7A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, MARCH 31, 2017
‘Tall Firs’: Anet, Johansen were lifelong teammates, childhood buddies
Continued from Page 1A
Fast-forward 78 years, and
take a look at Oregon’s ros-
ter: Players from Montreal,
Quebec; Brampton and Mis-
sissauga, Ontario; London,
England; Ashdod, Israel … big
city players from Chicago and
Seattle; Sacramento, Irvine,
Long Beach, Los Angeles and
Santa Ana, California; Tempe,
Arizona; and the lone player
from Oregon, freshman Pay-
ton Pritchard of West Linn.
Quite the difference from
1938-39, when — other than
a couple of Portlanders — the
Webfoots sported players from
smaller towns like The Dalles,
Ashland, Oakridge, Longview
and Raymond, Washington …
and fi ve from Astoria.
Conference of
Champions
The Pac-12 had four teams
in this year’s fi eld of 64 (and
three in the Sweet 16). If you
listened to players on that
1938-39 Oregon squad, not
much has changed.
Almost to a man, the play-
ers for the 1939 national
championship team from Ore-
gon agreed that the balance of
power in college basketball
was in the Pacifi c Coast Con-
ference (later the Pac-8, Pac-
10 and currently the Pac-12).
Lauren “Laddie” Gale, from
Oakridge, was one of three
All-Americans who played for
the 1938-39 Webfoots.
In a 1995 interview, Gale
said, “We felt afterwards,
talking it over, that the Pacifi c
Coast teams were superior to
the rest of the country. The
teams we played in the play-
offs — Texas and Oklahoma
— weren’t as good; and Ohio
State, the team we played (and
beat, 46-33) in the fi nal, wasn’t
very strong at all.
“We never felt threatened”
in the fi nal against the Buck-
eyes, Gale said. “Our biggest
competition was within our
own conference. The Eastern
teams were still using the two-
handed set shot. They hadn’t
adopted the one-handed shot
yet. They were calling those
‘hope shots.’”
Oregon
coach
How-
ard Hobson’s team averaged
fewer than 50 points a game
in 1938-39, but they featured
three All-Americans — Gale,
Urgel “Slim” Wintermute of
Longview, Washington , and
Bobby Anet, from Astoria.
Hobson brought ’em all
together and made them
winners.
“Hobby was one of the
best,” said Gale, who — along
with Hobson — were the fi rst
Astoria High School
Astoria Fishermen boys basketball team from the 1930s included three future national championship players for the
Oregon “Tall Firs” — Bobby Anet (first row, far left), Ted Sarpola (second from right) and Wally Johansen (far right).
two Webfoots enshrined in the
Basketball Hall of Fame. Hob-
son died in 1991, Gale passed
away in 1996.
“In those years,” Gale
said in 1995, Hobson “was
way ahead of the rest of the
coaches. We had a lot of fi re-
power, as far as the guards
were concerned.”
Those guards were seniors
Anet and Wally Johansen, life-
long teammates and childhood
buddies from Astoria.
“They had played all the
way through junior high, and
they went through Astoria
High School together,” Gale
said. “We were a fast-break
team.”
Anet and Johansen had
both won state titles at
Astoria before heading to the
University of Oregon, along
with high school teammates
Earl Sandness and Ted Sar-
pola, a sophomore and junior,
with the 1938-39 Oregon
team.
Johansen was later a sports
editor at the Evening Asto-
ria-Budget and died of a heart
attack in 1971 while on a fi sh-
ing trip with his family on
the Rogue River; Anet lived
in Lake Oswego and died in
1980.
After serving in the Korean
War, Sandness was a teacher
and coach in Anchorage,
Alaska, taught and coached
in Portland until 1979, then
moved to Ilwaco, Washington ,
where he owned and operated
a tourist charter boat. He died
of cancer in 1984.
Sarpola served in the U.S.
Coast Guard, and from 1965 to
1981, taught various subjects
at schools, including Knappa
High School. He died in 1985.
The late Toivo Piippo was
the fi fth Astoria High graduate
on the 1938-39 Oregon team,
but by the time of the national
championship game, Piippo
had suffered a season-ending
leg injury.
Piippo piloted B-26 bomb-
ers in World War II, and was
later awarded a Distinguished
Flying Cross . He taught and
coached in Marysville and
Richland, Washington , and
died in 2003.
ria players end up at Oregon?
That story was told by
Wally Palmberg, an Astoria
High School grad who played
for the Fishermen (and later
Oregon State).
In a 2001 interview, Palm-
berg said Hobson wanted the
Astorians “real badly. So the
Oregon people approached
John Warren (then a coach at
Astoria High School), and told
him, ‘if you bring all those
Astoria kids to Oregon, we’ll
hire you as freshman coach.
“And it worked. The whole
party, en masse, went to Ore-
gon, and it paid off for ’em.
Five years later, they won the
national title with those kids.”
Warren later coached var-
sity basketball and football at
Oregon.
John Dick of The Dalles
was one of the last surviving
members of the Tall Firs, until
his death in 2011 at age 92.
He remembers “the road to
the Final Four” in 1939 being a
lot different than today’s heav-
ily-commercialized version.
In the 1939 post season, the
Webfoots fi rst had to play a
best two-of-three series with
California at Mac Court. It
was scheduled for a Thursday,
Friday and Saturday, with the
winner advancing to the West-
ern Regionals the following
Monday in San Francisco.
In a 1996 interview, Dick
said, “we fi gured we’d bet-
ter win those fi rst two games
if we wanted to get any rest.
