On Thursday, The University of Texas hosted its annual Veterans Day ceremony at the Frank Denius Veterans Memorial Plaza on the northwest corner of Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium. The plaza is named in honor of the late Frank Denius, a two-time graduate of The University of Texas and a highly-decorated World War II veteran, who earned four Silver Stars and two Purple Hearts for his heroic leadership during World War II. The ceremony included the traditional laying of the wreath by UT President Jay Hartzell, ROTC Cadet/Midshipmen Commanders and Staff Sergeant Jeremiah Gunderson, U.S. Army (Retired). It is sponsored by the Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium Veterans Committee, The University of Texas Athletics Department, and The University of Texas Army, Navy, and Air Force ROTC Departments.
Below is a story from long-time Texas Sports Information Director and Texas Athletics Hall of Honor member Bill Little on the history of the iconic stadium and its name.
Bill Little commentary: The memorial in the stadium
Texas hosts its annual Veterans Recognition Game on Saturday.
It is hard to believe it has been almost more than a quarter of a century since University officials approached Darrell Royal with the idea of adding his name to the stadium, which is in its 98th year of operation this year.
Royal, himself a veteran of the U. S. Army Air Corps, was honored at the suggestion, but agreed only as long as the original stadium name – “Texas Memorial Stadium” – would remain, as well.
And that is why this week and this weekend’s Veterans Recognition Game remains very special to the UT Campus.
Just outside the northwest corner of the stadium, the ghosts stand sentinel, and the legends of three particular heroes remind us of sacrifice, commitment, and just how much the burning flame of freedom meant to those who have died fighting for our country.
A statue of a “doughboy” (a nickname used for a World War I U.S. soldier) is a reminder of how this all began in the days following what folks referred to as “The Great War” in the early part of the 20th Century. A plaque there remembers three Longhorns who died in that war.
Their stories are varied and significant. While the stadium was built as a memorial to all those Texans who were killed in World War I, three former Longhorn athletes were singled out on a plaque at the original tunnel entrance to the stadium. The three – Pete Edmond, Louis Jordan and Bothwell Kane – are immortalized by the plaque, which is part of the plaza on the corner of San Jacinto and 23rd streets (now DeLoss Dodds Way).
Probably the best of the former players was a multi-sport star named Pete Edmond.
The tucked-away file contained yellowed clippings, and as you opened it, you realized that in search of history, you had found it, and in search of a legend, you had found one.
The first thing I noticed in the Hall of Honor file of James A. “Pete” Edmond was a letter envelope dated Sept. 1918. It had three one-cent stamps on it and was addressed to Lieutenant James Edmond, Company G., 39th Infantry, Fourth Division, American Expeditionary Forces, France.
It had been marked “Return to Sender.”
Pete Edmond was one of the greatest student-athletes in the early days of The University of Texas. From the football season of 1913 through the baseball season of 1916, he earned 11 letters: three in football and four each in basketball and baseball. He also competed in wrestling, even though it was not an official UT sport. In the classroom, he held a student assistantship in history. He was a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity, the Friars and the Arrowhead.
Edmond was outstanding as a player in all sports. As an end in football, he was matched in 1913 against Notre Dame’s Knute Rockne, who would go on to become one of the most famous coaches in the history of the college game. Years after the Irish beat the Longhorns, 30-7 that season, Rockne recalled Edmond:
“I’ll never forget that player as long as I live. I played football against the best teams in the east. I played against the best in the west and against the best of other sections, but never was I forced to go up against a better wing. He was as clean as a whistle, but he played hard football…oh, how hard he did play, and I have always admired him for it.
“That was one great star in the southwest who did not get his just dues when all-American teams were picked. I can certainly vouch for that fact. He was a terror when his team was completely overwhelmed. I have often wondered what heights he achieved when playing against a traditional rival?”
In the years following his graduation from Texas, the Waco native married and found a job in the banking business in Orange, Texas. As The United States involvement in World War I deepened, Edmonds entered the U.S. Army and received a commission as a second lieutenant.
But you cannot capture on a plaque the story of Pete Edmond, or the message his life sent about the combined values of patriotism, and the challenges of real war and the philosophies of sport.
That, instead, is tucked away in that old file, where ghosts of the past march as a solemn reminder of why, on Veterans Day, we should celebrate all of these men and women, and what they have done.
