When Toledo, Ohio, leaders decided right after World War II to create a new college football bowl game, its originators opted to name it after one of the city’s big industries.

With that, the Glass Bowl was born, complete with a 25-pound etched glass bowl for the winning team, the first time any bowl game offered an honest-to-God bowl to the victors. The winning players got miniature versions.

But the most surprising thing about that game? One of the teams competing on the field that December day in 1946 was none other than the undefeated Bates College Bobcats.

In the history of college football in Maine, stretching back 150 years, it appears only one other squad from the Pine Tree State ever played in a genuine bowl game.

In 1965, a talented University of Maine team made the cut for the Tangerine Bowl, which is still around today, though it now carries the name Citrus Bowl since it cut a deal with the Florida Citrus Commission in 1983 to honor a wider variety of the Sunshine State’s fruit.

Sadly for the Black Bears, the East Carolina Pirates crushed UMaine 31-0 in an ugly, lopsided game in which the team from Orono gave up four interceptions and lost two fumbles.

Bates put up a far better fight against the University of Toledo Rockets, though they, too, came up short in a competitive match on their opponent’s home turf.

How Bates happened to get that chance – one unlikely to emerge again in today’s high-stakes, big-dollar world of college football – is a story worth remembering.

Days after the game, the Lewiston Daily Sun’s Ted Taylor called it “perhaps the most important game of football yet played by any Maine college.”

“It was a beautiful ball game and greatly benefitted the standing of Maine football,” Taylor wrote, “owing to the national attention drawn to the previously unknown quality of ball played by Maine teams.”

A great season for the Bobcats

Let’s make it clear: Lewiston’s Bates College has a great many things about it that are amazing, but its football team has rarely been one of them despite its record as the first college team in Maine to compete on the gridiron.

Every now and then the Bobcats field a team that can compete with the school’s peers, especially the squads from Colby and Bowdoin colleges in Maine. But football glory has been vanishingly rare at Garcelon Field.

There was no reason to think 1946 was going to be much different.

After all, Bates hadn’t played a football game for three straight seasons during World War II. Players were scarce during the war and people were focused on something more important than football.

Across the nation, though, fans looked forward to the 1946 season. The war had been won and a whole bunch of veterans had come pouring back to college, more mature than ordinary students and maybe carrying a little extra swagger after whipping the Nazis.

Only two players on the entire Bates team had been too young to serve. The rest of the 28-person team consisted of veterans.

During the regular season, Bates beat up on opponents, with its sterling defense giving up just 10 points over seven games. Neither Colby nor Bowdoin got on the scoreboard against the Bobcats.

At the end of the regular season, Bates had a 7-0 record, one of only a handful of teams in the nation that stood undefeated.

Normally, that would have been the end of it. Schools like Bates didn’t go to bowl games or yearn for national championships.

But with the war finally over, a spate of new bowl games came into existence as civic pride overcame financial fretting, opening the door for more schools to participate.

The Glass Bowl was one of them.

Origins of the Glass Bowl

The notion of naming a football game the Glass Bowl seems a little odd on its face. Glass, after all, is more often connected with words such as “broken” than ones carrying connotations of strength and grit.

Football and glass don’t have any obvious tie.

But sometimes it takes a visionary to see what everyone else misses.

For the Glass Bowl, that man was Wayne Kohn, a structural engineer at a Toledo, Ohio, glass company who loved football, glass and the University of Toledo, not necessarily in that order.

He managed to convince the university first to name its sunken football stadium the Glass Bowl, a nod to the city’s premier industry, which churned out everything from pickle jars to a brand-new product called Fiberglass.

Then Kohn’s push got civic leaders to back a plan to host a college football bowl game at the end of each season, inviting a topnotch gridiron team from elsewhere in the land to come to Ohio and take on the University of Toledo’s Rockets.

It all came together quickly and before long plans were afoot for the first Glass Bowl game, slated to take place on Dec. 7, 1946, the fifth anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Kohn, by the way, must have been a persuasive, skillful man. By the time he died in 2011 at the age of 93, he had become vice president of engineering for Libbey-Owens-Ford, a major glassmaker, and president of the Downtown Exchange Club in Toledo.

Getting to the game

Two days before kickoff, the Bates community turned out in huge numbers to send off their local champions to the Glass Bowl.

A cheering throng that included many Lewiston residents, students and Bates cheerleaders, who couldn’t go along, paraded from campus to the Maine Central Railroad station in Lewiston.

Students trailing the team held a huge banner reading “1,000 Miles to Victory.” Smaller signs urged the Bobcats to “Rock the Rockets” or smash them, crush them or otherwise leave them broken on the playing field.

Behind them was a buggy that featured a figure meant to represent Toledo’s Rockets. He was hung in effigy, the Journal noted, with a man dressed in Daniel Boone-like hunting garb beside it.

