Mel Bashore

Mel:   Would you tell me your memories of the first time you started playing football as a kid.

 

Joe:    Are you talking about tackle football or playing with a football?

 

Mel:    Just playing in the neighborhood or with kids around the block.

 

Joe:     Ever since I was big enough to kick a ball or play, it was a football.

 

Mel:     Was that in Texas?

 

Joe:     Yes. I was born and raised right here in Denton.

 

Mel:     Did you have a store-bought football?

 

Joe:     Oh, no. I didn’t have a store-bought football. Shoot. I don’t know where they came from. I can’t remember that far. We didn’t have money to buy one. I grew up in a family of ten. There were ten children. We lived on a farm right outside of Denton. That’s where I was born. That’s where I was raised and went to school.

 

Mel:     You say you grew up on a farm. Were there kids nearby?

 

Joe: Oh, yeah. It was right on the edge of town. There was always kids around to play with. Of course, I was from a family of ten. There was six boys. We had a pretty good group going there.

 

Mel:     Did you play in school, too? Elementary or junior high?

 

Joe:     Well, I played football, but not tackle football. I didn’t play tackle football then until I got to high school.

 

Mel:     Did you go out for the high school team?

 

Joe:     I went out for the high school team and we had a pretty good team.

 

Mel:     Well, football is big in Texas, isn’t it?

 

Joe:     Yeah, it is. You can’t believe the programs they have going down here. Then, but more I’m thinking of is now. I went to high school here in Denton. We were in the same league with Highland Park High School in Dallas. We had a real good team and Highland Park tied for the state championships. They were led by Bobby Layne and Doak Walker. So all during high school, they were our competition. They tied Waco for the state championship my senior year. They tied them 7-7 and they beat us 26-20. It was just one team went into the playoffs back then. So we didn’t make it.

 

Mel:     Did you make the high school team as a freshman?

 

Joe:     At that time, freshmen weren’t eligible. I made it as a sophomore. The sophomore year was the first year in high school. We had three grades in high school, ten, eleven, and twelve. And ninth grade was in junior high.

 

Mel:     Were you playing end in high school?

 

Joe:     Yes. I played end all the time. One of my best friends was a quarterback and he was quite talented. So he threw the ball and I ran and caught it. He passed away just about a year ago today.

 

Mel:     What kind of helmet did you wear in high school?

 

Joe:     In high school, we wore a leather helmet. Do you want me to tell you a funny story about helmets?

 

Mel:     I’d love to hear it.

 

Joe:     There wasn’t any such thing as plastic before World War II. I don’t know whether you remember that or not.

 

Mel:     I’m 61 so I don’t.

 

Joe:     Well, there wasn’t any such thing as plastic before World War II. It was developed during the war. So there were no plastic helmets, no plastic shoulder pads. All shoulder pads and so forth were made out of fiber and leather. When I was with the Bears, the plastic helmet came out, the suspension helmet, but the NFL didn’t adopt it. In 1948, the universities used the plastic helmet, but the professionals hadn’t started using it yet. We didn’t have suspension helmets until the plastic helmet came out. So Halas came up with Wilson Sporting Goods and he had a sporting goods store back in those days. That’s how he really made his living before football got going that well. He had a sporting goods store and they adopted a hard rubberized helmet. It looked exactly like plastic. You couldn’t hardly tell the difference in it, but it was shiny and polished and it was made out of some kind of hard rubber type deal. We were playing a game in Chicago and Ed Sprinkle —Ed’s still living by the way—Ed Sprinkle wore that helmet. And the referee saw Ed with the helmet on and he thought it was plastic. So he took the helmet and told him to change it. Well Ed come over and took the helmet off to the sidelines and was getting another helmet and Halas got mad and he threw the helmet out in the middle of the field. He said that’s a legal helmet. And the referee threw it back and Halas threw it back out there. Of course we were playing in Chicago so that went over, but they didn’t let Ed wear the helmet. The next year the NFL adopted the plastic helmet.

