric guy, he was a very nice gentleman, but he was sitting down in one of the meetings and Dutch was our captain, you know, when he said, “I tell you what I’ll do.”  He said, “I’ll leave the wives here and we’ll go over to Hawaii and play Pop Warner’s All Stars and they can stay right here in the hotel and I’ll pay all the expenses.”  Of course Dutch come and had another meeting.  Dutch’s recommendations and our recommendations were that if our wives don’t go, why there won’t be any game.  We’re not going to go.  But we’d pay for the wives in Hawaii.  Well, when it got all settled down, Mr. Richards says, “Ah, to heck with it.  You’re not going to pay for their way.  I’m going to pay for their way and we’re all going.”  So we went over there for three weeks . . . and a month in Hollywood.  That in itself was a wonderful experience.  All the time we were in California, we were doing something with some organization, some activity, or going on the stage, or seeing a show.  They were just wonderful people.

 

Mel:   Didn’t you have an off-season job and all the other players, too?  I would think a lot of them might have had jobs lined up.

 

Elmer:     I don’t recall any part of that.  Gosh.  We started going into practice in July and here it is, the first of March before we got through with the year of the championship.  Gosh, we were just home taking a couple breaths of hot air and getting ready to go back.  Because that year, what really happened after we won the championship, there was some celebrating in Detroit, and that year Detroit was known as the city of champions.  Joe Louis won the title in boxing.  They won the baseball, the Tigers did.  The Red Wings won the hockey.  And they had several Olympic individuals on the Olympic team.  That’s how they got the name of the city of champions.  So we stayed into Detroit for a while.  Then we scattered to our homes and then we got word that we was going to have a game in Denver.  So we went over in Denver and played on our way coming out.  Then they tried to get a game scheduled here in Ogden.

 

Mel:   Do you remember that one?

 

Elmer:    Potsy got a black eye as a result of that.  Then we got together after that and we met down on our way into California.

 

Mel:   Did Potsy really get a black eye?

 

Elmer:    Yes.  Potsy got a black eye.  It was at the Ben Lomond Hotel.  Somehow, I don’t know what the fuss was all about, but I guess he and the desk guy said a few words or something.  I don’t know, but Potsy got a black eye as a result of it.

 

Mel:   I read the newspaper accounts of that.  It was a controversial game that was supposed to be played here.  I guess the weather was just horrendous.

 

Elmer:    Oh, yes.  The weather was bad.  In fact, my old roommate, Floyd Rasmussen was quarterback on the local boys that they had rounded up.  Working with the sponsorship of the [?] society to get the equipment together, but anyhow.  Potsy was kind of upset and I don’t blame him because it wasn’t well enough organized here.  The fact was that he was bringing the world championship team into town as a good gesture because of myself, Jack Johnson, Frank Christensen, Dutch Clark, the intermountain boys that was here and then he thought that, Al Worden I’m sure worked with him on it, get a chance to show off some of the local all stars they had here.  It wasn’t organized and the weather was against it and therefore it just didn’t turn out as the promoters thought it would.  But the Denver game turned out well.

 

Mel:   Was that against some local talent over there, too?

 

Elmer:    Yes.  The game down here in Gilmore Stadium, down in California, it was a tough game.  That was against the Packers.  And it was revenge as far as they was concerned.  They were determined that they were going to show us that they were better.

 

Mel:   Who did you play against?  Who was your opposite number on the Packers?

 

Elmer:    As a linebacker, I was a middle linebacker, as far as scattering all through the line there, but I forget.  I just generally remember some of the players.  Don Hutson was the wide receiver that I had to cover.  Don still has a national record.  I don’t know whether it’s gotten broken recently or not.  But Don Hutson was the kind of a guy the way we played him, is you bumped him near the line of scrimmage and got him off stride.  If you could do that, the chances of his receiving was way down the line, but if you let him get away from without a bump and he’d have a freelance with his cut and speed, that’s why he was [?] good for such a long time. They was Herber and Johnny Blood and Laws.  That’s some of the opponents that I was [?].

 

Mel:   Do you remember Johnny Blood?  He was a colorful guy.

 

Elmer:    Yes.  Very colorful.

 

Mel:   Of course, I guess you didn’t have too much contact with opposing teams off the field, did you?

