Dec. 1, 2017
Bremerton, Wash. -
CARVER MEMORIES -- Spring, 1956
Willis Ball achieved much on football field, more off it
By Terry Mosher, Kitsap Sun, 11/20/17
I thought I had a good handle on all the good athletes who have come through this region, but then I came across an individual I had never heard of before.
Willis Lee Ball.
That probably does not ring a bell for you either. Ball, a 1946 graduate of Bremerton High School, is in the Western Washington University Athletics Hall of Fame, inducted in 1987 for football. He was an honorable mention Associated Press Little All-American (1955), honorable mention UPI All-Coast (1953) and All-Evergreen Conference (1953).
Ball, who died in 1987 of complications of renal failure, was a 6-foot-2, 210-pound defensive tackle for what was then Western Washington College of Education (now Western Washington University). He became the first African-American to graduate from the school, obtaining a degree in 1956 in education.
Ball moved to Bremerton in 1943, at age 14, shortly after his parents -- a stepdad (Samuel James) and mother arrived in the early 1940s from Winter Park, Fla. James took a job in the shipyard and the family lived in the segregated Westpark neighborhood.
Sandra (Ball) Campbell, Willis' only sibling, said many people of color from the south flocked to Bremerton because the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard was in a hiring frenzy during World War II.
Willis Ball
Bremerton's population soared to around 80,000 and the high school experienced an athletic Golden Age.
According to a 1946 Bremerton High yearbook supplied by Bob Fredericks, Willis played football for coach Dwight Scheyer his junior and senior years and was on the Bremerton boxing team his junior year.
"Here his love of football began," Campbell wrote about her brother, "embodying the lessons of teamwork and cooperation he so respected throughout his life.
"I know he played baseball in the South as a young kid, but most of his experience as a team member was with football, and that really started in Bremerton. And I think being a part of a team helped him ignore a lot of the racial stuff that was going on around him."
Darwin Gilchrist, who went on to star in college basketball at College of Puget Sound, was a Bremerton classmate of Ball and he remembers a huge senior class had just five black students. But if being in the vast minority bothered Ball, it didn't show.
"He was a happy-go-lucky fellow" Gilchrist said, "and was always hanging around the sports teams."
Campbell, who was born in Bremerton, said her brother (he was 17 years older than her) worked for about a year in the shipyard after high school and then joined the Air Force in a segregated unit. He spent four years in the Air Force and then was given a look-see by the University of Washington and Western for football. Western made an offer and a Hall of Fame career began.
Western was coached by Chuck Lappenbusch, and the Vikings were going through a bad stretch. In the years Ball played, the Vikings won just seven out of 25 games. That makes Ball's individual honors even more impressive. He was named honorable mention Little All-American in 1955, when the Vikings won just once.
After college, Ball worked at the Rainier State School in Buckley as a counselor and later at the Luther Burbank School, where he developed several programs combining sports and training for practical living skills as a recreational leader.
When he was 35, Ball went to work for the Seattle Parks and Recreation Department and several years later earned a promotion to a district management position.
Ball worked for more than 30 years in social services, including as part of the Federal Anti-poverty Model Cities Program in the 1960s, and was a tireless volunteer in nonprofit organizations.
A softball tournament to raise funds for minority students was named after him and the parks department, in cooperation with the WWU Foundation, and friends and family members, established a scholarship in his name that still exists.
The first Willis L. Ball Memorial Scholarship was awarded during the 1993-94 school year and the current total is 37. It is a permanent endowment, with awards continuing in perpetuity. Contributions can be made through giving@WWU.edu and by phone (360) 650-3027.
You would think the discrimination and racism that Ball faced would have scarred him and made him an angry man. But Ball was built differently. He was very tolerant of others.
"He didn't judge people," said Campbell, who moved from Bremerton to Seattle with her family in 1953 and graduated from Garfield High School. "He took people at face value. He looked for the common denominator in humanity for just about everybody. He had a way of finding the good in people. If somebody wasn't good, he just ignored them and moved on.
"His major contribution was his ability to avoid the ignorant stereotype attitudes around the environment he lived in -- the segregated South, Winter Park, Florida, a small segregated town, and the Jim Crow period."
Even his service in a segregated military was tough, according to Campbell.
"It was an all-black unit in Texas, "Campbell said. "His ability to navigate and thrive in those very contradictory environments is, for me, fantastic. He was the bridge in our family from Jim Crow South and then the experiences in Bremerton that were the exact opposite. And then back to (Jim Crow) in the military service and living in a 95 percent Caucasian environment in Bellingham. And to live that and to play football and do well academically ... it's just mind-boggling. He was very accepting of people."
That acceptance of conditions he could not control is what made him a beloved figure in his work, much of it centered on helping minority kids with problems overcome them and become productive citizens.
Campbell, writing about her brother, said, "Willis would be proud of Western's Compass 2 Campus program that thoughtfully and intentionally identifies and supports underrepresented students in their educational pursuits.
"Willis believed in inclusion. He carefully navigated around the ignorance and stereotype attitudes and practices encountered in his lifetime. He understood that to live, work and learn from these practices was the best way to challenge them."
So in an era now where there are sharp divisions in society and where hatred and racism has poked its ugly head out of the shadows, Ball would have found common ground no matter the skin color and moved on with love and acceptance for all.
And when Western took him into its Hall of Fame, they got a man who was good not on just one side of the ball, but on all sides of life's ball.
Written by Terry Mosher, who attended Western, majoring in political science and earning a bachelor's degree in 1965. He went on to a long career as a sports writer for the Bremerton Sun/Kitsap Sun and continues to write columns for the paper. Terry covered the Seattle Mariners for over 20 years and also was the Major League Baseball official scorer for Mariner games. He covered University of Washington football and Husky men's and women's basketball for nearly 30 years.
Presented by Paul Madison who served 48 years as sports information director at WWU from 1966 to 2015.
