The Whitefish Bay Athletics Honor Code

99 players are out for the team.
99 players are out.
One had a beer.
He’s out for the year.
98 players are out.

Judge me if you must, but I find that just as funny now as I did when I was 15.

A long time ago someone who was in a position to know the background details told me a vague story about the events leading to the Whitefish Bay Athletics Honor Code’s origination. 

Horror of horrors, the Honor Code came to be because of some absolutely scandalous behavior from Bay athletes during the always prim and proper 1950’s.  How can that be?

For all I know, the Whitefish Bay police are still trying to solve this 1951 travesty.  Long-time Bay Police Chief Orval Meister and his boys look like they’re in a Humphrey Bogart thriller.

As interesting as the 1951 Klode car caper is, it has nothing to do with the Bay Honor Code.

The vague story I was told had just enough details to track it down.

100% accuracy on the following.

In late August, 1955, just after football practices started, a Bay player was diagnosed with polio.

Practice was shut down while the locker room, football equipment, etc. were all scrubbed clean.

The Bays first football game was scheduled to be against Cudahy at home in early September. That game, as well as two other Suburban games, were postponed until the end of the season. Postponements were happening all over the state.

The 1954 Bay football team, led by Bob Nicolet, was one of the best in Bay and Suburban Conference history. They murdered everybody, except for Cudahy. That was just a 15-6 win. That team is rivaled in Bay history only by the stupendous 1962 team led by the great Tom Jankowski and a host of others.

So prospects were uncertain early in the 1955 season, with a young squad trying to replace a ton of top quality talent. But they racked up some early wins.

The Bay lost the Glory Cup game at Shorewood 13-12. Two second quarter fumbles, one at the Bay one and the other at the Bay 37 staked Shorewood to a 13-0 second quarter lead. Senior QB Don Hansen scored in the 2nd quarter to get the Bay back in it, trailing 13-6 at halftime. Sophomore fullback Tom Miller scored in the 4th quarter, but the extra point try was blocked. Both Bay TD’s were scored after long drives. The Bay should have won the game, but they didn’t.

Shit happens.

Fortunately for the Bay, there was plenty of mayhem going on in the conference. Shorewood lost to both Cudahy and Greendale. Cudahy lost to West Allis Central. The Bay had no other losses.

That left Cudahy and the Bay tied at 6-1 heading into the polio-delayed game. The season was supposed to have ended on Wednesday, November 2 — the night before the start of Teachers Convention. The Bay creamed West Milwaukee that night.

The Cudahy at Bay game was played on the night of Monday, November 7 with a 7:45 start.

School night. Did parents allow their grade schoolers to attend the game to see their Bay heroes try to bring home a championship?

Cudahy was the slight favorite.

There was a dusting of snow on the field and flurries continued throughout the game, making the turf slippery. The temperature was 30 degrees at game time with a strong westerly wind. But the stands were still packed with 3,500 fans.

This game was real man stuff.

The Bay had the better of things in the first half, but were thwarted inside the Cudahy 10 yard line twice.

The Bays Don Hansen and Ralph Benz say a not-so-gentle no to a Cudahy running back.

Cudahy hit paydirt in the 3rd quarter and converted the extra point. Early in the 4th quarter, Bay QB Don Hansen threw a 21 yard payoff pitch to Dave Crowley and Ed Leupold kicked the extra point to knot the score at 7-7. That was a pressure kick. There was no two-point conversion in those days. An extra point scored one point no matter how you got it.

Cudahy won the field position battle as the 4th quarter moved along and took over at the Bay 43 with four minutes left after a Bay offensive miscue almost resulted in a safety.

The Packers put together a drive and had 1st and goal at the Bay 5 with 49 seconds left. Bay end Dave Crowley broke through and dropped Cudahy QB Dennis Simuncak for a three yard loss. Cudahy ran a reverse on the next play and gained seven yards down to the 1. That was a huge tackle in space by the player(s) that made it.

There was time for one more play. Cudahy tried a QB sneak. There was a huge pile-up, the officials tried to pull players off the pile to find the ball and the play likely lasted at least 10 seconds from the snap to the officials’ ruling.

These were still the days without face masks. The amount of gauging eyes, punching noses, punching nuts, biting and all-out close quarters street-fighting at the bottom of the pile for 10 or whatever seconds had to be epic.

How did the officials rule?

The Bay wins 7-7.

I was told that an all-school Assembly was scheduled on Tuesday morning to honor the Suburban Conference champion football team. It was severely marred by the fact that few members of the football team attended school that day. Many girlfriends followed suit.

Whitefish Bay Principal J. Harold Rose was not happy. He was in his 12th year as the Bay Principal and 24th year overall at the Bay.

From the Milwaukee Journal:

Each of us can make our own observations from that article. These are mine:

— The article reads like a press release issued by the Bay school district that was written by J. Harold Rose himself. What a load of shit.

— There are no comments from the players, the girls, other students or their parents giving their side of the story.

— I’ve never heard of the “F minus 4”. It sounds kind of cool, actually and I’m mad that I never earned one in my time at the Bay, at least as far as I know.

