Colorado guard, Bob
Spicer, here represents a generation.
In the fall of 1946, when Spicer returned to the Boulder
campus after
a three-year absence, he announced
to CU coach Jim Yeager he wanted
to play football
again.
Remembering Spicer as a freshman letterman for the 1942 Buffaloes, and
as a tough guard from Leavenworth, Kan., Yeager welcomed
him back.
Yeager didn't ask Spicer many questions.
Neither
did the team doctors.
In fact, as Spicer remembers it, he didn't even have to take
a physical.
"If you were walking, you were OK," Spicer said with a laugh last
week from his home in Park Ridge, Ill.
In the locker room, or at his fraternity house, there was just something
about Spicer that discouraged extensive interrogation. One could tell.
He didn't want to talk about what he did during the war.
Some knew
he had been a soldier. Some knew
he was a Marine. They didn't know
many details.
"I didn't want
to think about it too much, much less talk about it,"
Spicer said. "Keeping quiet was the way to go."
In the immediate post-war years, when so many men were arriving back
on campus and attending school on the G.I. Bill, Spicer's veteran status
didn't make him unique.
The circumstances
did.
His right eye was fake, a $75 piece of cosmetic glass.
He
didn't tell anyone. Not his coaches. Not his teammates.
So needless to say,
he also didn't relate the story of how he lost his eye.
It happened after he had
played one year of football for the Buffaloes.
When Spicer was a freshman in 1942, the Buffs went
7-2. The fall term
ended prematurely,
Spicer recalled, because wartime allocation of resources
meant "they couldn't buy enough coal for the furnaces." Spicer went home,
and then traveled to Kansas City, Mo., to enlist in the Marines.
"I wanted to go," he said, simply. "It was my duty."
As
a sergeant, he came ashore with the Marines at Bougainville, the
largest island in the Solomons, in November 1943. "We secured
part of the island to build a landing strip," he recalled.
His unit moved on to another island, Emeru, by then calm,
but went back into action on Guam.
By late 1944, he was on Guadalcanal, where the Sixth Marine Division
was formed and he was the starting quarterback for the 4th Regiment
in a rough-and-tumble, scoreless Christmas Eve touch football
game
against the 29th Regiment. Both rosters
included NFL and college stars.
Okinawa was next. In the Battle of Sugar Loaf Hill, a week-long
siege
of heroism for the Marines, many of Spicer's
buddies died. He suffered
a shrapnel wound in
his arm. "I was looking when I should have been
ducking," he said.
Spicer went off the lines, but returned a week later wearing a bandage.
In the final stages of the Okinawa fighting, when he and his unit
encountered a trench full of enemy soldiers, he took a grenade
fragment in
his right eye. "That's how
I lost my eye," he said. "That's
what I think, anyway.
You
don't really know. I got back in the hospital
and my eye started scratching
and it got all puffed up, real big.
They said they had to take it out."
Nearly 3,000 Marines died on Okinawa,
including 15 who played in
the Christmas Eve
touch football game. (My story on the Mosquito Bowl.)
"I wondered why it was them and not me,"
Spicer said. "Nobody
could answer that."
Released from the
Marines in January 1946, Spicer learned to
navigate
with a limited field of vision. "You have no depth perception,
but that doesn't really figure into it where I played," he said.
He
got good enough at it to prevent it from becoming an issue with his
coaches, Yeager in 1946 and 1947, and then Dal Ward in 1948. Starting
at guard in his junior and senior seasons, Spicer also was the Buffs' captain
in 1948, CU's first year in the Big Seven Conference.
Incredibly, he also
played catcher for the CU baseball team. As a right-handed
hitter, at least, he could focus with his left, or lead, eye. "The worst thing was,
I couldn't follow pop-ups," he said. "My batting average wasn't
very high. I either
hit home runs or struck
out."
After leaving CU, he was a news editor for a Burlington, Iowa, radio station, and
then got into the banking field in the Chicago area. "I went in as a trainee and
then
became an officer," he said.
He and Nancy Spicer have been married for 55 years and have five children and 17
grandchildren.
"Three times a week, I go to kidney dialysis," he said. "Other than that, I guard
the television set."
Two years ago, Spicer got a new glass eye. "First one was $75, this one was $750,"
he said, adding he didn't have to pay for it. "That's how I measure
inflation."
To Bob Spicer and all veterans, ex-football players
or otherwise:
Thanks.
We owe you.