Pete Edmond gave up his banking job to enter Officer’s Training Camp, and was commissioned as a second lieutenant assigned to the Fourth Division, 39th Infantry. He sailed for France in April 1918.
His family knew he was in Paris as America celebrated Independence Day on July 4, 1918. In the days before instant communications with cell phones and the Internet, the written word was all that a soldier, and his family had.
“Only little letters of a few lines came to us,” wrote a member of his family later. “But every day he wrote those few lines. A last letter and a rough picture came Oct. 24.”
Months later, after searching for word through the military and the Red Cross, the family received a cable gram from General Pershing himself.
“Deeply regret to inform you…” it began. It went on to describe where Edmond had been buried, in what would become the largest overseas cemetery in United States history.
Later, the family would begin to piece together the story of lieutenant Pete Edmond.
In a field “near Ferne de Filles, St. Thibaut, France,” on Aug. 6, 1918, he made a personal reconnaissance of German positions in the area, covering almost two miles of ground under heavy fire. For that, he was awarded the Silver Star, the third highest recognition in the US military.
On Sept. 26, at Nantilles, Edmond was wounded, but refused to go to the rear and stayed with his men as company commander.
Leaders do that; we’re told.
And then, on Oct. 11, 1918, he was killed charging a German machine gun position in the battle of the Argonne Forest, one of the bloodiest campaigns in the history of American warfare.
He died fighting for his men and fighting for his country.
One month later, on Nov. 11, the “War to End Wars,” was over.
It has been more than a century since Pete Edmond sailed for France, and in a sense, he is still there. His address there would be plot C, Row 37, Grave 14 in the American cemetery where the dead of the battle of the Meuse-Argone are buried at Romagne, France.
One of the most popular students at The University of Texas from 1911-1915 was a young man of German heritage from Fredericksburg, Texas, named L.J. “Louis” Jordan.
Jordan was like everybody’s big brother. He was a round-faced blond who stood over six feet tall and weighed 205 pounds, which was big for the time. By timeless standards, he was exactly what you would want in a player.
Jordan, in fact, was so gentle by nature he had to be coaxed to play football. But when he did, he became the greatest lineman, both offensively and defensively, of his era. He became the first Texas player to earn national recognition, earning Walter Camp second team all-American honors in 1914. It is significant that this was a time when people in the East barely recognized that football was played west of the Mississippi.
Jordan made the electrical engineering honor roll every year, and he helped Texas teams post a 27-4 record during his four years, including a perfect 8-0 mark as a captain of the team his senior season of 1914. While the Longhorns played most of their games then in Austin, Dallas matters in this story. It was in Dallas, before a crowd of 7,500 at Gaston Field – the Texas league baseball park – that Texas and Oklahoma met in what was then a showdown for power in the Southwest.
It is also notable that the game was usually played at the State fairgrounds, but horse racing had taken over the fair that day.
Oklahoma’s Hap Johnson ran the opening kickoff back 85-yards for a touchdown, and the Sooner hopes soared. In those days, opposing fans openly bet with each other, and a lot of Oklahoma money went up at that moment. While the bets were coming, Louis Jordan gathered the Texas team around him for the ensuing kickoff.
Clyde Littlefield, one of the great Texas legends who was playing on the team, remembered the speech until the day he died.
“He told us in no mincing words, with a few cuss words in German and some in English, ‘Nobody leaves this field until we beat the hell out of them.'”
Let the record show that Texas scored 32 straight points, winning 32-7. Eleven men started the game, and the same 11 finished it, and an awful lot of Oklahoma betting money stayed in Texas.
Jordan lettered three years in track and four in football at Texas, and his athletic skill was superior to those players of his time. But what he brought to the game is the enduring quality that every coach searches for in every player they seek and every company worth a toot desires: leadership.
They inducted Louis Jordan in the first class of the Longhorn Hall of Honor 67 years ago. He was one of only four men inducted, and was the only former athlete chosen.
Sadly, he was not there to get the award.
As the years go by, fewer and fewer of us remember World War II, and almost none remember World War I. Only the history books and the Internet will tell us of the Luneville Sector in France, where brave young men like Louis Jordan went to fight for that elusive dream called freedom and peace. Luneville was the “quiet sector” of France, where the French troops helped harden the young Americans for the battle with Germany. It is ironic that a young man who was so proud of his German heritage would go there and die.