So we did manage to beat Cal
in two games on Thursday and
Friday, we spent the night (in
Eugene), and we got to San
Francisco Sunday afternoon.”
In the Western Regionals,
Oregon defeated Texas and
Oklahoma in two days, then
boarded a train for Chicago.
Once they arrived in Evan-
ston, Illinois — site of the
n ational c hampionship — the
Webfoots ran all over Ohio
State in the title game.
“We ended up playing fi ve
games in 10 or 11 days, plus
we traveled all that distance
just to get there,” Dick said.
“Ohio State had a whole week
to prepare for us, and we were
playing on a Big 10 court with
Big 10 offi cials.”
He agreed with Gale, in
that “we were clearly the
superior conference. Nobody
could challenge the PCC.
The toughest games we had
were always against Washing-
ton and California. The West
Coast was clearly ahead of the
rest of the country.”
For Dick and the rest of
the “Tall Firs” — as they were
referred to in a column by
the Oregonian’s L.H. Greg-
ory on March 3, 1938 — the
celebration after the n ational
c hampionship win was just
beginning.
The city of The Dalles
heard that the team’s train
would be passing through
town, and the tracks were
practically barricaded to get
the Union Pacifi c engineer to
stop for a celebration.
“After we had won the
championship, that created a
lot of excitement in Oregon,”
Dick said. “We got to The
Dalles at 5:30 in the morning,
and The Dalles, which had
about 5,000 or 6,000 people
then, roughly half that showed
up at the train station.”
City offi cials presented
Dick with a Hamilton watch
(“the Rolex of its day,” he
said), and the celebration
lasted over 10 minutes.
“When word got out what
The Dalles had done for me,
all the other hometowns with
players on the team had to
come up with gold watches
for their players,” Dick said.
“It was the toughest for Asto-
ria, which had four guys on
the team, so they had to come
up with four watches.”
Astoria Webfoots
Just how did all those Asto-
Center: ‘We try to give everyone a chance’
Continued from Page 1A
Community
comes together
The warming center is
one of several local shelters
serving the county’s growing
homeless population.
Helping Hands, a non-
profi t that helps the local
homeless population and pro-
vided overnight lodging for
some of the warming cen-
ter’s overfl ow, saw a roughly
60 percent increase in peo-
ple needing services at their
facility from 2015 to 2016,
CEO Alan Evans said.
“We’re having a hard time
keeping up with the demand
of people needing assis-
tance,” Evans said.
Though the Astoria Warm-
ing Center still relies on doz-
ens of active volunteers —
who put in a total of 2,620
volunteer hours, not includ-
ing work outside hours of
operation — the grant fund-
ing allowed the center to hire
paid staff.
“Staffi ng a shelter nightly
for 100 nights, all from vol-
unteers, is not realistic, and
we recognize that,” Coffi n-
barger said, “so we hired sev-
eral people to come in and
work those really challenging
overnight hours.”
Meanwhile, Astoria Cof-
feehouse and Bistro and
the North Coast Food Web
donated cooked meals.
This year, the shelter
added cots for most people ,
giving the room a military
barracks look; in the fi rst two
years, people slept on foam
pads on the fl oor.
“I think it’s really inspir-
ing the way that the com-
Joshua Bessex/The Daily Astorian
Volunteers hand out soup and coffee at the warming center
at First United Methodist Church in 2015. The soup was to-
mato bisque donated from Astoria Coffeehouse and Bistro.
munity came together to do
this,” Coffi nbarger said.
Changing face
of homelessness
The warming center had
planned to operate through
mid-March, but state fi re
codes permit temporary shel-
ters to operate no longer than
90 days straight within a
12-month period. Though the
center secured a two-week
extension, it closed two weeks
earlier than anticipated.
Ron Maxted, a warming
center volunteer and board
member, said some neighbors
have complained about the
transients’ behavior outside
the shelter; though it opens at
8 p.m., people start gathering
around 6:30 p.m.
“Sometimes they’re loud,
and boisterous,” and leave
beer cans around, he said.
Maxted said the shelter will
work on addressing these
issues.
The shelter accepts people
who appear intoxicated, as
long as they can enter with-
out assistance. “The nature of
our shelter being low-barrier
is that we try to give every-
one a chance,” Coffi nbarger
said.
But transients struggling
with substance abuse make
up a decreasing percentage at
the shelter . The people who
showed up included evicted
families, patients discharged
from hospitals and domes-
tic -violence survivors.
“The face of homelessness
is changing,” Evans said.
“Years ago, it used to be the
addicted and the broken and
the mentally ill. And now
that number’s completely
changed: It’s more women
and children. It’s more people
who can’t afford to stay in an
apartment because the rates
of apartments have (gone)
up.”
He added: “The prob-
lem’s going to get worse
before it gets better. We can’t
build affordable housing fast
enough. It’s impossible.”
Be in the know
A colonoscopy may be your best option
for cancer screening and prevention. Talk to
your doctor and learn more about your options online
at www.columbiamemorial.org.
3 Facts for Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month
1. Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer
death in the U.S. Finding it now could save your life.
2. Everyone over the age of 50 should be screened. Ask your
doctor if you should be screened sooner.
3. There are several colorectal cancer screening tests, includ-
ing affordable, simple, at-home screening options.
Call 503-338-4075 now to make an appointment.
2111 Exchange St., Astoria, Oregon • 503-325-4321
www.columbiamemorial.org • A Planetree-Designated Hospital