 

Elmer:    No.  No, no. No, no, no, no, no.  It was just a matter of playing a game with them unless you knew some of the fellows beforehand.  I didn’t and that was my first year up there.  Just studying, knowing something about their characteristics in their offense.  You’d just try to diagnose some of the peculiarities of the players to see if there was some give-away.  In other words, if you knew they had a running guard in most of the plays, you’d look to see if he had a little lean or indications where they was going to pull out, then you’d pick those kind of things up and you’d take a chance and bust through a hole when you thought he was pulling out or you’d play back a little more because they was coming straight ahead.  But as far as personal contact with the individuals, not too much.

 

Mel:   Wasn’t your championship game played in real terrible weather conditions?

 

Elmer:    No.  It wasn’t too bad.

 

Mel:   Didn’t it snow that game?

 

Elmer:    It snowed, but it wasn’t that bad.

 

Mel:   It seemed like I’ve read that there is no statistics for that game.  That’s the only NFL championship game that there is no statistics because it was so wet.

 

Elmer:    Well, it was wet, but I thought that was the year after when the snow was 70 some odd to something.  They changed shoes. . . .

 

Mel:   No.  I think that one there’s statistics, but I think it’s your game that they said it was just so wet and snowy and watery.

 

Elmer:    It was muddy.

 

Mel:   Was it snowing during the game?

 

Elmer:    I don’t remember that.  We had a good game.  We were all really geared up.  I had an injury in my right arm and it froze on me at about that angle.  I don’t know why.  They just kept treating it, but it couldn’t straighten it out.  Got it bumped.  It was a wonderful experience.

 

Mel:   Which game do you remember the most from that year?

 

Elmer:    The game I played with the Bears.  Played against Nagurski and Nagurski was, he was a fullback, and he was able to pass and actually when you was in the pros, in the college days, you have to be five yards back of scrimmage to throw a pass.  That was my experience.  In the pros, you could come right up to the line of scrimmage and pass.  Well you had to do an awful lot of adjustment because after playing several years in college ball and you see when a guy gets beyond the five yard line, you know you can go after him, you know, as a linebacker.  You can go right out there.  As a middle linebacker, why [?] inner line or whatever, it’s [fifteen interference off?] you could really get in there and ram jam.  After doing that for two or three years, having that kind of training into it, and get back there with a guy like Nagurski and he comes a charging up to the line and he’s a couple of yards back there.  Boy, you ram jam to get to ram him, you got to ram him hard.  He just stops and flips a pass.  That’s why I remember the playing with the Bears more than any other game I played.  I felt like I played a good game with them, but it really was a fact that he as a fullback was capable of passing.  He just come up here on the line, just get within a yard of the line and stop and pass it just right back of you.  So you had to work your defenses.  They never run away from us or anything.  We beat ‘em that day in Chicago. We was a day in Chicago.  I had some of those that was there.  Bill Hewitt was playing end.  And I’ll never forget, I had to take care of him and there was a few seconds left in the game and I was going to make darn sure that he didn’t catch the ball and win the game.  So he accused me of tackling him.  I really didn’t, but I did bounce him pretty hard.  He was a terrific ball player.  The Bears was always a grudge team.  I guess that’s why I remember that game.  Nagurski the fact that he was all pro tackle, all pro football fullback, world’s champion in heavyweight wrestling.  Man, how do you ever put a guy together like that, you know.  You’ve of Jim Thorpe and the other tailback that was such a great one?

 

Mel:   Red Grange?

 

Elmer:        Red Grange.  Especially because here’s a guy that you’ve got to go into it and they use him to run interference.  A heck of a lot.  Not only was he a great ball carrier, not only was he a heck of a defensive player from a tackle standpoint, they used him to run interference.  That you don’t find many of those kind of guys.  When you really analyze a football player, you look at Bronko Nagurski, and if you observe his films, when he was used as a interference man, he never left his feet.  And he was a big man for those days and he was fast for his size and he had a forearm that was kick like a mule.  If you didn’t go right on in and take his feet out from under him, whether he was running interference or whether he was carrying the ball, he would not use a body block.  He’d just forearm you and push you to the side and the ball carrier would step over the other way and he’d just go on and do the same thing to another guy.  In my experience of football, he was the greatest football player that I’ve ever been around.  Not from the fact that he was just the greatest ball carrier, the greatest fullback, but the all around ability.