On March 5, 1918, Louis Jordan died in another land in another time. Legend has it that two days later, on March 7, 1918, German artillery shells suddenly turned on the “quiet sector” and one shell hit a bunker where 21 Americans were hunkered down. The dirt collapsed on the soldiers, trapping them alive.
In the confusion that followed, they say a big blond headed American who nobody had seen in that unit from New York was cussing and yelling and urging the rest of the unit to dig with their bare hands to try to save the soldiers. They say, too, that he was seen charging at the artillery position, fighting with such rage that even hardened soldiers retreated.
Many of the soldiers died in that bunker, but those who lived praised their comrades of the 69th for risking their lives to save them. No one will ever know why the artillery shelling stopped.
News of the death of Louis Jordan, the first Texas officer killed in action, saddened the entire UT community. When they dedicated the new stadium in 1924 as Texas Memorial Stadium – in honor of the war veterans –the people of Fredericksburg erected a flagpole at the south end of the stadium where the Steinmark scoreboard stands today. It stood until 1971. Fred Steinmark, a Texas safety on the 1969 National Championship team, battled cancer until his death in 1971. Texas players on the way to the field touch his picture to symbolize the courage he showed. That spot is hallowed ground when it comes to courage.
Louis Jordan is important to us today because he represents what this game of football means to both sides. It is a challenge of the human spirit, and it is a contest played only on a Saturday in mock war. Louis Jordan reminds us that leadership and drive matter not only in a football game, but in life.
And somewhere in France, his ghost may be walking even in the next millennium, telling them all that “nobody leaves this field until we beat the hell out of them.”
When the Veterans Plaza was completed, the new Jordan Flag Pole was relocated there, where it stands beside the soldier’s statue.
Until Jordan’s remains were moved to Fredericksburg, there were actually three wooden crosses in the fields of France in 1918 – each for a former Longhorn football player who died fighting in World War I. Jordan and Edmond are in the Longhorn Hall of Honor and rank among the best athletes in school history. It is the legacy of the third that has endured in a unique way for almost 100 years.
The people of Fredericksburg erected a flagpole to honor their favorite son, Louis Jordan. General Pershing himself sent a personal message to the family of Pete Edmond, who won a Silver Star. Mrs. John D. Kane of Fort Worth, Texas, gave a scholarship to honor the memory of her son.
Bothwell Kane was a promising starting tackle on the 1912 Longhorn team, earning a letter as a freshman. That much we know. We also know that Lieutenant Bothwell Bierce Kane was mortally wounded in the bloody battle of the Ourcq River crossing in Picardy, France, in July 1918.
He is buried in the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, plot A, Row 8, Grave 63 in one of those fields with thousands of white crosses that still today dot the landscape where 30,000 Americans died in the same campaign of the war that claimed Kane.
Bothwell Kane’s story, like so many of those who died so long ago, could have ended here. Yearbooks, history chronicles, and all the rest cannot account for every story, every loss.
Mrs. Kane wanted to do something to honor her son.
In 1920, she established a scholarship with the fledgling Ex-Students Association now known as the Texas Exes.
She specified the scholarship should be granted to someone who plans to pursue a Christian vocation, such as the ministry or other such endeavors. This is what she wrote: “It should go to a man or woman who possess an unselfishness and sacrifice which characterized Bothwell Kane, and which was recognized and appreciated by his friends, his family and his classmates.”
For 100 years, that scholarship was has been presented to a deserving student. While its purpose has been reworked, it remains one of the oldest on record at the Texas Exes.
So what do we know about Bothwell Kane? That he, like all the others, was more than a name on a wall. That in his way he touched lives, both then and now.
The stadium has been rededicated many times, most significantly in 1977 when it was designated in honor of all U.S. Troops who have served in foreign conflicts. A stadium Veterans Committee oversees it. The committee’s commitment is to do exactly what the stadium founders intended – and what Royal maintained must remain its lasting tribute – to honor those who have perished, and who today stand in harm’s way in defense of our American dream.
History will remember the sacrifices of those before and since the creation of the stadium. And it will stand sentinel as younger generations are reminded of who they were, what they did.
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