At some point before the 1973 high school football season, the administration at Palo Verde High School informed history teacher/football coach Van Howe that ‘73 would be his final season at the school.
Not because the Titans had gone 41-57-4 over Howe’s 11 coaching seasons — not because they had slumped to 3-7 a year earlier and had never been a factor in the state playoffs — but because he was about to turn 65.
A half-century ago, state and federal organizations such as the Tucson Unified School District had a mandatory retirement age of 65.
A former Naval gunnery officer during World War II who spent three years in combat duty in the Atlantic theater and coached on staffs of perhaps the two worst Arizona football teams of the 20th century — the 1-8-1 and 3-7 teams of 1958 and 1959 — Howe survived serious challenges in his life. He wasn’t about to mail it in and let someone else worry about the sorry football history of the 11-year-old high school.
As training camp began in August of ’73, Howe put his history lectures to use. He wrote a football version of the Declaration of Independence, of which the key sentence was: “We resolve to win each and every game.”
Howe asked his 26 returning lettermen to read the Titans’ “Declaration of Football Success” and, if they were all-in, to sign it and commit to a memorable season.
All 26 signed it.
The Titans went 13-0 and won the state championship.
“Most of the kids believe this is our year,” Howe told the Star in early August of 1973. Almost no other football team in Tucson paid any attention. Palo Verde had been a pushover for so long it didn’t seem possible that the Titans could suddenly win 13 straight games, including playoff victories over Mesa, Salpointe Catholic and Phoenix Camelback.
The only other Southern Arizona football teams to ever post undefeated seasons were Tucson High and Marana.
But after Palo Verde beat favored Sahuaro 21-14 on the Cougars’ field in Game 2, Howe believed he might indeed have a special group. On the short bus ride home, Howe asked Palo Verde athletic director Art Droegemeier — who had driven the team bus because the original driver had a last-minute conflict — if he would drive the bus the rest of the season.
It was unusual in 1973 for a high school athletic director to double as bus driver, but Howe’s superstition stuck. Two weeks later, Droegemeier drove the bus to Sierra Vista for a tough 10-6 victory over Buena. And he drove the bus to subsequent victories at Pueblo, Santa Rita, Cholla, Salpointe and Mesa.
The defense-first Titans allowed just 48 points in 10 regular season games. It then routed Salpointe 41-6 to open the state playoffs before a crowd of 8,700 at Arizona Stadium.
Palo Verde won on toughness and discipline. Its best player was probably guard-linebacker Paul Swack, a junior who made the All-State first team. Its star running back, Robert Fowler, who would gain 1,114 yards, was injured late in the season, periodically keeping him on the bench in playoff games. But senior quarterback Chuck Helms, who only completed 35 passes for 564 entering the state championship showdown, proved to be a gamer, a difference-maker in the clutch.
After Camelback scored to take a 20-15 lead with 6:13 remaining at Sun Devil Stadium, Helms led an 80-yard drive for the winning touchdown with 34 seconds to go. Helms scored on an epic fourth-and-goal play from the 1-yard line to beat the favored Spartans.
“Coach Howe asked me what I wanted to run,” Helms said in January, when Howe was inducted posthumously into the Salem High School Hall of Fame in his Illinois hometown. “I said to Coach Howe, ‘Let me do a QB sneak over our left guard, Gary Brown,’ which was opposite our all-state guard Paul Swank. The thought was the Camelback defense would expect anything up the middle to go over Paul. Touchdown. Need I say more?”
It’s not that the Titans were lacking motivation. With 1:32 left in the state championship, the scoreboard operator at Sun Devil Stadium prematurely punched up this message on the end zone screen:
“You Spartans are a great championship team.”
Oops.
After 15 years as a small-college and high school coach in Illinois, Howe moved from his home turf to Arizona in 1956. He spent five years on the UA football coaching staffs of Warren Woodson, Ed Doherty and Jim LaRue. He then became the academic counselor for the athletic department before he got the itch to coach again.
Howe spent one season at Pueblo before getting the job at Palo Verde in March 1962.
“These boys have taken their lumps,” Howe said when presented with the Star’s 1973 Tucson Coach of the Year award. “They were getting beat by almost everyone. I just didn’t think they could take losing any more.”
In 1973, the Titans won ‘em all.