— Principal Rose mentions giving the “F minus 4” to the miscreants like he’s the man laying down the law, but then pivots to spending considerable time downplaying the significance.

— I doubt that the guys who went to the Lake Michigan cottage were in any condition to care about the light and heat. And they’d probably been partying there all summer.

— High school kids are not idiots. If they were sent home from school on Wednesday thinking they had been expelled, it’s because there were told that they had been expelled.

— Principal Rose carrying this into Wednesday rather than just moving on was total incompetence. Punishing students for skipping school by sending them home from school when they return to school in order to learn things in school is something taught in Principal school?

— It’s great to see girls partaking in these totally deviant activities. I’ve got a fiver that says more than one of these pristine angels skipped school on Tuesday.

Principal Rose’s comment that “It’s not our policy to ask one student to stool pigeon on another” would soon be shown to be complete bullshit.

Here’s a picture from the mid 1950s of Vice-Principal Roeder (left) with Principal Rose. The 3-hole punch, rolodex, tape dispenser, heavy-duty stapler, black rotary phone and in/out boxes were must-haves.

My knowledge of the following story came only recently from Bay athletes that went through the ordeal.

In February, 1957 the Bay basketball team pasted Greendale 86-57 on the road. It was the last Suburban conference game of the season. On the bus ride following the game a player brought out two bottles of “beer”. They were small green bottles — Sassy. They were passed around at the back of the bus. It is believed that two players took a drink.

Sassy came in three flavors — Cola, Collins, Peach — and was brewed in Waukesha. It existed for just a couple of years.

NOT to be sold to minors!

Varsity coach Nick Kuehl and Junior Varsity coach Leo Kratz were at the front of the bus and had no idea what was going on.

The story leaked out.

Early the next week the players who were sitting at the back of the bus were called into a small room in the principal’s suite of offices. Principal Rose developed a seating chart on the bus to visualize who was sitting where. The players were told by Principal Rose that nobody was leaving the room until he had the name of the person(s) that brought the Sassy onto the bus and who drank it.

It looks to me like Principal Rose was asking players on the team to “stool pigeon on another”.

Principal Rose threatened the players with everything in the book. No transcripts sent to colleges, no letters of recommendation, etc.

The players were kept in the room all day. They were not allowed to eat lunch. At several points various players started to crack and wanted to be the stool pigeons that Principal Rose desperately wanted. They were encouraged by others to stay the course. They did.

The room happened to be where the announcements were given. “Ding Ding Dong Ding. These are today’s announcements.” We all remember that.

One player did that early in the afternoon and announced to the whole school and faculty what was happening.

Principal Rose was furious. Not that members of the basketball team were being held as prisoners, of course, but that one of the prisoners broadcast it to the whole school.

It got to the end of the day and Principal Rose had no plan for what to do next. Finally, one of the players requested and was given a phone call — after six hours — and a lawyer was brought in. Principal Rose folded his cards quickly.

I know what you’re thinking: did the players kept as prisoners get the famous “F minus 4” for missing classes that Principal Rose made them miss? I don’t have an answer for that one.

There were no lasting repercussions to any of the players. Or to Principal Rose. By 1959 he was the head of the WIAA Board of Control and retired as Principal of the Bay in 1967.

The Bay went on to beat Riverside in the Regional semifinals, setting up yet another Regional final showdown with Shorewood on the Greyhounds’ court. Since the Bay hosted the Sectionals in the state-of-art Memorial Gymnasium for much of the 1950s, the Regionals were always at Shorewood

In 1957 a game went through two overtimes of normal play and then it became a five-man free throw shooting contest. If tied after that, each team got five more throws.

Obviously, I’ve had the good fortune to talk to some of the guys on that team.

Almost 70 years later, it’s easy for a know-it-all smartass like me to mock the decisions that were made in what was a very different era. But to this day the players are still furious about how they were treated by the Whitefish Bay high school administration. They don’t know how heavily, or even if, Vice-Principal Roeder was involved. They only saw Principal Rose.

And they said the noise in the packed Shorewood gym was over-powering and the pressure was indescribable. One of them made one of two free throws late in regulation and then went one of two in the extra throws periods. He said that there is a reason why in his 80s he still shoots free throws in his driveway on nice summer nights.

The Bay Honor Code came into existence for the 1957-1958 school year.

Predictably, it didn’t take long for the Honor Code to produce controversy. The first documented bitching that I can find took place in the spring of 1959.

The more you read, the funnier it gets. From the Whitefish Bay Herald:

Obviously, the “one beer out for the year” punishment was way too harsh. I don’t know the timeline on when the Honor Code was softened. My guess is that it was in the early 1960s. By the late 1960s it was 30 days for the first offense. And you had to be a total dumbass to get caught. Only cops and teachers mattered. Most teachers would ignore anything they saw.

Sometime in the late 1960s a guy’s friends challenged him to walk down Silver Spring from Marlborough to Santa Monica smoking a cigar on a Friday afternoon. The wrong Bay teacher saw him and did his/her patriotic duty and reported the guy.

30 days for you dude!