 

Mel:     What kind of helmet were you wearing then?

 

Joe:     We wore a leather helmet.

 

Mel:     So you were wearing the leather helmet in ‘48.

 

Joe:     Yeah. Everybody nearly was playing in a leather helmet in ‘48. Everybody in the NFL was. Maybe ‘46 they had the plastic helmet, but there weren’t any plastic helmets before that. When the plastic helmets come on is when they wore the suspension. Do you know what the suspension helmet is?

 

Mel:     No. Why don’t you tell me.

 

Joe:     Well, it’s a helmet liner, it doesn’t fit flat against your face. There’s air between your helmet. You’ve got an apparatus inside of it that fits your head and then that plastic is wrapped around it. Kind of like the helmet liner that in the army wore. Before that the helmets fit just flat against your face. Then when the plastic come on there was air suspension between them.

 

Mel:     I can picture it. We jumped ahead here. We left out your college play.

 

Joe:      We’re going back to high school, huh?

 

Mel:     Back to high school. I like to get the whole picture.

 

Joe:     OK. In high school, of course we had a pretty good team. We didn’t win the district because we were in the same league as Highland Park. They had Bobby Lane and Doak Walker. One was a Heisman Trophy winner and both of ‘em All Americans. Both of ‘em great football players and great people. I was later a teammate with Bobby Layne later on with the Bears for awhile.

 

Mel:     Did you get a scholarship offer after high school?

 

Joe:     Yes. I was eighteen in March of 1942. The war started in December of 1941. I was eighteen in 1942. When the war started in December, the draft age was twenty-one. When Roosevelt declared war, he lowered the draft age, he recommended to Congress that they lower the draft age from twenty-one to eighteen. So when I was eighteen in March, I had to go down and register for the draft as did all eighteen year olds. When I got out of high school, I had a chance to go to college. SMU had real good sports at that time. They offered me a scholarship and Texas offered me a scholarship. So I didn’t do anything. Summer came along and I was waiting. I registered for the draft and I got a deferment to finish high school. I was eighteen in March. They automatically gave you a deferment until you got out of high school. I had a deferment and all during the summer, I thought I was going straight into the army. All during the summer I didn’t get drafted. So then when September came, I went down to Texas. I played down there for about four games. We played the first four games and then I got drafted and went into the service. Then when I got out of the service, I was in the Army, was drafted into the Army, in the infantry. After I got out of basic training was assigned with the 25th Infantry Division. We went into Luzon Island in the Philippines. There were three divisions that landed in Lingayen Gulf. We were in the 25th and the 32nd and the Fifth Cavalry. The 25th went to the mountains, the Fifth Cavalry went to Manila, and the 32nd went inland into — I can’t think of that big city that they went towards. But anyhow we went north up into the mountain route. Then when we got out, the war ended. That was in January 1945. The war ended in August and then we went to Japan. They told us that when we were going over to Japan that we were going to be all these sports teams and all this, that, and the other. We got over in Japan and I went out to the football team and worked out. They had a football team. It was out on an air base out there. All the buildings were gone so we lived in tents. I went out and made the team. About the first, second, or third weekend, I went into town on a pass. The basketball team was working out and man, they were living in a gymnasium! They were staying where the military police were. I looked at the basketball team and I thought, shoot, I can make that basketball team! They’re having twice as much fun as we are! So I talked to the coach and went out for basketball and made the basketball team. I didn’t stay with the football any more. I played basketball all the time I was over there.

 

Mel:     You weren’t on one of those service football teams then?

