This week, Mrs. Ednold got off work early so that we could head to the big city for a game that started at 3:45. That start time was a first. It’s a complicated situation, but Ulysses S. Grant High School doesn’t have lights for their football field. Heck, they don’t even have a football field, but I’ll get to that in a bit. So, we drove up the big road and got on the Banfield Expressway. It doesn’t bother me that the state Highway Commission chose to attach Mr. Banfield’s name to that stretch of road. He was the Commissioner, and he died at just the right time, so he probably deserved that recognition. But Expressway? If we’d have just left The Bucket in the middle of the road and started walking, we could have gotten there sooner. When it was completed in 1955 it was probably a wonder of traffic engineering, but a name change is surely in order now.
But that travel time spent on the Banfield Parking Lot was built into our schedule, so we did eventually reach our destination on time. We got off on 33rd Avenue and headed north a few blocks, and there was Grant Park. There was even an open parking space or two on the street just outside the park, and we grabbed one. From there, we could see the school across the park to the east, and I got out to reconnoiter.
Grant High School was first opened in September of 1924, 100 years ago. Some years, Grant is challenged by Franklin for the title of largest high school in the Portland School District but, with over 2,100 students, it currently holds that title. That number is about 1000 more students than it had 100 years ago. Here’s something you didn’t know: After the Vanport flood, Grant hosted the Vanport Extension Center in the summer of 1948, and that Extension Center later moved downtown and became Portland State University.
In 2017, work began to completely gut the entire building and modernize and expand the whole thing. It was finished in the summer of 2019 and now, though it still looks old on the outside, the interior is totally new, and it only cost $482 million. That could be pretty cheap, for all I know, but it sounds like a lot of money. Regardless of the amount of money spent, that renovation didn’t include the football field at Grant. The Grant Bowl is actually owned by Portland Parks and Recreation as part of Grant Park, which is adjacent to the campus. We had planned to make this trip last season, but Parks and Rec hadn’t maintained the field turf well enough, and the Grant Bowl was shut down just weeks before the season started. To my knowledge, the Portland School District is still in a struggle with Parks and Rec to take control of the field, but politics and money issues have prevented any agreement so far.
There is no seating or lights at the Grant Bowl, though they are both included in the master plan and will hopefully be installed someday, and dozens of “Grant us Lights” and “Lights! Grant! Action!” campaign signs are conspicuous all over the neighborhood. Grant has scheduled two daylight games at the Bowl this season, but plays their other “home” games at defunct Marshall High School, 4 or 5 miles to the southeast. At least they can practice on their own field this year, but the absence of lights makes everything difficult later in the season as days get shorter. Parking is another issue, since there aren’t any sizeable lots for any school events, but that’s something that’s not likely to change for a school surrounded by residential neighborhoods and a large city park.
During my recon mission I saw that, though the recent renovation hadn’t included the exterior, the building looks pretty impressive for a centenarian. It’s not as classic as Roosevelt or Franklin, but it has a certain stately presence to it that is more in keeping with U.S. Grant’s gruff solidity. I saw that the Grant Bowl is kind of a bowl, with ground sloping up maybe 15 feet around the rubber running track that surrounds the newish artificial turf field. I also saw that a snack bar, of sorts, was being set up in a grove of trees at the top of the slope to the northeast of the field. That knowledge might come in handy later. I noticed, too, that there were no signs or other indications as to which side of the field would be the home side, or which was for the visitors. Hmmm.
My mind was made up on that matter by the fact that it was a warm afternoon, and the sun was beating down from the west. The trees lining the western side of the field were perfect for providing shade to spectators on that side, and I wouldn’t be staring into the sun throughout the game. Whoever ended up on the east side would be hot and, by the end of the game, possibly completely blind. We walked around to the entrance on the southeast side of the field, paid our $7 each, and set up our blankets and chairs at the top of the slope in the west-side shade. Maybe there was a good reason Grant chose to make their players and fans endure that heat, but I can’t think of what that might have been. Their opponents and the visiting fans enjoyed the cool of the shade, while the Generals and their fans roasted and went blind. It’s still a mystery to me, but for the second time in CPHC history, we spent the game on the visitors’ side.
As gametime neared, the Grant band took their position on the southeast corner of the track. We could still hear them, and they were pretty good when they got the chance to play, but it was odd to have them so far removed from the rest of the Grant crowd, and when they struck up the Star-Spangled Banner, it was a funny sight to see everyone facing a different direction: There was no flag anywhere, so each person settled on their own direction to stare off into space for a few minutes.
Historically, Grant has had a lot of athletic success, but not much of it has been recent. They have won a couple of girls' soccer state titles in the past three years, and the boys' basketball team won the state championship in 2018, but you have to go way back for Grant’s glory days. They played in 6 of the first 11 state championship football games through 1951, winning 5 of them. They lost that other game when the final score was tied but Grants Pass was declared the champion because they had made more first downs during the game. That would be a tough way to lose. By 1963 the rules had changed, and their tie with North Salem stood, and the two teams shared the title, and the Generals haven’t been back to the championship game since then. Their basketball team, however, which hadn’t played for a championship at that point, has won 5 titles since then. Their boy’s track team has won 9 state championships, the last in 1988, and they even won a boy’s gymnastics title in 1982. I didn’t even know that was a thing.
There have been a lot of Grant students who have gone on to noteworthy careers in one thing or another. Gert Boyle went to Grant before she was CEO of Columbia Sportswear. Astronaut Gordon Fullerton went there, as did Sally Struthers. Bob Packwood was a General, before he became a U.S. senator and got run out of D.C. after people discovered what a creep he was. I never read any Beverly Cleary books when I was a kid, but apparently she’s pretty popular, and she went to Grant. Another Grant alum is Ian Doescher, best known as the author of the plays in the William Shakespeare’s Star Wars Trilogy series, which are retellings of the Star Wars films in the blank verse of William Shakespeare. As a fellow writer of things that nobody cares about, I feel a kinship with this strange man I’ve never met.
