“No, I didn’t play football for Knute Rockne. People get that mixed up. I was there, but I was only 14 years old when I got to the Holy Cross Seminary on the Notre Dame campus, across the lake from the college. This was 1926. A Father Dolan had come to Racine on a mission and recruited me from the eighth grade. So I was a high school freshman, the first of my eight years of studying to be a priest. We could hear the Notre Dame Victory March across the water. We heard the football players and the whistles and the coaches at practice. Knute Rockne was already famous. The Four Horsemen team was 1924, but in ’26 they didn’t have much of a ball club at all. We couldn’t go to the games or even read newspapers, but we heard from other kids. One day Babe Ruth came to campus for lunch, and that was a very big deal. Seminarians could play sports, but not contact. We weren’t allowed to play football, except touch. I played everything. If you could hit it or kick it or throw it, I did. My whole interest was in athletics but we wore robes and took philosophy taught in Latin with footnotes in Greek and Latin. It was Latin first period and then study hall and then again Latin and Geometry and History and what have you. They didn’t let us out to exercise until 3:30 to 5 because the saying was mens sana, sano corpore. Sound mind, sound body. S... a... n... a. S... a... n... o. That’s your declensions and stuff in Latin, you see. The endings let you know where you are. Do you mind if I take my fake tooth out? It’s easier to talk.”
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Meet Lacy Zenner, ’39, at his Beaverton home, talking faster than you can listen. He’s got a bum hip and that fake tooth, but Zenner is a strapping, wide-eyed, quick-laughing 94-year-old in possession of every brain cell he ever had. We’re here because Zenner played and coached football and baseball on The Bluff and because he’s a living link to an era when college sports were just beginning to be, as they say, organized. Stick around. He’ll get to that part, to the University of Portland part.
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“Yes, the seminary was a boys’ boarding school. Brother Norbert would line us up and assign work for the day. My job was I drove the blood wagon. You’d get the blood from the slaughterhouse and spray it over the fields and your asparagus would grow two inches in one night! After high school I just walked across campus to the Novitiate. That’s one year of silence where you get to know yourself, you see. No experience with the outside world at all. Your folks could visit but you couldn’t go home. And after the Novitiate I studied at the college seminary. We went to class with the football players and all. No girls. We never saw gals except the women in offices. You heard those heels clicking down the hall and everybody’s ears pricked up. I remember when Cartier Field was moved, turf and all because Knute Rockne didn’t want to leave the blood and teeth from any football players at the old field. Now it’s called Rockne Field. Knute Rockne got killed in 1931. His Ford tri-motor airplane fell out of the sky, and he got killed. I worried that Rockne wasn’t a Catholic, but at the funeral his kids said he was.
“So I was a junior at the college seminary in 1934, and here was a rough decision, a tough choice. It was time to take vows to continue into the priesthood. Poverty, chastity and obedience. These are vows, you see. If you sin after that it would be double sins. I thought I can’t hack this. I better get out. It was my choice to leave the seminary.
“My life is a little hazy in this period. I was that shook up. It was the Depression, you see, and nobody wanted a Latin teacher. I stayed out a year and went back to Racine which is a big sports town and everybody worked in factories. I got a job at Hamilton-Beach baking out paint jobs for $17 a week. You’d place a milkshake mixer in a 780-degree dryer, leave it there for a while, and pull it out in zero degree weather. I tried out for the city football team at a field there off Lake Michigan. They timed me at 6.3 seconds in the 60-yard dash from a flat-footed start in tennis shoes on a cinder path, us guys checking ourselves out. I was 5’11”, about 172 pounds. I could run like hell, always could. My brothers and I grew up biking. We used to bicycle from Racine to Milwaukee or to Kenosha and back. Then there was ice skating, figure skating, speed skating. All my strength was in my legs. I made the team as a halfback. This was the summer of 1934, semi-pro football, the first and the dirtiest football I ever played in my life. After I returned a kickoff 60 yards, a big fat lousy guy jumped on the pile and broke my collar bone. My boss at Hamilton-Beach was madder than hell. He read me the riot act. You dumb so-and-so. There was no cast or anything. I went back to football after three weeks and they fixed me up with suitcase handles under my armpits. I could work my left hand. All they wanted me for was running, you see. I took a hit and rolled. It was OK. I’m a rough and tough character. My folks had named me Licinius in memory of a Brother who did my dad a favor, but you couldn’t say Here comes Licinius. I was called Lace or Lacy all my life.
“One day my cousin Art came over to the house and closed his eyes and squinched and said You want to go to California? They were hiring drivers to drive cars from the Nash plant in Kenosha to Los Angeles. These were brand new 1934 La Fayettes and Auburns, the ritziest convertibles, chrome pipes along the side, six-cylinder flathead engines. Those cars cost $405 at the factory and could sell for up to $900 in L.A.! These were actors’ cars. Drive one and tow one. There were 24 drivers and 48 cars. I was the mechanic. I could fix any damn thing, always could. They guaranteed $1.25 a day plus meals, and we ran those cars through Salt Lake City and across the Utah and Nevada desert with washtubs full of water because water cost 50 cents a gallon, more than gas. They weren’t going to pay our way back, you see. In my suitcase I had my baseball shoes, my glove, and my sweats because I’d heard they played baseball in the West.
“So a guy said, You play baseball? His dad had a sawmill with a ball team up in Northern California. I started hitchhiking, flat broke, up the...”