 

Joe:     I was on a service football team, but I didn’t stay only long enough to play in any games. We were just starting. We didn’t have very good training facilities. We didn’t have very good living conditions. They were a lot better than what we had in the Philippines because we lived in a foxhole over there. The guys in basketball had a great set up. So I went out for basketball and played basketball and went all over Japan playing basketball. We had a guy on our basketball team named D. C. Wilcutt. He later was an All American at St. Louis University when St. Louis had the great teams after the war. His name was D. C. and they nicknamed him Direct Current. But he could play. Then I came back to the states. They had passed a rule in the NCAA that if you were in the military and had gone to school, you could go anywhere you wanted to. So many universities started recruiting athletes who were coming out, recruiting them again. UCLA got after me quite heavily. That year they played on January 1st of ‘47, they played in the Rose Bowl. I’d gotten out of the service in September just before then [in 1946]. They invited me to the Rose Bowl to see UCLA play Illinois. I got my ticket stub. I kept it as a souvenir. I was looking at it last week. You got in the Rose Bowl that year, a ticket cost six bucks.

 

Mel:     What came of that then?

 

Joe:     Well, I didn’t go. I came back and I went to North Texas which is in my home town. I’d been traveling a lot. I didn’t go back down to Texas even though they wanted me. I came back and enrolled in North Texas. I played one year at North Texas. The 1947 football season at North Texas. Now my graduating class had graduated. So while I was here, I lettered in football and basketball. At the end of that year the Chicago Bears got after me and I signed with the Bears. I only played college one year after I came back. I signed with the Bears and then I came back in the off season and finished my degree.

 

Mel:     So you signed with the Bears to play in the ‘48 season. Was it a contract that you signed?

 

Joe:     Yep.

 

Mel:     Was it kind of a make good contract?

 

Joe:     Well, all of them were at that time. They was before the Player’s Association. You had to make good. They owned you. They could do with you what they wanted to.

 

Mel:     So you had to make the team?

 

Joe:     Had to make the team.

 

Mel:     You had a contract, but there was no guarantee.

 

Joe:     No. In the contract it said you had to fulfill the position and skills of a professional football player. And evidently, if they said you wasn’t good enough then you, that’s the clause they used to get you out.

 

Mel:     Where was the camp that you went to?

 

Joe:     We were trained at that time in Rensselaer, Indiana at St. Joseph’s College. It was a little college right outside of Rensselaer, which is about a hundred miles into Indiana from Chicago. I don’t think it’s on a main freeway. We didn’t have any main freeways then. It was about eighty to a hundred miles out of Chicago. It was a little Catholic college. It’s still there. We stayed in their athletic dormitories. They had a farm there. They milked cows and raised their own beef. They fed us and we trained there. It was a good training camp for that period of time.

 

Mel:     Did you feel you had a chance to make the team when you went there?

 

Joe:     Well, the Bears had real good football at that time. The rules have changed so much that it’s hard to believe. In 1948 there were thirty-two players on a team. And the Bears had an established team. You didn’t have just offense and defense. They didn’t have multiple substitutions. If substituted over three players, you had to call a time out. So you had to play both ways. And you only had thirty-two players. The Bears had an offensive end and a defensive end and then a guy that could play both ways [?] substitute with both offense and defense and that’s what I did. We had Ken Kavanaugh who was the offensive end from LSU and H. Allen Smith was the defensive end from Ole Miss and I was a substitute for them. I substituted for Kavanaugh on offense and H. Allen on defense. We had thirty-two players and the next year they got real lenient and they upped it one to thirty-three. But the Bears at that time kept three centers. If you played offense, you had to have a defensive position also. The Bears had three centers which were normally linebackers. You played at center on offense and linebacker on defense. Then we had eleven guards and tackles. We had six ends and three quarterbacks, three fullbacks. Anyhow it totaled up to thirty-three guys. Our left guards were linebackers and our right guards were down linemen on defense. So if you played left guard, you were kind of smaller and you could be a linebacker and if you were right guard you were a little bit heavier and you were a down lineman.

 

Mel:     Was there any worry that you wouldn’t make the team?