Grant has also had more than their share of athletic stars. NBA superstar Terrell Brandon led the Generals to their 1988 championship, and Oregon State’s Mark Radford was a General. As was George Shaw. Shaw was the quarterback on those Grant championship teams in 1949 and 1950, and then played for the Oregon Ducks before being drafted by the Baltimore Colts. He’s mostly remembered for breaking his leg during his second season in 1956, and being replaced by the unknown Johnny Unitas. Shaw never got his starting job back. June Jones was another Grant quarterback who played a few years in the NFL, and then really made his name as a coach. Riley Mattson played football at Grant. Never heard of him? Me either, but he was a tackle for the Bears back in the 1960’s. Kenneth Acker graduated from Grant in 2010 and then went to SMU before playing a few seasons as a defensive back in the NFL. And, of course, Ndamukong Suh was a General.
Maybe the most surprising athlete in Grant’s long history is Caroline Walker, who entered the old Trail’s End Marathon in Seaside as a 16-year-old high school junior in 1970, and set a world record for the womens' marathon, beating the old record by 4 ½ minutes. It would have been faster, but she had to stop at a restaurant to use their bathroom. That was her first and only marathon, and Grant didn’t even have track or cross-country teams for girls at the time, but Caroline won the Junior AAU cross-country championship in 1971, running for the Oregon Track Club. She then went to the University of Oregon, where she was mentored by Steve Prefontaine, and she represented the United States on the national cross-country team for a few years.
In 1981, Caroline went back to school, this time at Oregon State, and set school records in the 5,000m and 10,000m while being coached by Joe Fulton, who just happens to be an old acquaintance of mine who still coaches the Philomath High School track team. It’s frustrating to wonder what Caroline might have done if she’d been born 20 years later.
The Grant Generals play in Division 1 of the 6A classification, better known as the Portland Interscholastic League (PIL). The Generals were coming into this game with a 1-2 record, having lost a couple of relatively close games to open the season before shutting out Lincoln last week, 9-0. Their opponents for this game, Jesuit, had lost their opener at Tualatin, but had bounced back to beat Tigard and Oregon City, and were sitting at 2-1. In 2022 Grant were league champions, and represented the PIL in the playoffs, where they promptly lost to West Linn in the first round, 59-0. That marked the fifth consecutive time they had reached the playoffs only to lose in the first round. They’ve had a lot of recent success within the PIL, but the PIL just isn’t very competitive against the suburban schools.
Early on, it looked like that trend might be coming to an end. Grant recovered an onside kick to open the game, and when they marched down the field and scored to take a 6-0 lead after just a few minutes, things were looking pretty good. By the end of the quarter, though, Jesuit had taken the lead, 14-6, and they extended it to 21-6 by halftime. Neither team looked particularly sharp, but Grant just couldn’t find a way to stop the Crusaders’ running attack.
Halftime at the Grant Bowl was a curious sight. First, the Grant dance team took the field for a short routine, then a guy in an Audi convertible drove some students around the track waiving a couple of huge flags. What was it all about? I have no idea. The PA system at the Grant Bowl consists of a guy sitting at a folding table talking into a mic plugged into a speaker system he may have found in his little sister's bedroom. Once in a while we could hear something coming from it, and maybe for those on the home side of the field it was effective, but if he ever explained what was going on I couldn’t hear it. The crowd, which had continued to grow throughout the first half, loved it, though. School had been let out around the time the game started, and parents getting off work were showing up to watch the action. It still wasn’t as heavily attended as you would have expected from a school the size of Grant if they’d been playing a night game on a field that was really their own, but a lot of the grassy spots had been filled in, and groups of people had set up folding chairs or just staked out a spot along the top of the slope to stand and watch.
The most popular spot, though, was in that grove of trees near the snack bar. When I went for my mid-game snack, I found that most of the students had congregated in the shade, oblivious that a game was going on at all. The makeshift snack bar, as well as the Kona Ice truck that had pulled up nearby, were doing big business, and the crowd was enough to make us satisfied with getting a cold can of pop and getting out of there.
The whole atmosphere was a little weird for a football game, and I guess it was the absence of any grandstands that contributed mostly to that feeling. There was no place for the energy of the band and cheerleaders to focus. There was no forced togetherness of the fans cheering on their team. Everything was dispersed, and the support haphazard. I still think it’s a good idea to host a game at the Grant Bowl now and then to give people a chance to see the team play without having to drive across town, but it’s also kind of sad that the facilities just aren’t there to make it a better experience for everyone.
The teams came out for the second half, and they both picked right up where they had left off. I think the Crusaders were disappointed to only have been up 15 at halftime, and they scored another 21 unanswered points in the third period to put the game out of reach. Though both teams threatened, nobody scored in the final quarter, and 42-6 was the final score. I don’t think the Generals are as bad as that score sounds, and I expect them to challenge for another league title this year. And I don’t think Jesuit is quite as good as that score makes them look, either. They rely on their running game, and when they run up against someone with a big defensive line, which they will, they might have some trouble.
Hopefully, the Grant Bowl will receive the attention that it deserves before too long, and the Grant Bowl experience will be a lot different a few years from now, but it was interesting to see it as it is, in its unvarnished natural state. I can honestly say I’ve never experienced anything quite like it. With those thoughts in my mind, we got back on the “Expressway” and headed home.
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