 

Mel:   Did you ever have him run at you?

 

Elmer:        Oh, yes.  Oh, yes.

 

Mel:   Did you ever take a hit from him when he was carrying the ball?

 

Elmer:        Oh, yes, yes.  Oh, you just got to get in there and go at it.

 

Mel:   Were you ever able to take him down?

 

Elmer:        Oh, sure.

 

Mel:   How did you do it?

 

Elmer:        Get him low and get him quick.  Get him low and get him quick.  You got to block him right at the hole of the line.  As I say, that’s where I tried to meet him right at the line of scrimmage.  But if he stopped and passed right behind you, then you got to stop and try to block into it.  Oh, yes.  He was just like any ball carrier, you get ‘em low you got ‘em.  But if you get ‘em up high, they’re going to brush you and make four or five yards.

 

Mel:   If you were categorizing the hardest hitting player could take, who would it be?

 

Elmer:        Bronko Nagurski.  And I would say that, by far, the largest percentage of players that had personal contact with him, would give you the same results.  And I’d classify them as guards, tackles, and linebackers mostly because that’s the ones that he was working with.  He didn’t too often get out in the halfback area.

 

Mel:   He was a clean ballplayer, too, wasn’t he?

 

Elmer:        Absolutely, he was.

 

Mel:   Occasionally in the ‘50s, there’s a lot of guys they categorized as dirty ballplayers.  Was there anybody in that category back in the ‘30s?

 

Elmer:        No.  I don’t think there was any who was a dirty player intentionally or continuously in that classification.  Sure, once in a while, come up and something will happen, but not as an overall.  I object to our kind of, I don’t want to say, officiating.  I object to what’s going on in today’s football.  A fellow [Charles Martin in 1986] that picked up Jim McMahon like he did and throw him on the ground would never play football again as far as I’m concerned in the league.  We just don’t have any need for that kind of stuff.  Here’s a guy that’s spends all his life, trains all his day, gets a chance to play in the top leagues in the world, and a guy comes out and after the play is over, ram jams him down into the ground like a mushroom, and you might say, chance of ruining his career.  I’ve no use for it.  I never was penalized in all my football for unnecessary roughness, but I consider myself a vigorous player, like a contact player.  But when I see this go on—it’s not too often—but when I see it going on today just absolutely deliberately is what it is, trying to injure somebody, I just don’t understand how the league tolerates it.  I’d never let ‘em play again.  I don’t want to leave the impression that, yes, when we come in and rush the passer, we threw elbows and we hit heads.  I’m not talking about that as a matter, but after you’d thrown the ball, then that was different. But if he still had the ball in his hand, man, we went right to the ground in full bore, you know.

 

Mel:   Back then, I’ve read that the quarterback was fair game until the whistle blew.

 

Elmer:        Right.  You must remember that we didn’t have any face masks.  One of the roughest tricks that we used to do on the quarterback was if you come in to hit him, you had a high elbow.  Gosh.  He’s got no face mask on.  That’s nose, face, chins and everything else.  So he better throw that ball a yard before you get there so you’ve got time to not run into him.  That was the object of the game.  We just went slambast and high elbows and so we weren’t pussycats.  I’m not saying that, see.  So he didn’t have anything on his face like that and his face was a vulnerable spot so we high elbowed him and so we wanted him to throw that ball out a yard or two before we got there.  Then we kind of set it up.  That was our main defense in Detroit.

 

Mel:   You played center, too, on offense.

 

Elmer:        Yes.

 

Mel:   Without a face mask, playing center, did you keep all your teeth?

