Plains Folk: Remembering Six-man Football

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Response to a recent column about six-man high school football proves that this is a chapter of Great Plains life that still stirs senses and recollections. My mailboxes filled with letters and messages from veterans of the game in North Dakota and on the plains. I'll follow up on all these in time, but some of the correspondents included stories so good I have to pass them along right now.

For instance, R. Wallace "Pop" Gotham, now living in Chetek, Wisconsin, who read the Plains Folk column in the Tioga Tribune. He was the coach for all sports at Ray High School from 1935 to 1939, and he recalls the historic first, 1936, state six-man title game.

The principal from Sykeston called him in early November and proposed they play an unofficial championship game. "We had 3-4 inches of snow at Ray but was told that Sykeston had none, so the logical thing was to play there," Gotham recounts.

After a 200-mile drive on bad highways in packed cars, the undefeated Ray team arrived to find folks at Sykeston using a road grader to scrape snow from the field. Gotham realized he had been snookered for the home field advantage. The troubles for Ray had just begun. Besides some homer calls by the referees, there also was the rangy quarterback of Sykeston to deal with, a fellow tall enough to pass over the Ray players. The Ray quarterback, David Lemire, still lives there, and says he just got too cold and weary to keep chasing the guy from Sykeston.

"I always felt that I had let the team down by not demanding that we play on a neutral field," Gotham writes. "I thought that 6-man was a good game for the small schools so that a coach had enough players to practice without using players that were not in the best physical condition."

Speaking of questionable calls--I also heard from Elden Stompro, in Swan Lake, Mont., about the 1952 game matching Columbus and Bowbells. Stompro played for Coach Vern Hedstrom at Columbus High School, graduating in 1953.

"Our big rival was Bowbells," he says. "Our game in Columbus in the fall of 1952 against Bowbells presented a problem that probably never happened before."

The field was crude: it had no goalposts or scoreboard. The arrangements, too, were makeshift: "Vern Hedstrom had forgotten to ask someone to be the official scorekeeper."

"It was, as usual, a wild high-scoring game," Stompro recounts, warming."We got to the end of the game and no one knew for sure what the score was. The referee lined all of the players up and asked each one how many points they had scored.

"The first liar didn't have a chance! To this day no one knows who won that game."

Furthermore, Stompro writes, "I remember playing in a game in Donnybrook where there was a pump on the playing field."

Lest we think that six-man football was some sort of quaint frontier amusement with no lasting pertinence, I'll point out that dozens of schools still play it in West Texas, and a few in other states. In fact, a fellow named Pat Osborne now proposes to launch a six-man pro league and says he has heard from more than 30 Texas entrepreneurs or communities seeking franchises. If you're interested, he's located at www.sixmanpro.com.

In the meantime, I'm going to keep after these six-man stories, in search of answers to questions such as, Who clipped Lowell Fruhwirth and broke his leg in the 1958 Sykeston-Bowden game? And just what was the mysterious butt-to-butt formation deployed by the boys from St. Francis Academy of Hankinson?

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2942, isern@plainsfolk.com
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865, gmoran@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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