The Bates team piled into a Pullman car with a sign that read “Bobcats Bound to Beat Toledo.”

Somebody put a cat in a cage that may have been a bobcat, as claimed, but it was caught in an alley near historic Parker Hall so it probably wasn’t. It did, however, enjoy drinking milk from a baby bottle proffered by a Bates player named Cuddle Cunane.

At the sendoff ceremony, a state agricultural official handed the team two crates of Maine apples, half of them Red Delicious and half of them Gold Delicious. The players were showered with kisses and promised more if they returned victorious.

The train rolled out of the station as students sang Bates songs together, vowing they’d be on hand the following Monday to welcome the team home whether it won or lost.

But players and coaches weren’t the only ones heading for Toledo. Fans, too, found a way.

Resident Lucille Dingley managed to charter a plane for about 20 people to wing their way to Toledo. Some students managed to arrange another flight. Two semi-professional football players who had graduated from Lewiston High School hitchhiked to Ohio. Others drove.

Aboard the train to Toledo

Aboard the long train ride to Toledo, the Journal’s sports editor at the time, Norman S. Thomas, heard all sorts of tidbits.

He said the players were “getting a kick out” of the fact that they were the first from Maine to play in a bowl game. But they weren’t sure of victory. They simply wanted to show that “a good small college team from New England” could compete with one from the Midwest.

One of the stars from Bates, Linden “Lindy” Blanchard, had been sick for a few weeks, Thomas learned. But for the past week, a Lewiston grocer, Conrad Cloutier, had been sending him steaks to build up his strength again.

Thomas also discovered that the Maine Development Commission had shipped an 18-pound lobster, to be handed to the governor of Ohio at the game. A Martha Washington bedspread from Bates Mill was also earmarked for a gift.

Thomas noted that at least five players were married to “very comely wives.” He said one of them stood on her tiptoes to make sure her husband had washed his ears.

“If you heard something that sounded like baby talk” from the players, Thomas said, “it wasn’t some fond parents telling what Baby Joe or Baby Ruth was saying. It was a bunch of boys who used radio or telegraph code during the war reviewing their ‘das’ and ‘dits.’”

Most of the Bates squad spent the trip playing cards and chattering.

But Thomas noted that a few of them had their schoolbooks and were “getting in a little extra scholastic work.”

When the team arrived in Toledo 24 hours later, seven station wagons met the train and carried members to the Commodore Perry Hotel for a rest. On Friday night, both teams had dinner at an American Legion hall before heading to the stadium on a foggy evening for a look around before hitting the sack.

Competing for the Glass Bowl

There’s not much to say about the game itself, held before 12,000 fans on a lovely late autumn day after a ceremony honoring veterans.

During halftime, Ohio’s governor got his gigantic lobster and the bedspread. There were five marching bands and a Glass Bowl queen, whom Thomas called “a looker” in one of his dispatches from Ohio.

Both teams played well, with Bates scoring first but not often enough.

The Rockets got a couple breaks and wound up winning 21-12, a close contest by any measure.

The United Press report on the game said the Rockets “had all they could handle in a stubborn Maine team headed by fleet Art Blanchard,” a 166-pound triple-threat back from Massachusetts. Art was Lindy’s younger brother.

“It was his passing, running and punting which carried the invaders to one touchdown and set up another in the closing moments which was ruined by a fumble on the three-yard line,” the UP said.

Blanchard, a freshman, won The Toledo Blade’s outstanding player of the game award. Twenty-two of the 24 sportswriters covering the game voted for him.

Blanchard was talented and tough, an Army veteran who earned a Purple Heart after shrapnel sliced into his shoulder and right leg on Bloody Nose Ridge during the 1944 invasion of the coral island of Peleliu in the Pacific Ocean.

With his brother Lindy, Art Blanchard returned to Toledo for the 1947 Glass Bowl game, where New Hampshire lost to the hometown favorites. The Toledo Blade newspaper gave him a glass plaque with his own bust front and center.

Reviewing the 1946 game, The Journal said that “Bates lost on the scoreboard but the important part about this contest is that Bates was ‘in there fighting’ to the last second” despite being outweighed and outpowered.

Bud Cornish, sports editor of the Portland Sunday Telegram, said the Bobcats put up a “brilliant fight.”

“Bates played a valiant game and well deserves the plaudits of the folks back home,” the Journal said.

That was the last bowl game Bates played in.

The Glass Bowl game itself only lasted four years. After Toledo lost in 1949, its sponsors pulled the plug, one of many 1940s bowl games that didn’t make it to the 1950s, in part because Toledo’s team started losing.

Three-quarters of a century later, as football fans watch bowl after bowl featuring nationally ranked college contenders, it may seem impossible that Bates once sent a team a thousand miles to play in one.

But it really did happen.

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