Remembering the Dream Team of ’47
In 70 years no one has upset the U.S. collegiate wrestling powerhouses as decisively as Cornell College’s storied 1947 team that won both the NCAA and AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) titles.
“No private college has ever won, nor probably ever will win, the wrestling championships again. There was only one division and it was all comers,” says Arno Niemand, who chronicled the team’s feats in the book “The Dream Team of 1947.”
At the heart of this story was Paul Scott ’29, a charismatic recruiter and coach who created a team of high school championship wrestlers and World War II veterans.
“It was a sweet spot with the GI Bill and being able to get these three superstars from West Waterloo,” says Niemand. “Clearly Paul Scott worked very hard to put this team together. His willingness to travel—which a lot of coaches were unwilling to do—to the AAU, made Cornell more visible. Scott was way ahead of his time in terms of recruiting nationally.” Scott was also an Iowa high school wrestling official and scouted teams throughout the state. After officiating at the 1946 Iowa high school championships, he recruited the Waterloo West state champs—Lowell Lange ’50, Dick Hauser ’50, and Leo Thompsen ’50—by inviting them to wrestle in the AAU championships in New York City. In New York he recruited recently returned servicemen Rodger Snook ’50 and Al Partin ’50. Joining the core team would be veterans Fred Dexter ’50 and Kent Lange ’50 (Lowell’s brother).
The team not only won both national titles, it became the first team ever honored by the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.
Team members remember Scott
Surviving team members agree that Coach Scott, who died in 2003 at age 97 after a legendary career as Cornell’s Alumni Director, was a great motivator, a great recruiter, and knew how to keep his athletes conditioned and healthy. What he did not do, surprisingly, was coach wrestling technique.
“Scott never did any coaching—he didn’t have to. He agreed that what he did was recruit, make up the schedule, and work the hell out of us,”
says Partin, 95, the heavyweight and oldest on the team (he was 24 when he arrived at Cornell).
Partin met Scott at the ’46 AAU meet in New York City and told him he planned to attend Purdue. “Scott said, ‘No, why don’t you come to Cornell.’ He got out the application, asked me all the questions, and turned in the application. The next mail I got was from Cornell saying I was accepted,” Partin says.
Partin, a retired Knox College football coach, says he and Scott didn’t always agree.
“He wanted to win and he was a winner. I used to get him pretty mad because I was the only one on the team who wasn’t too enthusiastic if we won or lost. It didn’t make any difference to me. We didn’t lose many of them, though,” he recalls.
Partin says he also upset Scott when he married Genevieve Callinan Partin ’48 in 1948 (the couple is still married). “He thought it was a distraction,” he recalls.
He gives Scott credit for this: All the guys graduated. “He got us all through,” Partin says. “A lot of these teams that win championships have guys just wrestle one year and that’s it.”
Like Partin, Ben McAdams ’50—a state champ from Rock Island, Illinois—had other plans before Scott convinced him to join the team. “Scotty said, ‘Bennie, we’re going to have a good wrestling team. You need to come to Cornell.’ I said, ‘I’m going to go into the Navy.’ He said, ‘Nope, you’re going to go to Cornell.’ That’s what I did,” he recalls. “He was a great motivator.”
McAdams, a retired school superintendent, recalls that Scott “wasn’t only concerned with what you did on the mat, he was concerned with what you did with your life. I got in some trouble and got kicked out of Cornell for a semester. Scotty got me back in.”
Lowell Lange, one of the Waterloo freshmen and the undisputed star of the star-studded team, recalls that Scott never gave motivational speeches before meets. “He was a motivator just by ordinary talking. He never had a group meeting before the match,” says Lange. “We knew winning was very important to him. He didn’t take losing lightly either.”
Lange, who coached Georgia Tech’s wrestling team for 30 years, says that the team had to overcome a lack of appropriate facilities and transportation.
“Our facilities for wrestling were the pits. Our freshman year we could only work out at the end of the two basketball courts, between the basket and the wall,” Lange says. “We had an old station wagon that we used for travel, and it was about one leg in the grave.”
Lange and his West Waterloo teammates helped convince Lange’s brother, Kent Lange ’50, to join the starting team. Kent Lange was in the Aleutian Islands preparing to leave the Air Force when Lowell called to say they wanted him for the Cornell team.
During his first week on campus Kent Lange met Carol Petersen Lange ’51 and they were married in 1949, after his junior year.
“It was a neat time. The war was over and the guys were all enjoying the wrestling,” Carol recalls. “When they went on trips, the wives and girlfriends would get together to make the time go faster.”
She says the home matches in Alumni Gym were packed with spectators, and students “were delighted because the team was so good. I never heard any criticism of the team. They were friendly. They didn’t get special treatment from faculty. They were just expected to win.”
One member of the team would later make a huge impact on the school.
Scott recruited Richard Small ’50 to the team, and also later introduced Richard to his future wife, Norma Thomas Small. “I was no athlete in high school,” Small recalls. “When I got to Cornell, I thought the only way to get a letter was to be manager. So I was manager of the cross country team, and at the end of the cross country season, Paul Scott said to me, come out for wrestling. Well, I knew nothing about it. I had never even seen a high school match. But it was a great experience to be part of the backup team.”
Small eventually became a Midwest Conference wrestling champion. He joined the Cornell Board of Trustees in 1971, was board chair, and is a Life Trustee. He and Norma, an Honorary Trustee and alumna, are the most generous philanthropists in Cornell College history.
“My appreciation of being able to be part of that great team and being able to wrestle the following years is the basis of my loyalty to Cornell College,” he says.
Legacy lives on
The 1947 team legacy remains strong at Cornell. Head Wrestling Coach Mike Duroe and members of the 2017 team recently recreated a classic 1947 photo of the national championship team. Posters of the 1947 and 2017 photos will become part of the Smithsonian traveling exhibit, “Hometown Teams: How Sports Shape America,” opening in Mount Vernon on March 18, 2018.
Cornell’s wrestling program has seen continued success. In the past two years, the Rams have recorded back-to-back, top-20 NCAA team finishes with three all-Americans and a pair of NCAA finalists. The team has also won 20 dual meets over the last two years, including a victory over Simpson in November of 2016 at Ash Park football field— the program’s first-ever outdoor wrestling meet. Coach Duroe is Cornell’s winningest wrestling coach with a 139-92-2 record in 12 seasons.
Other living members of the team, according to college records, are Mark Anthony ’50, John Gregg ’49, Richard Houser ’50, Joe Pelisek ’48, Philip Polgreen ’50, Walt Romanowski ’51, and Lynn Stiles ’50.
