Sixty Years On

Alumni Reminisce on Pali High’s First Football Season in 1961   

By STEVE GALLUZZO | Sports Editor

When Dave Card and George Wilken stood side by side on the painted Dolphins logo at the 50-yard line to participate in the pre-game coin toss before last Friday night’s homecoming game at Stadium by the Sea they could not help feeling a bit nostalgic. For it was their blood, sweat and tears six decades ago that laid the foundation for what the Palisades High football program has evolved into today—one of the best in the City Section.

As both attested, it was not always that way. They played on Pali High’s first varsity team in 1961 and back then the Dolphins were far from a powerhouse. They were merely trying to learn the basics and gain some small measure of respect. In fact, Palisades did not win a game that first year and got outscored 319-19.     

“Dave and I both went to University for one year  before Pali opened, so we were juniors when we got here,” recalled Wilken, who played offensive guard and linebacker. “Pali opened as a three-year high school, but without a senior year class—meaning that for the first year we were at a disadvantage in all varsity sports. There were one or two guys on our team who had played JV at Uni and there was no Pop Warner in those days, so we were pretty much new to football. I didn’t even know the rules well.”

Dick North, whose players secretly nicknamed him “Needle Nose,” was Palisades’ first coach and his job was to mould a shorthanded, inexperienced group into a cohesive unit. Merritt Stanfield, who coached the ‘B’ team in 1961, joined North on varsity the following year.

    “Coach North was my coach when I played JV at Uni so he knew me,” said Card, who played offensive and defensive tackle. “Coach North coached the linemen and running backs and Coach Stanfield would handle the defense and some of the passing plays. I was a backup my first year because there was a guy [Lou] McNairy who was much better than I was. At the beginning of the second year he broke his leg. It was a ‘next man up’ mentality   and at the end of the season I got the Most Improved Player Award because Coach North remembered how bad I was in 10th grade and saw how much better I’d gotten.”

In the days before busing, Card recalls protesting mightily that he had to walk to campus all the way from the 500 block of Toyopa Drive in the Huntington.

“It was horrible,” he joked.

Both Card and Wilken recounted boarding a bus for the first game at Santa Paula—a 28-0 defeat.        

“It was very exciting, everyone  had butterflies,” Card said. “We were looking forward to actually hitting someone else. There wasn’t a huge turnout because we all lived in the Palisades. The reason we didn’t have a JV team is because there weren’t that many parents who wanted their kids to go out for football and hardly any of us had ever played football.”

“When we first started practicing all of our equipment came from Uni and it was all old hand-me-down stuff,” added Wilken, whose brother Rich was a sophomore on the ‘B’ team in 1961. “Some of the guys didn’t have face guards. We even had a few leather helmets.”   

   Palisades had no stadium lights that first season so home games were in the afternoon. After four straight shutouts, the Dolphins scored their first touchdown against Fairfax on a pass from Bill Furry to Bob Sawyer. Furry would become the school’s first Post Cup Award winner in the spring.

“The best thing that happened was that the dads got together and put up lights,” Card said. “So for our second season we did Friday Night Lights.”

“We helped put up the poles that are here now and we dug the trenches for the conduit that runs over to the utility room,” Wilken added. “At the time, that’s where our changing room room was. That first year we didn’t have locker rooms or showers. We put our uniforms on in that little shed.”  

 Palisades showed great improvement in 1962, notching the program’s first varsity win, a 13-7 triumph at Hamilton, and finishing 3-4-1.

Card’s favorite memory that season was tying perennial City power Gardena, which had embarrassed Palisades 44-0 the year before when Wilken got two front teeth knocked out from a cheap shot on the first play.

“It was right here in this stadium and it was so foggy that you couldn’t see the end zone from the other end of the field,” Card said of the 14-14 shocker—the first tie in program history. “For us, it was a moral victory.”

Wilken recalled the headline in the Palisadian-Post the week of the game reading: “Mohicans Coming to Scalp the Dolphins Friday Night,”referring to Gardena’s mascot, which was changed to the Panthers in 1998.      

“North had us all sitting in the room and turned off the lights,” Wilken said. “You could just feel the energy building up because we really didn’t want to look bad. I was one of the co-captains that game because of what happened the year before and on the opening kickoff I knocked one guy down and he got mad at me. I yelled back ‘We came here to play football. If you don’t like it you can get back on the bus!’ Afterwards they were limping, which made us feel good that we’d played a physical game.”

Five years ago, Card and Wilken attended a similar reunion honoring the 1961 squad and last Friday they were happy to celebrate the 60-year anniversary with fellow Palisades football alumni from the 1960s: Jim English (’66-’67); Tom Dorner (’62-’64); Neil Melinkovich (’67-’68); Mark Melinkovich (’67-’68); Rich Wilken (’61-’63); Carter Harrington (’61-’63); Tom McGarvin (’61-’63); and Richard Landess (’68-’69).