Today's Tidbit... All Aboard for 1941 Minnesota @ Washington
While I enjoy trying to understand the history of football rules, equipment, and the nature of play, gaining an understanding of fan behavior in years gone by is every bit as fun. I've published previous stories about team travel and packages for fans traveling to away games, but the 1930 Loyola of Chicago @ St. Louis and 1957 Army-Navy stories covered weekenders or day trips. Today's Tidbit covers a long-distance itinerary for fans riding the rails to Minnesota's season-opening game at Washington in 1941.
The Gophers have made little noise in the last sixty years, last winning a Big Ten championship in 1967. But the Gophers were golden during a period of dominance under Bernie Bierman from the mid-1930s to the early 1940s. Few programs have matched their performance the began when Bierman arrived in the Twin Cities in 1932 following his tenure at Tulane, which included a 1932 Rose Bowl appearance. He quickly made mountains out of gopher holes, as Minnesota became national champs in:
1934 (shared)
1935 (shared)
1936 (consensus)
1940 (consensus)
1941 (consensus)
Outside the national championship years, they were Big Ten champs in 1933, 1937, and 1938, though there was that 1939 season when the Gophers went 3-4-1. They bounced back with the 1940 national championship and looked forward to the 1941 season, when they played five Big Ten games, had a non-conference battle at Washington, and played home games with Pitt and Nebraska.
Their undefeated 1940 season included a 19-14 win over Washington at home, so Minnesota returned the favor with a visit to Seattle. To that point, Minnesota had only traveled west of the Rockies twice. They played at Stanford in 1931 and had a 1936 contest at Washington. So, heading to Seattle remained heady stuff, even as the returning national champions and the railroads wanted to accommodate Gopher fans' desire to see the Northwest.
To satisfy the needs of Gopher fans, the Milwaukee Road and the Great Northern Railway developed a joint itinerary in which Gopher fans took the Milwaukee Road on the outbound and the Great Northern Railway on the return.
It was a 48-hour trip in either direction, leaving Wednesday morning for a Friday morning arrival in Seattle while heading back the night of the game and getting home on Monday night. The train cars had all the desired appointments, ranging from De Luxe coaches to sleeping and dining cars, as well as club and lounge cars, and the observation car to enjoy while traversing the Rockies.
The trip cost less than 2 cents per mile, and Seattle hotel rooms were available for $1.50 and up per night, so one might have expected a large contingent, but it turns out that gophers seldom travel in packs. In fact, the English language lacks a word, like pack or herd, to describe a group of gophers. So, with the game scheduled for Saturday, September 27, 41 team members and 100 fans gathered at the train station that Wednesday morning for their trip west.
Missing from the group at the train station was Dick Cullum, the beat writer for the Minneapolis Times. Flying to games was relatively new then. (The Green Bay Packers were the first NFL team to fly to a game in 1940.) Cullum planned to fly to Seattle, report on the game, and double back to catch the Joe Louis fight in New York on Monday night, pulling a Herbstreit 28 years before Kirk was born.
It's likely that everyone enjoyed the trips there and back. The train stopped on the way in Miles City, Montana, to give the Gopher team an opportunity to stretch their legs, run through plays, and enjoy a luncheon. Bierman announced his starting lineup for the game at the luncheon, opting for his defensive specialists. Before two-platoon football came along, coaches assessed each opponent and chose to start their best offensive players, their best defensive players, or a combination of the two. Bierman went with his best defensive lineup for Washington, assuming his team could score enough to win by limiting the Huskies' offense.
The game attracted a record-setting 43,000 fans, including the crew of the HMS Warspite, a British battleship torpedoed off Crete that was under repair at Bremerton Navy Yard. Another 7,000 Yankee sailors and soldiers joined the throng that saw a defensive battle. Minnesota held Washington to five first downs and 85 yards of offense, while Minnesota's All-American halfback Bruce Smith scored both Gopher touchdowns in their 14-6 win.
The game proved to be the start of another national championship season for the Gophers, as they went undefeated again, and Bruce Smith won the Heisman Trophy.
Bernie Bierman, who had been a Marine Corps reserve officer since WWI, coached the Iowa Pre-Flight team in 1942 and had other athletic officer assignments during WWII. He coached Minnesota for six seasons after the war but did not enjoy the same success as before the war. Bruce Smith became a Marine Corps fighter pilot before playing in the NFL from 1945 to 1948.
The long train ride to and from Seattle marked the end of an era as commercial aviation was spurred on by the technological advances in aviation and the large number of trained pilots that resulted from WWII. Post-war Gopher fans were more likely to fly to distant games than take the train. Plus, they’ve had less reason to travel since the team has not had sustained success since Bierman’s first tour ended. OF course, he set a high bar in his first go-around, enjoying a decade and more of coaching success that stands with the best in college football history.
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Even though the brochure said that it would be the last time the schools would meet for "some years," they picked right up again after the war, in 1947. Their most famous game was the 1961 Rose Bowl, when the Huskies upset the No. 1 Gophers 17-7.
I have a book--Minnesota Football: The Golden Years 1932-1941 by Dr. Jamie Quick (who got all his degrees there)--with an apocryphal tale about a Gophers' trip west. I'd thought it was this game, but it must have been during an earlier or later trip west. After dinner, the team visited the local whorehouse, while the hotel they should have been in burned to the ground ..