 

Elmer:        Yes.  I got one chip.  I’ll tell you my experience in centers and why they’re having a hard trouble nowadays finding a long ball passer.  I went to a clinic once that Dick [Romney] had up in Logan, [?] Knute Rockne had up there.  Before the T came in, they used the wing formation.  What a center had to do, I was a tailback and fullback and tackle in my sophomore year in college, so I didn’t play center until the next year because they had John Rains up, their all conference center.  But from my experience, there isn’t a great deal of fans that realize, when you play center in a single wing position, there are many things that you’ve got to do besides block your man.  If it’s going to be the play that’s going to the right and the quarterback is going to hand it off to the wing around, you got to lead him at the right.  So you lead this guy out here two or four feet to the right, but you get another player in there at the same play and he don’t start the same way and your hands aren’t the same way so you kind of have to fluff the ball to him or he’ll get it mixed up in his knees.  So if you’re going to be a line buck, you don’t get the ball to him straight over at the right hand side, you just kind of fluff it in the air so he can pick it off if he’s coming forward.  So your complications of knowing your plays, right to left, line buck spinner play, your quarterback wasn’t sitting right underneath you, you had to deliver that ball in so many different angles.  I have felt like that’s so hard for them to find a kicker.  The passer in my days was no problem for the center to pass, [?] the kicker.  Because he did all those things all the time, but now.  We used the T a little up here under Dick [Romney] in Logan.  That was passing from right under your legs to your quarterback right now.  Being a middle linebacker, I had my greatest success as a defensive man at the expense of the opponent’s center and a guard.  Of course you don’t have that nowadays.  They did when I was in college, but I would say 65 or 70% of the plays that were run against us, you could diagnose before it was run.  The guard was going to back out, if you watched for those little key things.  If he’d stick his hand up a little forward, you know he’s going to come straight ahead.  If he’d stick his hand back so he could get out, you know he was going to pull out and lead the interference.  Sixty percent of all his line plays, this guard run the interference has done that, so we pop off to the side and make the center think he’d going this way and [pooh], go right through the hole as fast as I could help him help the guard get the hell out of there.  So I’ve got write-ups in there that I made 65% of the tackles.  A lot of that was through reading the characteristics of the individuals on the line.  But nowadays you’ve got films and so they say, “Don’t do that.”  See.  Because people are watching what you’re giving away.  But I used to ask the scouts to look for certain things that I wanted them to bring back.  You don’t have much time to adjust like that in a game, see, to pick up some characteristics.

 

Mel:   So there were scouts in the pros before your games?

 

Elmer:        Yes.  Even in the college that you’re asking for scout tips.  But even in the pro game, oh, yes, we had scouts.  In the pros, we had a little more sophisticated.  My laws.  Nowadays they’ve got coaches all over hell and looking at every film.  Film on every player.  Your looking, is anybody giving the signals away.  When I look back through it, I just wonder why we didn’t have more face injuries in the days we played.  We did have a lot of fellow’s teeth trouble, you know, and stuff like that.  The face mask is a wonderful thing

 

Mel:   Was the equipment that you had protection enough?

 

Elmer:        It seemed to be.  I got my right shoulder hurt a little bit, but I done a of course lot of tackling.  In college days, as a middle linebacker, you got in.  That was your job.  You should do it.  But I got that rooted into the ground on a tackle after I tackled a guy and hurt a nerve on it.  But I felt that I didn’t have any trouble with that equipment at that time.  When we got into the pros, that darn Ernie Caddel from Stanford, he was a wingback guy, faster than heck, I went there one day and says, “What are you doing?”  He’s making him some hip pads.  And he went and got, oh gosh, he had two dozen donuts, rubber donuts, and he just sewed them together because they was lighter.  The coach was kind of concerned that we had enough protection for him, but he was such a spinner.  He wanted to fly.  Some of our actual pads were quite heavy.  I don’t know how they are nowadays.  You had two pair of shoes.  A game shoe, which our laces had to be all laundered and tied.  And then we had our practice shoes.  When I went back to see the football game at our reunion that we had in 1985, I went in the locker room there, I think they had something like fourteen pair of shoes.  They had some that they’d play on turf, on grass, in cold weather.  We had two pair [?] put new corks back on them when they was changed [?] along the field.  I had a nice experience.  We went back to the fiftieth get-together of the championship in 1985.  Miami was playing Detroit.  We stayed at the hotel.  The wife was with us and all the alumni that still [?].  Miami stayed at the same hotel.  I had met Don Shula before.  My wife wanted to meet him so I introduced him.  Don Shula, he spoke that night at the Lions’ reunion.  I kidded her about not washing her hands for a couple of days.  We went into the game and I asked my wife to take a picture while we was being introduced at halftime.  Bill Munson from Utah State quarterbacked that game and won it.  They won it.  I talked to Bill down on the field.  It was quite a thrill to see an old Utah Stater boy.  We had a wonderful day at the Silver Dome.  It was a nice experience.  I asked my wife if she got a picture of me when we was introduced.  She said, No. I thought it was so far away from where she was sitting that it didn’t show.  But she got Don Shula’s.  She went back to the dressing room.

