It was a great run — and they’re ready to celebrate it again.
The 1959 Winlock High School football team — as well as the Winlock teams from 1955 and 1958 — will all meet up at the Hope Grange in Evaline on Saturday for a team reunion. The three teams posted combined records of 28-0, outscoring opponents 819 to 158, en route to taking the State B Championship each season.
All three teams were coached by the legendary Dick Stultz, who was elected into the Washington State Football Coaches Hall of Fame in 1981. Stultz had previously coached at Ryderwood, and went on to coach Lake Stevens to a 37-game win streak in the mid-1960s.
All three championship teams, interestingly, beat Toledo, which was coached by Hall of Famer Ted Hippi.
The afternoon event will feature a video speech by Bud May, who played under Stultz in Ryderwood and went on to become a sportswriter for the Longview Daily News, and a handful of keynote speakers, including former Cardinal and pilot Ed Leonard, who was shot down and held captive for five and a half years during the Vietnam war.
Football was, by all means, a big deal in 1950s Winlock, according to Mike Porter, one of the organizers of the reunion and a member of the 1958 and 1959 teams.
“We didn’t have ping-pong in Winlock,” Porter joked. “We just had four sports, and one of those was football.”
Most of the players on the championship teams, Porter added, were instilled with the winning spirit from that point in their lives on.
“We all kind of looked back, and remember the days when we sucked it up, and life never changed much after that,” he said. “Most of the successful people (from those teams) can point to learning how to be successful to our days on the gridiron.”
The three championships came in the days when Associated Press ballots determined which school would earn the state title. In 1955, Winlock (9-0) beat Toledo (which was ranked No. 1 in the poll prior to the game) 19-6 in the finale, with Cardinal fullback Sherman Porter tallying one touchdown on the ground and catching another from quarterback Dick Blakeley.
In 1958, Toledo and Winlock entered the final game of the season ranked No. 1 and 2 in the AP poll. Toledo was coming off a title in 1957 and packed a 27-game winning streak into the contest, played before a record crowd on the Indians’ home turf. The 20-6 win left Winlock atop the State B poll, while Toledo came in third.
The 1959 season started with somewhat low expectations for the Cardinals, but a back-and-forth 27-21 win over Toledo at the end of the season gave the Cards their second straight title.
The Saturday event, which starts at noon, will include a full lasagna lunch prepared by the Winlock Lions Club and served by the Winlock High School cheerleading squad.
