Colfax, WA
The Codger Pole of Colfax, Wash.
The latter is displayed in a park off John Crawford Boulevard where stands Colfax’s 65-foot-tall “Codger Pole,” into which are carved the faces of players from the 1938 Colfax Bulldogs football team.
The pole wasn’t carved in 1938, but that was the year the heavily favored Colfax team played—and lost—its annual football game against archrival St. John. It was Friday, Nov. 18, 1938, and according to the Colfax Gazette-Commoner, the game was fought out on “a field blanked with snow and ice…so bitterly cold (that) players wore gloves, and the black lines on the snow-white field became a greasy mixture of mud and snow.”
Gloom reigned when Colfax lost The Game that day—and through the decades Colfax players tried to forget the loss, while those from St. John liked to remind them of it.
A Colfax seventh-grader at the time was Cleve Richardson, later to become movie actor John Crawford (The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure). Nearly 50 years after The Game, Crawford returned to Colfax to film a biography of his cousin, Hollywood stunt man Yakima Canutt. Howard West, a boyhood friend of Crawford’s and a St. John alumnus, reminded Crawford of The Game again.
One thing led to another, the Fogey Football League was formed, and Crawford invited the boys of autumn 1938 to return to the same field and replay The Game—or The Codger Bowl, as they called it. Cheerleaders practiced, bands gathered, and a Friday pep rally, bonfire, and dance were held in the Wheat ’N’ Barley Restaurant parking lot the night before the game.
“That week in September of ’88, the band played You’ve Got To Be a Football Hero, and sixty old bucks went limping through a tunnel of memories…” reads a stone plaque in the park off Crawford Boulevard.
On the morning of the game, a four-hour community breakfast overlapped a mile-long parade to the field for the game reprise, played by tag, not tackle rules.
Colfax won 6–0 this time.
Native songwriter Jay Livingston—who wrote the words to such favorites as Buttons and Bows, Que Sera, Sera, and Mona Lisa—penned a song to honor the event and performed at a post-game concert.
“Not every player made the concert,” says player Harold Heilsberg. “They sold a lot of Sloan’s Liniment (that day).”
To commemorate the replayed game, Crawford and others hired chain-saw artist Jonathan La Benne to carve caricatures of each player on the 65-foot Codger Pole.
“We’re all getting a bit long in the tooth to take care of the park,” which was built mostly by the players, says player Bob Clegg, “but we still manage.”
Colfax has pretty much returned to normal since replay day—“normal” being a thriving small community in the midst of the steep, rolling hills of eastern Washington, an area known as The Palouse after the Palouse Indians, a small tribe indigenous to the region. The appaloosa horse originated with this tribe (from “a palouse”).
The hills, formed by winds and retreating glaciers in the last ice age, hold extremely rich earth with topsoil up to a hundred feet deep. Alas, the land could not be farmed because of its low rainfall (about 16 inches per year) until immigrants from eastern Europe, familiar with such conditions, began growing winter wheat—which is now Washington state’s largest cash crop and the major crop around Colfax.
Most families were farmers, in fact, when Colfax lost to St. John in 1938. The depression was still being felt, and the team’s cheering section huddled in hand-me-downs that cold November day, hoping their team could end a poor season with a little glory.
It would take 50 years, but that’s exactly what they found.
“That glorious afternoon of fun (in 1988) gave us guys a chance to fulfill that dream that every seventy-year-old kid hangs on to: Playing one more game,” Crawford wrote in words carved in a plaque by the Codger Pole.
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