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LETTERS: Salty sidewalk, bus line, tear gas opinions PAGE 5A
2018 Year in Review
Blast from the distant past: Local man played for Gophers Rose Bowl team BY BRUCE STRAND SPORTS CONTRIBUTOR
Meeting with Paul Ramseth is a bit like encountering someone from an ancient tribe, a lost civilization. Yes, walking among us is a living remnant from the only Minnesota Gopher football teams to play in the Rose Bowl. “We thought we’d go back every year,” said Ramseth, 75, about the early 1960s. Instead, it’s been 57 years, about three generations, since the U of M went to a Rose Bowl, or played in any Jan. 1 game for that matter. Ramseth, who lives on Bald Eagle Lake, joined the Gophers in 1960 on scholarship after sparkling in four sports at Redwood Falls. Freshmen were not eligible to play then, so he did not make the trip to Pasadena that season, when the Gophers won the Big Ten but lost to Washington 17-7 in the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day 1961. A year later, he was third-string quarterback on the 1961 team that placed second in the Big Ten and returned to the Rose Bowl because — things were a bit different then — the Ohio State faculty voted not to let the Buckeyes play, fearful that football was overshadowing academics. The Gophers made the most of that second chance, beating UCLA 21-3 on New Year’s Day 1962. Ramseth’s contribution to the victory was running the “scout team” that executed UCLA’s old-fashioned single-wing offense against the Gopher defense during the weeks of preparation. In the last minute of the Rose Bowl, coach Murray Warmath sent Ramseth and the scout team into the game to run out the clock. So he got on the field, but didn’t actually run a play. “I’d been running the UCLA offense so long, I could barely remember our plays,” he recalls. “The guys in the huddle wanted to run the UCLA plays, but I said absolutely not, it
W
hew. Looking back at the White Bear Press, the variety of community news and feature stories published in 2018 was copious. We can’t begin to include everything in this year-end review, but highlights have been gleaned, as is tradition. As we start the new year, we hope 2019 is filled with good health, good cheer and good newspaper copy. That’s a resolution we plan to keep.
SEE YEAR IN REVIEW, PAGES 3A, 7A, 8A, 10A, 11A, 14A, 16A
SEE ROSE BOWL, PAGE 9A
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