 

Joe:     Yes. I kind of felt like I would. They brought in three ends. They needed one end badly. They brought in Max Bumgardner from Texas who was a good friend. Max was an All American offensive end. He was mostly offense. They brought in Bruno Opella, a big defensive end from Notre Dame, who was really thought of, and then me. Right off the bat they traded Max Bumgardner to Detroit. Detroit needed an end so they traded him to Detroit. A little bit later they cut Bruno. So I was able to pick up that end spot. But I was worried about it. Yeah, you worried about it. There was a lot of pressure, but I kind of felt like I could make it.

 

Mel:     After you made it, then you had an exhibition season?

 

Joe:     We played an exhibition game. Of course they kept all the players. There’s a time period of when they had to let them go. By a certain date you had to cut down to so many. The Bears never did bring in a lot of football players like they do today. Of course now they’ve got fifty some odd players on a team. That’s nearly twice as many as they had when we played. When we played there were twelve teams in the NFL and there was thirty-two, thirty-three players on a team. So there weren’t that many football players.

 

Mel:     It was the best of the best. So they kept a lot of guys during the exhibition.

 

Joe:     There were some that they let go that they knew, they could tell right off the bat they wasn’t. But they wanted to see them all and give them a good opportunity. They had a rule by one certain date you had to cut your team down to X number. That allowed other teams to pick up a player that you may cut down. And then by a week or so before game time, you had to have it down to team level.

 

Mel:     So then the season started.

 

Joe:     The season started.

 

Mel:     And you were on the team.

 

Joe:     He called the team together the week before at a team meeting and said, “This is the Chicago Bears of 1948” and so forth. Which was a good feeling. Our opening game was up in Green Bay and Green Bay and Chicago are bitter enemies. That’s like UCLA and USC. We went up and played them. Also what people don’t realize today maybe is that [Clark] Shaughnessy put in the T-formation with Stanford. He had Frankie Albert and Norm Standlee, a big fullback. He had a great team. But he put in the T-formation and before that no one played the T. It was all single wing, double wing. Then the Bears put in the T-formation. They hired Shaughnessy and the Bears put in the T-formation with the modern man in motion where they run a guy in motion. The Bears were the first pro team to really go to it. They got Sid Luckman out of Columbia to come in and run the T. They didn’t get him out of Columbia to come and run the T. He was a good football player and he was with the Bears before, but they made him into a T-formation quarterback. He became an expert and he was an expert. So then the Bears were nearly unbeatable during the 40s.

 

Mel:     Did you play in that first starting game against Green Bay?

 

Joe:     Oh, yeah. Everybody played. There was only thirty-three players so you had a role to play. Oh, yeah. Everybody played. In fact I was nearly on all the special teams. Kick offs, kick off returns, punts, punt returns. Smith, the tight end, blocked on extra points and field goals. But I played a whole lot.

 

Mel:     Now that first game was up in Green Bay.

 

Joe:     Up in Green Bay. It was supposed to be kind of a nip and tuck ball game. We went up there and clobbered ‘em. Beat ‘em 48-7. What’s kind of interesting about that is that we put in a direct snap. The center would center the ball back to a right halfback who was in a T-formation and he would run around the end. The halfback would go in motion and just as he passed the center where the center could snap the ball by him, he would center to that right halfback and that motion in motion at that time would block the view of the defensive end. He’d be right between he and the right halfback. Does that make sense?

 

Mel:     Yes. I’m picturing it.

 

Joe:     He’d center it to him. We beat them 48-7 in Green Bay and then later in the season, we beat ‘em 7-6 in Chicago. Of all things, they missed the extra point. That’s how nip and tuck Green Bay and the Bears were. Halas hated the Packers. Man, if you messed up in practice or did something wrong before that Packer game, he was all over you.

 

Mel:     Did you have a special coach for the ends?

 

Joe:     George was the head coach. George Wilson was our end coach. George Wilson was a player who had just retired a couple of years earlier with the Bears. A great coach. He went to Detroit later on as head coach. George Wilson was our end coach. Halas was the head coach. Luke Johnsos, an ex-Bear player, was the offensive coach. Hunk Anderson was the defensive coach. Paddy Driscoll was the backfield coach. An Italian guy, I can’t think of his name, he later went to Green Bay as head coach, was our quarterback coach. Gene Ronzani. He was our quarterback coach. That was about all we had.

