I was not taking any chances this weekend. Since we’d been smoked out last weekend, I was looking for a football game far from any possible hazardous air conditions, so I decided to head to central Oregon. The Bend Lava Bears were hosting the inter-city rivals Caldera, and that sounded pretty safe. I’ve been through Bend many times, and have occasionally stayed for a day or two, but none of those trips had included a stop at Bend High School, so this would be a first.
The city of Bend was named after the Farewell Bend in the Deschutes River, a convenient ford for travelers during pioneer days. When settlers applied for a post office in 1886, they requested the name Farewell Bend, but that name was rejected since there was already a Farewell Bend somewhere else, and the U.S. Post Office Department shortened it to simply Bend.
Bend began as a sawmill town, with the mill powered by the river. A small community developed around the area, and in 1904 the city was incorporated. In 1910, Mirror Pond reservoir was created by the construction of a dam on the river, which powered electricity for the city, and still does provide enough for a few hundred homes. In 1916, Deschutes County was formed from the western half of Crook County, with Bend becoming the county seat. An interesting bit of trivia: One of the guys who spearheaded the effort to create Deschutes county with Bend as the county seat was a man named G.P. Putnam. He was educated at Harvard and came west and bought the Bend Bulletin newspaper, and was its publisher and editor. He became mayor of Bend in 1912 at the age of 24, but disappeared from Oregon history after a few years. Decades later he became famous as the husband and promoter of Amelia Earhart. Then she disappeared, too.
Over the past 100 years the mills have all closed and the economy in Bend has shifted from lumber to tourism, but the growth hasn’t stopped. Bend had 13,000 residents in 1970, and now has close to 110,000. I miss the old, smaller Bend, but I doubt that will stop people from moving there.
Bend High School opened downtown in 1904, but the current building just southwest of Pilot Butte was opened in 1956. Over the years the school has produced some notable alumni. Ryan Longwell went to Bend High School, then was a placekicker for California. I believe he went to Cal because they have the same colors and the same logo as Bend, and he could continue to wear all of his high school t-shirts while in college. Longwell then played for the Green Bay Packers and ended his career in 2012 as the second leading scorer in Green Bay history. Tight end Luke Musgrave is another former Lava Bear playing for the Packers, though he played his college ball at Oregon State. Famous tire guy Les Schwab went to Bend High School, too. After the family sold out to investors in 2020 his tire company isn’t quite what it once was, but Les built that business from nothing when he began in 1952, and is now buried in Prineville, where it all started.
Bend won the first OSAA state championship game ever played in 1940, when they beat a Medford team coached by none other than Bill Bowerman. They also claim to have been runners-up in 1929, so apparently there were non-OSAA tournaments prior to 1940. The Lava Bears haven’t been back to a championship game in 84 years. Bend competes in the 5A Intermountain league with the other three Bend schools along with the two from Redmond. They started the season 5-0 before losing to Summit last week and would be facing a winless Caldera Wolfpack team this week. Bend made the jump from 5A to 6A in 2018 and didn’t have a lot of success against the bigger schools, but in 2022 they moved back to 5A and promptly came within one game of playing for a second state championship. They slid back a little last year, finishing 4-5 with a 2-3 league record. With Caldera winless after 6 games and Bend having only lost once this season, I wasn’t expecting a very close game.
With a school as big as Bend, I was looking forward to some delicious stadium food for dinner, but I did make the short trip downtown to The Cellar for a pre-game beer. The parking situation downtown has room for improvement, but the Extra Special Bitter made me forget that. I can always use a few extra steps, anyway, and by the time I reunited with The Bucket after my little hike I could almost smell the freshly-grilled hamburger I’d be having at the game. I turned east off the highway onto Burnside Avenue, drove a few blocks and saw the big school building in front of me and followed the traffic into the lot north of the school. It’s not a huge lot considering the size of the school, but I found a space for The Bucket and went off to find a space for myself.
