This account is being presented with the permission 
of Walter J. Klein

who authored the Book “A Bowl Full of Miracles” and is the only known written  account of the first fifty year History of the Shrine Bowl Event .

 We appreciate Mr. Klein’s generosity in allowing us to share this with you.

How The Shrine Bowl Began.

     My Dad was a Shriner. He had a parking space on the back of the Sanders house up there on South Tryon Street that became the Red Fez Club.  I use to go up there to see Mr. Blythe before I got to be a Shriner.

      That was back in the thirties when the Shrine Bowl game was coming about. They had those old high-backed chairs in the Red Fez Club.  They sat around and chewed tobacco and spit in the fireplace.

     Hix Palmer and Ernest Sifford, each of them said he got the Shrine Bowl game started. But I think between them and others working is the way it got started.

 And that is how Bill Isenhour, Jr. describes the official and historic origin of the Shrine Bowl of the Carolinas.

 Most other accounts dovetail with Bill Isenhour’s.  The subject of discussion around the fireplace was the annual Shrine East  West Game played in San Francisco.  It was bringing in major funds to assist the operations of the Shriners Hospitals for Crippled Children.  If they could such success on the west coast, why couldn’t Shriners in the East do the same?

 Out of such questions can come answers that make history, and so it was. 

 The concept of a high school all-star football game took form in late 1936 and early 1937.  That was the time when people who read anything were reading Gone with the Wind, when the Great Depression looked as it could go on forever, when President Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court, and when Amelia Earhart disappeared in the Pacific.

 The early names associated with this very special game were all well-known and well-loved citizens and Shriners. Which came first among them is not for us to judge, they sit today, symbolically, at the round table of honor.

 Bob Allen reminisced in 1978 about the bowl beginnings.

      I was less than enthusiastic about the idea when Hendrix Palmer approached me, Allen remembered.  I’d been involved with previous all-star games, and they weren’t successful.  He was struggling with the regular football season when Palmer told Allen how impressed he was wit the Shrine East West game during a recent visit to San Francisco.

      It’s a great idea to raise money for charities, Coach Allen. Hendrix said

     I told Chief Palmer (he was Charlotte Fire Chief) that I’d  be glad to talk it over during the winter.  Allen smiled.  I thought that would be the end of it. But about February Chief Palmer was in my office again.  He convinced me, Then he talked about the idea with officials at Oasis Temple here I recall Roy Smith and Clarence Beeson were among those very much for it.

     Robert L. Sides was Potentate of Sudan Temple in New Bern in 1968.  His memory of the original of the Shrine Bowl is quite different from the other accounts.  First off, the game was a brainchild of my brother. L., R. Sides, and one of the boys at the radio station in Charlotte.  My brother was Director of Music in the city school and Director of Oasis Temple band.

     Those two, with help from many others in Oasis and Hejaz, worked the plans out to fruition for the first game.

    Robert Sides attended the first game and 37 games there after.  He was playing trumpet in the Sudan band in 1937, but that band didn’t get to go. So he played anyway ---- in the Oasis band.

    If there were a contemporary official story of the beginning of the Shrine bowl game. It would be the one published on page 31 of the 1945 program.  During the administration of Past Potentate J. Sidney Wingate of Gastonia, N.C., the idea of the Shrine All Star High School Football Game was conceived by W.H. Palmer, now Assistant Rabban on the Official Divan of Oasis Temple.  The idea was presented to Potentate Winget and received his hearty approval Ernest J. Sifford was appointed the General Chairman and W.H. Palmer Vice Chairman of a committee to play and stage the first game. The groundwork for a successful enterprise was laid with this committee. The game was played in Charlotte on the first Saturday in December 1737.

 Then as now, Shriners did not know how to say NO.  The infant organization became a real and effective one.  Out of Oasis Temple sprang leadership for everything from involving the other three Carolina Shrine temples to selling and buying --- programs ads. F. A. Haunsek took the job of putting the first program together, succeeding in getting worthy messages of greetings and encouragements from North Carolina Governor Clyde R. Hoey, South Carolina Governor Olin D. Johnston, Charlotte Observer Sports Editor Jake Wade. Charlotte News Sports Editor Wade Ison, Raleigh News and Observer Sports Editor Anthony J. Kelvin, Luella Schloeman, Superintendent of the Greenville hospital and W. Freeland Kendrick, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Hospital.

   The pioneers of the game printed 25,000 blue tickets and found buyers for only 5550 of them. The very first ticket read. ADMIT ONE Admission $1.00.  NORTH AND SOUTH CAROLINA HIGH SCHOOL ALL-STAR CHAMPIONSHIP FOOTBALL GAME. American Legion Memorial Stadium Charlotte  December 4, 1937, 2:30 P.M. Hejaz, Omar, Sudan and Oasis Temple, A.A.O.N.M.S Benefit Shriners Cripple Children’s Hospital, Greenville, S.C, NO 0001.

     One noble hustler sold the printing bill to Pure Oil Company of the Carolinas, which got a sponsorship plug on the back crediting them with donating the tickets.

     But selling the tickets, that was something else. Isenhour remembers the pain well.  They were trying to sell tickets for a dollar apiece and you just couldn’t get0 people to pay a dollar to go out there to that first game.  I personally took a bunch of tickets and went to places like Southern Engineering and around cement plants and sol them there. That’s how it went for years, selling one ticket a time.  We didn’t do too well until after World War II.  Then tickets sales really blossomed out.

     There was a general feeling of malaise the first year that extended beyond Coach Allen’s doubts and difficulty in getting players and in Bill Isenhour’s trying to sell tickets. Even with the brilliant success story of the San Francisco East  West game to point to, the Carolina all  - star game had no reputation, no record, no clout.  Hendrix Palmer and Roy Smith and Clarence Beeson and Ernest Sifford and Bob Allen and the others were working on pure nerve, brass and guts.

     Anyone who has originated a sports festival or pageant knows all too well the gnawing feeling in the stomach that stays there day and night through the months of constructing an organization. You know your reputations on the line. You see failure staring you in the face with every decision and ever act.  For every word of encouragement you hear, there are three telling you what a damned fool you are to get mixed up in something like this.

     So the pioneers of the Shrine Bowl were not only people who happened to be at the right place at the right time to make history. They were strong and dedicated men.  They did heroic things.

     They began the largest and longest-lasting high school football event in the world.

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