Whitehouse '49, '53 MD, emeritus professor of microbiology and immunology, played halfback, quarterback, punter and end for the team of 150-pounders-and-under. How did the league come into being? Whitehouse says the late George Allen, an assistant coach for the team and later coach of the Washington Redskins, told the story well in the article "Pound for Pound as Good as the Big Guys: U-M's Unheralded 1947 Football Champions." Here is an excerpt:
Michigan's first and only l50-pound football teams existed in l947-48. Ohio State, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan fielded teams in a four-game season with each playing one team twice. Michigan's home games were usually played Friday afternoon at Ferry Field. Cliff Keen, Michigan's legendary wrestling coach, was also the head coach of the lightweights. I was selected as his only assistant.
Fritz Crisler was then the athletic director. One hundred and fifteen prospects tried out for the team the first year. What amazed Keen and me was that so many excellent athletes came out for the team--all-state, all-conference players, outstanding track men and athletes in other sports who were too small to play varsity football. World War II had just ended, and every school was loaded with service veterans. One hundred-fifty-pound football had been played in the Ivy League and Service Academies, and Crisler, who had coached at Princeton, saw how successful it had been and wanted to introduce it into the Western Conference.
Whitehouse and other team members--who included Jerry Burns, the star quarterback and later head coach of the Minnesota Vikings--celebrated their 50th reunion in Ann Arbor in June. As vividly as the former teammates recalled their adventures on the field, they honored the generosity and leadership of their coaches.
Allen, for example, offered Whitehouse an athletic scholarship to be his punter at Morningside in Iowa when Allen got a coaching job there after the team's first season. "I thought it over," Whitehouse recalls. "With my service-time savings, dormitory-staff position, GI bill and my sister's financial help I could probably get by the proposed eight more years at the University. So I told him no."
And then there was Cliff Keen. When the squad's final season opened in 1948 at Illinois, they arrived by bus and spent the night on cots in the Illini field house. Early in the game, Michigan held and went on offense. Whitehouse picks it up from there:
On the first play my solid block was met with a solid knee in the small of the back. I felt a raging pain but finally made it to the bench and slithered onto the ground. Two plays later Cliff's face loomed above me. "Well, are you going in to punt or not?" All I could do was despairingly shake my head. A stretcher took me to the ambulance and on to the health service. A urine sample looked like coffee grounds and I was put to bed.
The Wolverines played miserably and lost 13 to 6. They contemplated a long return bus ride to Ann Arbor after the game. "We knew that we could play better ball, and that was what hurt," wrote star halfback Prentice (Pin) Ryan in a memoir. But Keen arranged for his squad to stay for the afternoon Purdue-Illinois game, giving his men time to restore their confidence. When they departed for Ann Arbor, however, Keen left the injured Whitehouse behind:
My brother had a faculty friend on the UI campus who said that I should come to his home to convalesce. I found I was strong enough to help dry the dishes for the coed who was living with them. During the several hours it took to dry the dishes after dinner, we fondly discussed the truly serious problems of the world as college students are wont to do. After a few more days of rest I returned to Ann Arbor by train. It wasn't until years afterward that I found out the train ticket was Cliff's, and that he had been planning to go to Chicago on business after the game. Instead he had left the ticket for me and came home with the team on the bus.
Ryan had more to say about Keen. "One evening before the second season began, I stopped at Cliff's home for a little talk about the season's prospects ahead. When Cliff told me that Bennie Osterbaan had offered him the assistant line-coaching job with the varsity football squad, I was speechless. Cliff then went on to explain that he had told Bennie that if he was needed he'd go, but his preference lay in coaching the 150-pounders. When I realized the opportunity that Cliff was sacrificing to remain with the 150-pounders, I could only marvel.
"Though we were usually practicing when the varsity and JV squads had gone in to shower at night, there was no grumbling or lack of spirit. Cliff was everywhere, criticizing, explaining, demonstrating and, with it all, mixing in that great Oklahoma wit that relaxed the tension ... . I have experienced school spirit and team spirit, but never such loyalty for a coach. Here at the University of Michigan I soon discovered why this school's athletic teams have set such great winning records. The answer lay not only in the knowledge of the sport, but in the ability of men to lead their teams into competition with the greatest possible desire to win."
And win the Lightweights did, sweeping the final three games of the 1948 season-topped off again with a shutout of Ohio state, 20 to zip. Wisconsin also finished 3 - 1, but, says Whitehouse, "because we had beaten Wisconsin both years, everyone knew who the real Champions of the West were."
After two years, Michigan and other members of the athletic conference discontinued lightweight football, citing financial pressures. A student named Jim Armeligas protested the decision in the Diag, Whitehouse recalls, "but also at the same time the junior varsity and freshmen football schedules were discontinued; it would have been unreasonable to continue the lightweight program in the face of those cuts."
Looking back over 50 years, Whitehouse unites the past and present in the same perspective:
Well, Cliff is gone. And so is George. And so are some of the rest of us. And after closing the bound newspaper files with crumbling paper edges and yellowing newsprint in the Michigan Daily office, what really remains? Was it all truly part of the rehearsal for real life-with a capital L? Or did it exist as part of the big L itself?
It is spring again--this time in l997 and the new football teams are trying their mettle in Spring practice. Fifty years seems to be too long ago. And yet our old practice field is slowly being converted with new buildings, and our bodies are slowly changing as well. Walking across the Diag to my seminar it is sweater time. Students are walking purposefully to class or standing in groups and chatting animatedly. The genders, races, body shapes and all are looking much the same under blue jean uniforms and backwards baseball caps. A few may seem more neat and isolated, but in all there is purpose in the air-purpose as real as the next hour's class, the paper due in two weeks, next semester's course selections, the new friend, the job interview coming up over at Career Planning and Placement, and the hopes for next year's professional and graduate school. The carillon is playing familiar Michigan melodies, and the trees are starting to bud.
Like many in his generation, Prof. Emeritus Frank Whitehouse interrupted his education to fight in WW II. He served in the Pacific as a bomber pilot before returning for his final three years of college in 1946. A Hopwood Literary Award winner and Medical School alumnus, Whitehouse has served as a popular counselor of students as well as a microbiology researcher and teacher.
What's Whitehouse been up to since this article was written?
Still teaching
"Composed" in retirement (from the Southeast Michigan Chapter of the Fulbright Association
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. . . Summer 1997
