Frank's Place: When West Catholic, West Philly High, and high school sports ruled in the city
The joy of exploring the past isn't in judging what was better or worse, but in appreciating what has and hasn't changed.
The joy of exploring the past isn't in judging what was better or worse, but in appreciating what has and hasn't changed.
Philadelphia high school football is a good example. Trying to compare players and teams from disparate eras is both futile and meaningless.
What's fascinating, though, is considering how we in a city whose allegiances are now almost thoroughly professional once adored the scholastic game.
For the first half of the 20th century, city title games, which pitted the champions of the Public and Catholic Leagues, often filled Franklin Field. When, for example, West Catholic and West Philadelphia met in the 1941 game, they did so before 43,000, a crowd befitting this matchup of powerhouse schools with the area's two coolest nicknames - Burrs and Speedboys.
High school games frequently were the lead stories in sports sections. Their stars were local celebrities. Their annual team banquets, like the one West Catholic held on Jan. 9, 1941, were huge social and civic events.
That football banquet attracted hundreds of handsomely dressed guests to the 600-room Hotel Philadelphian at 39th and Chestnut. Those who couldn't attend were able to read about it the following day in reports from the many sportswriters who covered it.
Letters were awarded there to 17 West players. They also got sweaters on which those letters could be sewn and miniature gold footballs hand-fashioned by a local jeweler.
And if all that weren't enough to convince you of the importance of high school football in prewar Philadelphia, consider that the banquet's principal guest was Humphrey Bogart.
One of the most famous movie stars in the world at the time, Bogie interrupted a promotional tour for his new film, High Sierra, to attend. Players remembered him as "personable and gracious" and noted that he took time to shake hands with each of them.
That night's big reveal - and the subject of a four-column headline in the next day's Inquirer - was the naming of the 1941 co-captains, Paul Lhulier and John Willis.
The '41 West Catholic team would go on to win the Catholic League title and play to a 0-0 tie in the previously mentioned city championship game against its neighborhood rival.
One of West's stars was two-way end Frank "Bud" Kane. A Yeadon resident, the 5-10, 160-pound Kane has the distinction of being the only player ever to letter in football for three Big Five schools - Temple, Penn, and Villanova.
After graduating from West in 1942, seven months into America's involvement in World War II, Kane enlisted in the Navy. While waiting to be called to duty, he enrolled at Temple and played for coach Ray Morrison's 2-5-3 Owls.
Eventually he was placed in the Navy's V-12 program, meant to create educated officers in a hurry. The intense four-month course took place at Penn, where Kane once again played football.
He graduated from the V-12 program but was allowed to continue his education and his college football career at Villanova. Kane was no average player either. In 1990, Villanova inducted him into its sports Hall of Fame.
He died at 88 in 2012, still lamenting the fact that West Catholic didn't beat West Philadelphia in that scoreless city title game.
Now that both schools are shadows of their ex-selves, it's hard to recall their 1940s stature. West Philadelphia was booming and the area's two primary high schools - just two blocks apart - were athletic powers and the kind of fierce rivals proximity creates.
If you stood on the parapets atop the grand entrance to West Philadelphia High, you could have looked into West Catholic's windows. The pair of sturdy, imposing educational castles - one brick, the other stone - dominated the landscape and collective psyche of West Philly for the better part of a century.
West Philadelphia housed 5,000 students when its five-story, block-long, Gothic school opened at 47th and Walnut in 1912. Four years later, West Catholic High for Boys was built at 49th and Chestnut, a handsome stone structure that reflected the size, power, and wealth of Philadelphia's burgeoning archdiocese.
But as the demographics of the city and Catholic church changed, the castles came under attack from unseen forces.
Despite its impressive heft, West Philadelphia High couldn't fend off time. It sits empty now on the edge of Penn's expanding campus, soon to be converted into luxury apartments.
When the building was abandoned in 2016, West Philadelphia's enrollment had dropped to just over 500, a tenth of its original total. Its students now occupy a new structure that, ironically, rose on rival West Catholic's footprint.
Beset by enrollment declines of its own, West Catholic fled its longtime home in 1989, the boys joining their once-segregated female counterparts nearby at what had been West Catholic High School for Girls. The old building at 49th and Chestnut, long a familiar site for riders on the adjacent Market Street El, was demolished in 2009.
West Catholic itself nearly disappeared in 2012 but, after an archdiocesan reprieve and a change to prep-school status, things appear to have stabilized.
It has one of the area's largest and most loyal alumni bases. One graduate recently donated $5 million to the school. Most still get teary-eyed remembering their old home, with its dark, low-ceilinged basement gym and that compact football practice field in the rear.
Bogie's not around anymore. But maybe those graduates can take comfort in the sentiment - if not the exact words - he expressed at the end of Casablanca, a classic film released a year after Bogart's appearance at West Catholic's banquet:
The problems of a few thousand alumni might not amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. But we'll always have 49th and Chestnut.
@philafitz