I hope it wouldn't hurt Gladstone's feelings to know they weren't our first choice for our 2024 season opener. When any mention of the game we had originally planned on attending mysteriously disappeared from the OSAA website sometime Thursday afternoon, we went with plan B. These days, at this time of year, there isn't any part of the state completely immune to fire, or at least the resulting poor air quality, but I guessed that heading to a town at the confluence of the Willamette and Clackamas Rivers would give us as good a chance as anywhere of seeing some Week 1 football. So, five years to the day since we started this whole thing, we headed north again, to the town of Gladstone.
After the first few stabs at creating a town just across the river from Oregon City had been thwarted by fires and floods, Gladstone was founded by Judge Harvey Cross in 1889. For reasons unknown, he named it after former and future British Prime Minister William Gladstone. That strikes me as a little odd, and my research has turned up no reasonable explanation. I can't imagine Keir Starmer receiving the same honor around here, or anywhere else, for that matter. Judge Cross' home was built in the late 1840's within what would become the city limits of Gladstone, on land now occupied by the Mr. Rooter plumbing business. In Gladstone, the area finally had a town that didn't burn to the ground or get washed away by floodwaters, and it was incorporated in 1911.
Here's an interesting little fact: When Judge Cross was laying out the streets for his town, the surveyor suggested naming some of them for American colleges, so you'll find Columbia, Cornell, Harvard and Yale Streets running north/south through downtown. Also, the west/east streets use the exact names, in the exact order, as the ones in Boston, Massachusetts! The map is small, and you may need a magnifying glass to see it, but it's true, and nobody can tell me why. After its small town beginnings, Gladstone saw a post-war boom, tripling in size between 1950 and 1980, but growth has leveled off since then, and the population is currently around 13,000.
The traffic wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been as we drove through the heat and the haze of I-205 and crossed the river into Oregon City before heading north on McLoughlin Blvd. Gladstone High School was one of the teams in our league when I was in school, so I'd been there many times, but never strayed from the route that leads to the school, and I don't think it had ever occurred to me that there might be more to the town than the school campus. This was our chance to see if there was. As soon as we crossed over the Clackamas River we took the first right in search of the one bona fide attraction in the town of Gladstone: The Pow-Wow Tree. This bigleaf maple tree was a landmark and gathering place for local native Americans before the arrival of white people and, according to its plaque, the first Oregon State Fair was held near it in 1861. It has become an important symbol for the City of Gladstone, and I was pretty stoked about the chance to see it. Alas, as with most of us, the Pow-Wow Tree isn't quite as impressive as it once was. It's estimated to have been around since the late 1700's, but for the past 70 years it's been in poor health, the town has grown up around it, and now it's practically in someone's front yard. That tree has seen some stuff, and in its glory days it was probably quite a sight, but I fear it's not long for this world, and if seeing it is on your bucket list, as it was for me, you might want to make that trip before the next big storm.
We drove around the town, through many blocks of old beautiful craftsman houses and, a little further east, newer 1940's and 50's homes built with less craft and imagination. We found there really is a nice little downtown district around Portland Avenue where you can walk around and convince yourself you're a hundred miles from any big city. I'd had no idea. Just a few blocks from the tree we saw Gladstones Eat Drink Sports and, since those were three things we were interested in, along with some AC, we decided to check it out. There were a few too many Green Bay Packers fans for my liking, but the food was good, and the service was better. Red pepper and mushroom soup didn't sound like the best thing ever when the waitress recommended it, but Mrs. Ednold and I now agree that it just may be.
We made the short trip north on Portland Avenue to the high school, where the school itself sits on the east side of the street with Garrett field and Dick Baker Stadium across the street to the west. I don't know who Garrett or Baker are, so please don't ask. I remember making that walk across the street to the locker rooms at halftimes and after games, and it is a little weird, but it works. The parking lot in front of the school is spacious, and there is more parking along Portland Avenue, so we had no problem finding a spot near the field. The entrance is off of Portland Avenue on the north end of the field, where 6 bucks each got us in with a paper program. I'm old; I love the paper. We grabbed a couple of spots on the aluminum bleachers inside the big aluminum grandstands and settled in for an evening of sweltering, sweat-inducing football. A few months from now, that aluminum will conduct the frigid temperature right into someone's bum, but on this night, when it was 91° at gametime and didn't ever cool off much, the metal stadium with its metal roof served as an oven. The fact that there was not a single wisp of a breeze the entire night didn't help matters, and keeping the sweat out of our eyes was a challenge we'll probably look back on fondly in November.
