Liberty 10/9/26

I’ve said it before, but even on an overcast day an autumn drive through Yamhill County is hard to beat, and when that drive ends at a roadhouse you’ve already had a good day before the football game even begins.  We made our way into Hillsboro by the back door through Cornelius, and headed east on the Sunset Highway to Cornelius Pass where, just south of the highway McMenamins opened their roadhouse on a converted farm forty years ago.   It’s a McMenamins like all the rest, but it’s a nice place to relax and gather yourself before a Friday night showdown at Liberty High School just across the way.

Liberty is the newest of the four Hillsboro high schools, having been opened in 2003 on the north side of town.  It’s got one Intel campus just north of it and three other Intel campuses to the south, so I can imagine a lot of Liberty parents spend their lives doing one thing or another for Intel.  Hoping to avoid the pitfalls of naming their school after a person, the school district chose the name of least resistance.  A hundred years from now nobody is going to campaign to cancel liberty, or at least that was their reasoning.  Our great-grandchildren will find out, I guess. The building’s signature feature is a kind of rotunda thing at the front entrance, but after that the designers seemed to have run out of ideas, or money, and the rest of it is a bit clunky; like a typical high school, in other words.  

I’ve never considered myself an investigative journalist, but maybe that’s about to change.  When the Liberty Falcons first started playing football in 2005 Liberty scored a giant coup by bringing in former NFL offensive guard Eric Mahlum as their first head coach.  Nothing but a former Indianapolis Colt would be good enough for the newest high school in Hillsboro.  You may be asking yourself how they managed to pull that off.  You are not alone, my friend, and I believe I may have just uncovered a rather surprising answer. 

A few years before Mr. Mahlum arrived on campus, as the district was planning for their new school, guess who just happened to be awarded the contract for designing Liberty High School?  That would be Mahlum Architects of Portland.  Well, well, well.  Now, this investigation is ongoing and I have no proof of any improprieties by the district Business Manager, but if my research finds that this little arrangement involved a small paper bag being dropped off at his house in the dead of night, I’d just like to assure him that my silence can be purchased at a very reasonable price.  A measly five figures and I’ll kiss my pulitzer goodbye and just pretend I didn’t find this dormant bombshell.  Think it over.

Despite the NFL experience and the backroom shenanigans it may (or may not – *wink* ) have taken to land him, Coach Mahlum turned out to be a pretty average coach, with the Falcons spending most years solidly in the middle of the pack.  The Falcons got a new coach in 2024 but the results have been about the same.  After playing the past ten seasons at the 6A level, Liberty’s enrollment has dropped to under 1,000 students this year, and they are playing in Special District 3 of the 5A classification along with Hillsboro and Forest Grove.  They won their first two games this season but have lost their last three, and are looking to stop the skid.  Their opponents this night, a rejuvenated Aloha team, also play in Special District 3 and are currently sitting at 4-1 on the season.

We pulled into the parking lot off of Wagon Drive, parked The Bucket, and followed the crowd toward the lights.  With Hillsboro Stadium directly across the highway I was afraid that Liberty would host their games over there, but they have a nice stadium of their own.  It wasn’t raining at the time, but it was a comfort to see a big, sturdy roof over the large grandstand and know that we’d be out of the elements just in case.  Eight dollars each got us past the lady at the entry table, and we found a couple of spots on the aluminum bleachers within the all-metal grandstand.  With the band and students to the west, the parents and other assorted Falcon fans took up the east side, with the poor visitors across on the north side of the field without a roof over their heads.  The artificial turf field in between is ringed by a rubber running track and a chain link fence keeping the riff-raff from getting too close to the action.

Liberty is located in north Hillboro, just north of the Sunset Highway with the suburbs of Portland to the south and east and lots of farmland to the north and west, making for a surprisingly diverse culture, at least to judge from the football crowd.  A large portion of Falcon Nation appears to embrace their identity as farmers, or at least wannabe farmers. The cheerleaders wore cowboy boots and hats, at least until they changed into their tennies after halftime, and the whole place felt a lot more country than I was expecting.  I saw many more cowboy hats and cowboy boots and overalls at Liberty than I saw last week in central Oregon.  Whether those people are really cowboys or just city folk playing that part is hard for an outsider to tell and I wasn’t going to ask, but it was surprising to see at a school I would have considered urban.  You just never know.

Aloha opened the scoring in the first quarter, but the Falcons answered back, and that set the tone for most of the game.  Both teams were equally adept with both their running and passing games and, though the defenses were pretty good, the offenses were always just a little bit better.  The Falcons, though, got to punctuate each of their scores by ringing their miniature replica Liberty Bell, complete with an imitation crack in the side.  It may not have been the real thing, but it certainly made a racket, to the crowd’s delight each time.  By halftime each team had scored three touchdowns and Aloha’s 4-point lead was the result of their superior extra-point proficiency, and they went to the locker room with a 23-19 lead.

As the players filed past to the locker rooms underneath the grandstand, the Liberty Marching Band made its way onto the field for their turn under the lights, and it was quite a production.  The music changed as a giant disc representing the sun, or the moon, or something, turned from light to dark.  The finer points were lost on me, but it was well done and very impressive for those of us who can’t play an instrument even when we’re sitting down.

Then the cowboy-booted-and-hatted cheerleaders did a little dance number to Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 and made it off the field just as the hanging mist was turning into a constant drizzle.  They lost no time getting out of their cowboy boots, which might have been as uncomfortable as they looked, in exchange for their tennis shoes and jackets.  At which time I made a break for the Snack Shack right below our seats, where I found I could get the Meal Deal that incuded my cold popcorn and hot coffee with a hot dog to boot.  I’m not sure why they even bother with anything else on the menu.  That was some powerful coffee, even by my standards, and the popcorn was downright frigid and the hot dog was a hot dog.  You won’t find that at McMenamins for $7, or for any price I’d imagine.

There’s something cozy about watching the rain pick up out on the field while you watch from the comfort of your dry cushioned seat a few dozen yards away.  The people who didn’t bring something to sit on were probably getting some chilly bums, but with Mrs. Ednold and I sharing our hot coffee we were positively toasty while we watched the players getting soaked.  That rain seemed to help the home team somehow, and both their offense and defense stepped it up a notch and the Falcons had themselves a 26-23 lead by the time the third quarter was over.

By the time the rain had stopped in the middle of the final quarter the visiting Warriors had regained a 32-44 lead, and when it was all said and done they won by a 32-51 score.  The Falcons fell to 0-2 in their league this season, but they’ve lost to the two best teams in the league, so it feels like they could still make a late-season playoff run.

Our trip to the silicon forest had included a stop in a roadhouse in an actual forest, and that was a good omen for the rest of the night.  A big, covered grandstand, albeit aluminum; a tasty Meal Deal for our mid-game snack; dancing cheerleaders and a marching band at halftime, and a couple of teams that battled back and forth all night and scored a dozen touchdowns, all told.  Then, to top it off, the Sunset Highway to the interstate was practically deserted by the time we left, and The Bucket made short work of the long drive home.