Cheney's 1966 Boys of Fall

Fifty autumns ago, a strange alignment of the football stars was taking place in Cheney.

Over to the west, Eastern Washington State College was making a march to the NAIA football national championship game on the brand new green grass at the latest rendition of Woodward Field.

The Savages, who were making their first playoff appearance for the school, would ultimately lose to Fairmont State College 28-21 on Dec. 9 in Morgantown, W.V. and finish the season 11-1.

Then down off of North Sixth Street a talented crew of Cheney Blackhawks were making their own history by becoming only the second team in modern school history to finish a season undefeated.

"It was quite a fall for football in this town," team member Bob Crabb said.

And it was also a special time for those who attended the new Cheney High School, which had just opened for the 1966-67 school year. These Blackhawks played on the old Fisher Field near Betz School, Crabb said. The present field opened in 1967.

Crabb recently joined some of his former Blackhawk mates, Timm Shepard, Tom Whitfield, Cliff Thompson and Phil Conrath, to look back at that most special time, and darn, if after all the hits, and all the years, they still had that special year pretty well dialed into the memory banks.

Coached by the legendary Jim Hatch, for the actual record - not from half century slightly faded recall - Cheney finished the season with a 9-0 record and were champions of the Northeast A League. The NEA, still around today, included East Valley, Chewelah, Colville, Deer Park and Medical Lake.

In a time nearly a decade before the high school football playoff system was initiated in 1974, the bragging rights for the state were determined by a vote of coaches and sportswriters.

When the final state polls were published 50 years ago on Nov. 10, Cheney would land in fourth place behind Lake Stevens and Raymond, both 9-0, and 8-0 Washougal.

"Hatch called their coach (at Lake Stevens) and offered to play, at least that's what I heard," Crabb said. "But their coach said, 'I'm No. 1, why would I do that?'"

This group, however, is just as happy to take the zero-loss distinction to their final resting place.

"Rarely are you a part of something special," Thompson said. "Undefeated is special so I think everyone walked away with something special in their lives they can always look back on. There is a common thing, we're all part of that moment."

While the roster for Cheney's final home game that year against Colfax was nearly 50 deep, one thing was for sure.

This was Tom Oswald's team.

"There was no question who was in charge in the huddle," Crabb said. "At one point Hatch was sending someone in and Oswald turned him around."

"You could see he was going to be a coach way back when," Shepard said of the two-way star, who was both quarterback and linebacker.

Oswald would go on to star at Spokane Community College in 1967, then move on to Oregon State before eventually landing back in his hometown and coach for 25 years. He died at the way-too-young age of 57 in 2006 after a long battle with cancer.

Cheney's football field was named in honor of their feisty former player, and coach.

"The thing about that team was Tom Oswald, he was the MVP, he was everything," Conrath said. "Tom absolutely refused to lose," Crabb added. "He might have been the most violent competitor I was ever with."

Back then, teams often called their own plays and Oswald was definitely in charge, Conrath said. "Or he'd change them in the huddle," Shepard added.

Crabb, a junior on this team, was a guard on offense and an outside linebacker on defense. He doubled as Hatch's messenger.

"Jack Eyre and I alternated, I would play a play and come out and Hatch would give me a play to tell Tom," Crabb recalled. "Tom sometimes paid attention to it." Hatch trusted him to do what he thought best, Whitfield said.

Cheney played an interesting mix of teams in 1966, starting with a 44-13 win over Quincy and a 12-6 squeaker versus Dayton, keyed by Oswald's interception return for a touchdown.

League play began with East Valley where Cheney won 38-32, but it never should have been that close, at least in the eyes of the players who felt Hatch's wrath following the game. "We were ahead 31-13 at the half, Conrath said. "I think we let up just a hair."

Even though playing at home, Cheney players did not go into the locker room at halftime, but rather a school bus parked behind the old Fisher Field which apparently had no locker facilities.

While Shepard did not recall the halftime pep talk, he did remember Hatch throwing the clipboard and saying "I've never been so pissed off before," and then going on to win a game.

The Blackhawks raced past league foes Deer Park, 46-0, Colville 35-0 and Chewelah 40-19. They generally did most of their damage with Shepard running the ball.

Conrath, an end, wanted more passing. "But we had a big fullback, Jerry Hudson," and "The big star," as Conrath called Shepard.

"I wanted them to throw on first down once in a while," but with Shepard rolling down the field at over six yards a clip, Conrath had to wait his turn. "We never could because we were never in third-and-long," he added.

Conrath did have his night, however, with three touchdown receptions in the Blackhawks' rout of Chewelah.

Standing in the way of Cheney's quest for its first undefeated season since 1949 were the Mead Panthers, a 2A team that featured talented quarterback Pete Glindeman.

That game stood out for all kinds of reasons on both sides of the ball, and special teams, which probably wasn't even a term in those days.

Mead's innovative head coach, Landy James inserted today's version of the no-huddle offense into his playbook.

"So Hatch, in one week - and he couldn't have done this without Oswald - put in an all-audible defense," Crabb said.

Cheney scored a 27-20 upset on the road with Oswald's 6-yard run with 5 minutes, 37 seconds to play breaking the tie.

But it was that new defense that broke the Panthers at the goal line - four times - in the final minutes of the game. That included Glindeman's fourth-down try that left him inches short of the end zone reports said.

One of the other heroes of the game was Hudson who scored once, added a pair of extra points and booted the punt of his life, a virtually unheard of 55-yarder that rolled through the opponent's end zone and snuffed out a final Mead drive.

Hudson, who recently passed away, had a warning to his teammates in the huddle prior to that kick. "If anyone comes through (to me), I'm going to kick your ass," Crabb remembered.

The league season ended on the road with Medical Lake.

"That was the rival," Crabb said of the guys from the other part of the West Plains neighborhood. "What a battle that always was." The schools were closer in size then and Medical Lake got all the kids from on Fairchild Air Force Base while Cheney got those who were not inside the fence, Crabb explained.

Cheney won, but not easily, 23-7. The first of a pair of Conrath touchdown receptions put the Blackhawks ahead 7-0 at halftime. His second score bumped the lead to 14-0. Hudson added a rare field goal of 23 yards while Bill Dickson's run concluded the scoring.

Conrath concluded his high school career with a memorable four-touchdown evening against Colfax in a 36-7 non-league win, scoring on a punt return, a run and yes, two passes from Oswald for 44 and 32 yards.

While 50 years has passed since they rambled up and down the field, a core group of these greying Blackhawks still remain as close as they were growing up on the playfields in Cheney.

Following high school, Shepard went on to an injury-shortened stint as a running back at EWSC. But Shepard is better known for his years of work for Medical Lake Parks Department where he was honored with the city's soccer field being named for him.

Crabb went on to attend Whitman College, where he also played football, but earned a teaching degree and spent a long career in the classroom and coaching.

Whitfield attended the University of Washington where he became a dentist and practiced until recently in his hometown. Thompson went to Eastern, became a successful local businessman and builder of student housing. Conrath, who also graduated from EWSC, played some football, and baseball and became an accountant.

This band of Blackhawk brothers still regularly gets together. They do so in the safer confines of the golf course and compete and love to remember their never-to-be-forgotten year of football greatness.

Paul Delaney can be reached at [email protected].