It's a very nice grandstand, though, built sometime in the past few decades. It certainly wasn't there back in my day. And you can reserve prime seating, including chairbacks, if that's important to you. Though the stands were pretty well packed, those seats were mostly empty for this game, so maybe that's not something terribly important to the fans in Gladstone. Across the field are a pair of nice, newish aluminum stands for the visitors, and a rubber running track surrounding the artificial turf field. In the middle of the field is the same black-and-orange Green Bay G that the Gladstone players have on their helmets.
I'm sorry to say that I don't have any feedback to provide regarding Gladstone's Snack Shack. Due to a lack of volunteers, one of the two Shacks was closed, and the line at the one that was open would have precluded me from seeing any of the actual game. That didn't mean completely going without refreshment, though, as the Senior Class Moms were selling root beer floats to raise funds for the senior class, and there was no line at all!
Gladstone High opened in 1966 and is the only high school in the Gladstone School District. Their football team competes in the small 4A Special District 2 along with The Dalles, Parkrose, Molalla, and Estacada. They beat Bob Dixon's Yamhill-Carlton team to win a state championship in 1971, and won another one the next season. They also won championships in 1978 and 2014, and have a 4-0 record in championship games. That final championship came against the team they would be facing this night: North Bend. They went 3-7 last season, and this will be their second season teaming up with players from Riverdale High School across the Willamette River. As of 2010, Riverdale was the third richest school district in the country, and the only district in the top 10 from outside the New York City metro area. According to the World Wide Web, "The Thomas B. Fordham Institute describes Riverdale as a "public private school", meaning it is a public school that serves "virtually no poor students", with 2.46% of students low income, and 96% of students being white". It was already going to be hard rooting for the Gladiators, and that little bit of information didn't make it any easier.
I have some good memories of Garrett Field, and one not-so-good memory that I still have a souvenir of, all these years later. For one, we beat the Gladiators on this field when Erik Wilhelm was their quarterback. Was my defense responsible for him deciding to transfer to Lakeridge before starring at Oregon State, then having a long career in the NFL? I like to think so. But in that same game I took a cheap shot to the chin and left a little blood on the old natural grass. The scar on my chin remains, having dashed my dreams of a modeling career, but we won, so it's all good.
As difficult as it is to root for old rivals, we did our best for the Gladiators, and when they went right down the field and scored to take a 6-0 lead in the first quarter, it looked like we might be backing a winner for our first game of 2024. We were aided in our cheering by the three-time-defending National Champion Gladstone Cheer Team, and they really were that good. There were no fewer than 30 of them. They weren't spectacular; just loud and energetic, and the student section was totally into it. It was also little cheerleader night, so we got to see them do their thing with a bunch of tiny cheerers at halftime, which is pretty cool, no matter how many times you see it.
That winning feeling lasted into the third quarter when the Gladiators had a 12-6 lead. It was a sloppy game on both sides, with multiple turnovers by both teams and flags on the field after seemingly every play; about what you'd expect for the first game of the season. Eventually North Bend stopped shooting themselves in the foot, though, and when they did, their running game was all but unstoppable. The quarterback and running back, Johnson and Swanson, each must have ended up with a few hundred rushing yards, and Gladstone had no answer. Their quarterback, JD Self, wasn't much of a thrower, and in the end there was no one to blame but him, Self. That's not true, just funny to say.
So, we begin the new season with a loss. But we did get to see the Pow-Wow Tree. I got to show Mrs. Ednold the site of some past glories, and we found out that Gladstone is really just a small town in the middle of bigger places, if you get off the big roads and look around a little bit. But if we end up going back to HappyRock someday, it will definitely be for the soup.
Ah yes.......I remember that bloody long-ago day at Gladstone. Folks were asking at the time if you ought to have stitches in your chin. I suppose it was the macho image of a wicked scar that had you declining that possibility. But like you say.......the good guys won.