 

Mel:     That’s quite a lineup there among the coaches.

 

Joe:     Let me talk a little bit about history. Hunk Anderson was Knute Rockne’s fine coach at Notre Dame. And when Rockne was killed in a plane crash, Hunk Anderson took over as head coach at Notre Dame. No one could replace Rockne so they fired him after a couple of years and the Bears hired him. He was our line coach. Another thing. When we went out to play the Rams, in that game the Coliseum had not been remodeled much. The dressing rooms in the Coliseum were little small two-man cubicles. So you and your teammate dressed in one about the size of a small bathroom. It had a couple of lockers in it and a couple stools and a shower. While we were dressing, Jim Thorpe came in and talked with everyone. He just come into your little cubicle, stuck his head in there and introduced himself, and said hello. He was up in age a little bit, but still got around real well at that time. That was kind of interesting. Jumping Joe Savoldi, who was a great running back for Notre Dame back then, we played a game up in Wisconsin, and he carried the chain. I talked to him before the game a little bit. When we played the Rams at that game in Los Angeles, at that time, everyone traveled by train. When we went out to Los Angeles to play, normally Mondays is an off workout day. You don’t work out on Mondays. You go for treatment, training. If you want to go up and jog around and exercise a little bit, you can, but no formal workout. But on Monday before we played the Rams, we worked out on Monday. Brought our clothes with us and went straight to the train station. We got on the train and drove for twenty-four hours and got out to Los Angeles. We got out there on Wednesday and worked out Wednesday night and Thursday and Friday and played the game and then came back on the train. We had won four or five games in a row before we came out to that game. Our two offensive ends were Ken Kavanaugh and Jim Keane. The Rams had a defensive halfback named Tom Keane. It was Jim’s little brother. So we played them and we thought Kavanaugh could beat them on the first play of the game. So we had it set up where Fears would cover Kavanaugh. Sure enough, we got a touchdown pass on the first play of the game. He went about seventy-five yards for a touchdown on the first play of the game. But I thought, man, this is kind of cruel. Here we are playing against one of our teammate’s brothers, but it worked and we were successful with it. On the train coming back, it’s kind of interesting. Halas told us, we’d won four or five games in a row, and he told us that if we beat the Rams — the Rams had an up and coming young team. He told us if we beat the Rams, he’d give us a club car on the way back. When we traveled, we had two sleeper cars. The players played on two sleeper cars and the coaches had a bedroom car up in front of us. He told us he’d give us a club car if we beat the Rams. We beat the Rams and we got a club car. Well on the train coming back we heard that Mae West was traveling from Hollywood to New York to be in the show play of Diamond Lil. So we heard she was on the train up there. All the rookies had to draw straws to see who was going to invite her back to our club car. So all the rookies drew straws and I and J. R. Boone drew the short straws and we had to go up and get her. She had a bedroom. We wrapped on the door and one of her agents came to the door and we told them who we were and we had the back car, the club car, and we’d sure love for her to come back and visit with her if she would like to. So the guy went in and talked to her and sure enough, she said she would. She came down to our club car and rode with us for awhile and chatted. She told us that she had just had a fire at her home in Hollywood. She had a picture of her in the nude over the fireplace. The picture was damaged from smoke. She couldn’t make a settlement with the insurance company, so she had a court case over it. During the trial, they put her up on the witness stand. She said, “I got up on the witness stand.” She said, “When I did, why I crossed my legs and pulled my skirt up a little higher than the judge liked.” He said, “Now you listen here, Mae West. We’re not going to have any more of that. Any more acts like that and I’ll get you for contempt of court.” She said, “The jury immediately recessed and come back and sentenced the judge to sixty days.”

 

Mel: That’s a great story!  [Continue reading the rest of his interview in Part 2]