Mens Sana, Sano Corpore

Ladies and gentlemen, meet perhaps the greatest talker in University history, Lacy Zenner '39.

By Robin Cody

 “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.”

*

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.

*

“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...”

*

Now Lacy. We have to move this story along. Let’s get you to Portland. You asked at a local jail to sleep there one night... stopped at a farmhouse, where the family fed you for cutting everybody’s hair... found work at that mill in Pondossa... Madame Queen’s box factory in New Pine Creek... semi-pro baseball in Lakeview, Oregon... And you went back to Notre Dame?

*

“I wasn’t a seminarian anymore, so I could play football there. Oh, my. Yes. Notre Dame had some 50 football teams, from the hall teams to the B team and the varsity, all in uniforms. At first I was on the off-campus team. My brother Elmer was a guard on the varsity, and pretty soon they moved me up to the B Team, first string. At the fieldhouse they outfitted us in slick form-fitted uniforms and high-top shoes. We played the Illinois B Team. The Purdue B Team. The...”

*

Lacy, please, the University of Portland...

*

“O yes, well, after football season I wrote to Father Mike Early, my old high school principal. He was now the president at the University of Portland. I told Father Early I’ve got $150, and he said Come on out. I’ll take your $150 and find a place for you. So I rode the train for 39? hours and landed at Union Station and asked Where is the University? They pointed me to the Killingsworth bus and told me to transfer to the St. Johns bus. At Willamette Boulevard and Fisk, the driver dinged his dinger. He said There’s the University. I said Where? I’m lookin’ and it’s all trees. It’s a forest out there. Four hundred and some trees and just three buildings. The driver said That’s it. That’s all there is. Christie Hall was the dormitory. Howard Hall was the new athletic facility. Everything else — Columbia Prep and the university — was in West Hall, which is what you call Waldschmidt. OK, there was St. Mary’s Hall, where the nuns did laundry. I enrolled in a couple of writing classes and taught French at Columbia Prep. At spring football practice we had 25 or 30 guys. At Notre Dame we’d had 50 fullbacks. I thought, God, I’m first team! We had only one set of uniforms. We couldn’t practice in the rain because we’d get our uniforms muddy. The football field was on that ground where Chiles Center is now, and after a spring scrimmage we’d walk over and play baseball. Gene Murphy was the football coach and he’d had some success from 1927 to 1936. He was a thinker, always thinking up plays, but he had a faraway look in his eyes and wasn’t always quite there. Distracted. We ran the old Notre Dame Shift. Line up in a T, and then shift to a box formation. The center snap went to the tailback or to the fullback. But football was irregular, you see. Unorganized. We didn’t have plays written down. It was sandlot football, backyard football, as far as I was concerned. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing. I had 20-400 vision. I was a blind man. In baseball I wore glasses, but at football I couldn’t see the ball. I was best at linebacker, where you can see where people are going. We played Linfield and schools like that. Pacific. Willamette.

“In the spring of ’37 they hired Matty Matthews to coach. I was about to leave, but Matty took over and asked us to stay. He said we’re going to have rules and exercises, a program to get in shape. Now it was the single wing, and we had plays written down. I was the regular quarterback, a blocking back. You were limited to a hard shiver, no holding. Just your body, you could take a beating. I learned to block like a boxer. Fake the guy out of position. If you got hurt, you couldn’t go back in in the same half. Eleven regulars played offense and defenses, with three or four substitutes. We had leather helmets. No face guard. You couldn’t get me to wear one of these helmets they wear today with a face guard like a handlebar. They can grab that face guard and throw you down rodeo style. We played sideline to sideline. If the last play went out of bounds, the center hiked the next one from a yard in. Everybody else lined up to the center’s right or left. We could beat any smaller school. St. Mary’s. Gonzaga. Seattle U. Oregon and Oregon State College would schedule us pre-season, looking to beat us easy, but we could give them a game.

“No passing attack. The ball wasn’t made for passing. That ball was a pillow compared to that bullet of a ball they use today. Did you see on TV the other day they let Doug Flutie drop-kick and extra point? He did it, with that ball. Chin down. Follow through. I could dropkick left foot or right foot. I was having a heck of a lot of fun. Guys from Butte, a tough bunch of guys, arrived on the freight train and walked up to the campus to play football. A big fellow from Bend, from the Southern Pacific, played for us and went right back to the railroad. As long as you didn’t graduate you could keep playing, you see. I’d been a senior at Notre Dame. Matty said We’re going to have to do something about your eligibility. We’ll call you a freshman from Lakeview. Or in those days you could take a different name. Some-times we’d recognize an opponent who had graduated somewhere else. I played three years. The fall of 1936, 37, and ’38. I graduated in 1939.”

*

So. Lacy. Born in 1911. You were 28 years old when you graduated?

*

“Twenty-seven. That spring and fall of ’39 I was the head baseball coach and Matty’s assistant at football. Then some school board members at St. Paul wanted me to be the principal at the public school there. Matty said Go ahead. Take that job. I read a book on it, How to Be a Principal. At St. Paul I was the principal and coached football and taught Latin, and we introduced college prep courses to the 55 students there. By then the war was on and I tried to enlist, but the service rejected me for bad eyesight. Harvey McKay and I went up to Canada to try to get into the Royal Air Force but no luck there, either, and when I got back to St. Paul they had hired another principal. I managed a flax plant. I was CYO director at St. Vincent DePaul. Matty was now the athletic director at UP, and he’d been following me. In 1942 he hired me to be his assistant in all sports.

“So then it was 1943. That was the year the University cancelled the football program. We had a heck of a time fielding a team because so many players were called into the service. The V-7 and V-12 programs meant the military could call anybody to active duty at any time. Basketball kept going. They played football after the war, up until 1950 or so, but I wasn’t there for that. In 1944 the military reclassified me and drafted me into...”

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He’s still talking. Lacy will still be talking when you read this. The Air Force tested him at 125 IQ with mechanical aptitude off the charts and made him a teacher of B-29 electronics... baseball at Lowery Field, where he pitched on a service team with Hub Kittle and Vic Rasche, subsequent major leaguers ... twenty-seven years helping Rudy Boyd build a local coffee company into an international business... teaching auto shop at Washington and Franklin High Schools...

*

“My first wife, Odrian Gibbs, was a lab technician at St. Vincent’s Hospital. We had four kids. She died a week after our fortieth wedding anniversary, in 1982. Then there was a Gonzaga basketball game downtown where I met Joan. Joan Koessler. We walked into the Coliseum together and she asked me Where do the Pilots sit? and I said That’s where I’m going. You going there? Turns out she’s a 1965 grad, a certified management accountant. She sets up businesses. So Joan and I sat together at the ballgame, maybe the only game the Pilots ever beat Gonzaga. After the game we went to a restaurant and this gets into a personal moment and I said I hope to see you again and she was going to Hawaii but we got together when she got back. Half a year later I proposed and she declined but sixteen months after that, she proposed to me and I accepted of course...”

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Forty years in one marriage. Twenty-two in another, and still going. Joan says they went to the DMV on Lacy’s 94th birthday to renew his driver’s license. The guy talked with — or listened to — Lacy for a while and then extended his license for another eight years.

*

“Do I follow sports!? O my yes! Those girls this year! That Pilot soccer team! They are students, you see. I follow college teams, not pro. For my own personal opinion it goes back to mens sana, sano corpore...”

Robin Cody, the University’s Schoenfeldt Series visiting writer this past February, is the author of the novel Ricochet River and the deft travelogue Voyage of a Summer Sun, which won the Oregon Book Award.