 

Mel:   [Reads a summary of the 1935 championship game of the Lions versus Giants]

 

Elmer:        Yes.  Ace Gutowsky.  He could rare up and go.  He could have some hot hands.  And Buddy Parker.  I think Buddy later coached.

 

Mel:   Could I just run down the lineup of your team and have you give me any memories that come to mind?

 

Elmer:        Sure.

 

Mel:   Even funny instances are fun to have—off the field kind of stuff.  Steve Banas (QB).  Ernie Caddel.

 

Elmer:        Ernie Caddel was a gentleman.  His wife Nellie was a lady.  Ernie Caddel was just an outstanding individual.  Ernie, if my memory serves me right, I think for the season’s games that we had, they won’t play as many games as they do nowadays, but I think that Ernie, the statistics may show it, but he was the leading ground gainer for that particular number of games it was.  He was such a reverse spinner.  And then in a desperation when we needed to pass, he’d run that reverse and run it so well, that they had to get out and get after him or else he was going to pick up lots of yards.  Then he’d make that one play that we had which he’d run almost to the line of scrimmage and reverse back and then throw across the field at a forty-five degree angle and I’d say 90 percent of the time, there wasn’t a soul around [?].  Ernie was a gentleman in every way, shape, or form, on the field, off the field.  He was a hard worker, fast.  We called him The Antelope.

 

Mel:   Don Hutson had that name, too.

 

Elmer:        Yes.

 

Mel:   In a race, those two would have been neck to neck?

 

Elmer:        Well, I think that Ernie was probably faster.  He could run that reverse like you couldn’t see.  Good blocker, too, on offense.  Going both ways, you know.

 

Mel:   Frank Christensen.

 

Elmer:        Frank was a tough punter.  Done most of our punting.  He never carried the ball a great deal.  He was a blocking back.  Frank was a hard player.  In there all the time.  I knew Frank off the field.  He was a baseball player in the industrial league in Salt Lake.  He was just as tough in baseball as he was in football.  Frank was a respected guy by all the players.  He [?] a hundred percent, a hundred and ten percent.  Hard worker.  Always in good physical shape.

 

Mel:   George Christensen.

 

Elmer:        I just roomed with him for awhile.  George played tackle.  He was Oregon.  George was fast for his, and he led a lot of interference.  George was a smart fellow, an intelligent fellow, thinking things out.  That shows in his business world after he got out of school in the diamond bit business.  George was always thinking.  George was a tremendous bridge player.  Good sense of humor.

 

Mel:   Did you play bridge during your off times? On the train?

 

Elmer:        Yes, and go over plays and stuff like that.  George was a good bridge player.  We’d play cribbage.  I never did get too much into cribbage.  Frank was a great cribbage player.  He liked to play cribbage.

 

Mel:   Was George one of the bigger players on the team?

 

Elmer:        George was the biggest. I’d say George weighed about 245 or 250 in them days.  He was the heaviest man we had.

 

Mel:   Dutch Clark.

 

Elmer:        You’re talking about a gentleman.  You’re talking about a fellow that had the ability to uncoordinate a good defensive player.  The fact that he could change of pace.  He was a change of pace artist and cutting bursts of speed down . . . . [end of side one] Gentleman, soft-spoken.  I appreciate the fact that I had the chance to play with him.  He was just the greatest outstanding quarterback in the country.  Nothing boisterous about him.  He was quiet if he was in the room with the people.  A tremendous golfer.  From the Rocky Mountain Conference here, as I remember him.  He had the hammer, and he weighed 160 some odd pounds and he had the hammer throwing record for years.  His coordination, but to see him run and his change of pace which his thing which threw the defensive guy off and then he’d make another four, five, six, seven yards.  I thought he was the most outstanding change of pace people [?] slow, he wasn’t, top speed, but he just got the job done.