It’s not quite as easy without Mrs. Ednold along, but she’d had family commitments to attend to, so it was up to me to pick out a seat before taking my tour of the grounds. I exchanged $6 for a ticket and hand stamp at the booth on the southwest side of the field and found my spot halfway up on the south end of the grandstand. It’s a large newish wood and concrete stand with a double-decker press box and plastic composite benches that were a welcome sight for my backside after all the aluminum it’s seen this season. On either side are smaller sections of old wooden bleachers. They weren’t necessary for this game, but probably come in handy on big occasions. None of it is covered, but I doubt rain is much of a concern in Bend during football season.
The band was at the north end next to the students, who were dressed up for their white-out night, so I could hear them at just the right volume, and was pleasantly surprised that Bend had stolen the fight song from my own alma mater, even though nobody else seemed to be familiar with the correct words that go along with it. I thought about teaching a few of them the correct lyrics, but they all seemed content in their ignorance, and I thought better of it. One nice touch was that the Bend cheerleaders, of whom there were about 20, divided themselves into two groups. One group cheered in front of the student section, and the rest of us had a group in front of us, too. I don’t know how they decide who has to lead the old people and who gets to lead the students, but I know which group would be more fun.
Leaving my cushion on the bleachers to mark my territory, I walked around to see what was what and snap a few pictures. There are large wooden bleachers on the east side for the visitors and a natural grass field surrounded by a rubber running track that was fenced off from spectators. Near the ticket booth a makeshift Lava Bear gear booth had been set up selling t-shirts, hats and all kinds of stuff for the serious Bend fan. Then, off under the pine trees on the south end of the field, I found the concession stand. There was already a mass of people in front making it impossible to get near enough to even see what they offered, so I made a note to come back later when the lines had gotten a little shorter.
As I settled back in to my seat on the bleachers I noticed the Lava Bears had employed a tactic I’d never seen before. During warm-ups they had worn their gold-trimmed navy blue jerseys, but after they’d gone to the locker room for their final pep talk they re-emerged from a giant inflatable football helmet wearing light blue jerseys, waving flags and doing a lot of whooping and hollering. They looked like a completely different team, which their opponents must have found really confusing. The boys from Caldera shook off that puzzlement, though, and scored early in the first quarter. When the Wolfpack led 7-0 after the first quarter it looked like the whole jersey-swap ploy had been for naught.
It was a late-arriving crowd, and my comfy spot with lots of leg room had dwindled as time went on. By the end of the first quarter a group of middle school students had arrived to invade our peaceful little corner of the stands. They turned out to actually be pretty funny, though, so I spent the rest of the night eavesdropping on conversations of 12-year-olds and vaguely remembering when I, too, was concerned about which one of my classmates had the coolest shoes, or which girl really might be cute if she’d get a new haircut. The Lava Bears eventually got their running game going and the Caldera defense couldn’t find a way to stop them. Bend scored 3 times in the second quarter and went into halftime with a 7-21 lead.
During all of this action, I had kept half an eye on that concession stand, and at no time did the crowd ever diminish. I was getting seriously hungry by now, but halftime is never a good time to visit the concession stand so I stayed to watch the Bend dance team do a short routine. I guess they were good, but it was very short, and my middle school chums had gone off to mingle with more exciting company until the second half began.
Bend scored again in the third quarter to put the game out of reach, and though the final score of 28-7 might make you think Caldera was at least in the game, it really wasn’t that close, and the outcome was never in doubt. The same cannot be said for my hamburger. I continued to hold out hope that the line at the concession would shrink in the second half, but it never did. The crowd had continued to grow throughout the game, with the grandstand filling up and lots of the younger fans loitering around the fence surrounding the field, and the mob at the snack bar never went away. I don’t even have a picture of their menu, if they had one. I couldn’t even get that close. I guess you can’t win ‘em all. Unless, perhaps, you’re the Mountain View Cougars, who won again tonight. They sit atop the Intermountain standings with our one-loss Lava Bears in third, right behind Summit.
The chill I had been expecting never did arrive, and it was as warm at the end of the game as it had been at the beginning. And if the game wasn’t exactly a nail-biter, I did get to see the impressive Lava Bear running attack in action, and their defense wasn’t bad either. There’s also something about seeing the absolute first-ever OSAA state championship team on their home field, even if that championship came 84 years ago. Which felt like about the same length of time since I’d had anything to eat. Not for the first time in my life I found myself thinking “Thank God for Taco Bell”.
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