No. 9: 1950s black and gold
(AUTHOR’S NOTE: This article draws heavily from a much longer version of the Chuckran Era and the legacy of Slug Drake that appeared in my 2021 book The Tyrone Football Story: A Team, a Community, and 100 Years of Defying the Odds, Volume I. It’s available on Amazon at this link.)
Jason Wilson caused no small amount of buzz in 2014 when he took over the head coaching job at Tyrone and immediately changed a uniform that had been the same for 20 years.
Under Wilson, the Golden Eagles would wear black-on-black at home and white jerseys with black pants on the road. The helmets – white with orange Ts – would remain the same for a season until even the shells went black in 2015.
It was a move that got fans talking right away, with social media posts like, “What are we thinking about Tyrone’s new uniforms” common in the first few weeks after the change.
One thing Wilson didn’t do was fiddle with the school colors. After all, Tyrone is orange and black, and it’s always been orange and black. That’s just the way it is.
Except for a brief period in the 1950s.
For a hot minute during the era of sock hops and soda fountains, Tyrone’s football team, under the direction of a young upstart from Lansford, PA, eschewed the school’s traditional colors and instead donned black and gold.
John Chuckran was just 28 years old when he was hired at Tyrone is 1954, but by then he already had four years of experience as a head coach. On top of that, he had played big-time college football. In 1944, with many of the top stars at Penn State serving in WWII, Chuckran became a freshman phenom who ran for five touchdowns and threw for five more under Coach Bob Higgins, ultimately being labeled “the best freshman back I have ever seen” by Chester Smith of the Pittsburgh Press.
The only freshman to ever captain a team at PSU, Chuckran himself enlisted the following year and never quite regained the magic of his freshman season once the war ended. When he returned to campus, the Nittany Lions roster included all-time greats like Wally Triplett, so his minutes weren’t what they used to be, but he did play on Penn State’s 1947 team that went to the 1948 Cotton Bowl, the first major bowl game to break the color barrier and part of the origin story of the Nittany Lions’ famous “We Are” chant.
Altering a team’s color scheme as a young coach wasn’t quite as ground breaking as challenging Jim Crowe laws in the South, but it was bold nonetheless.
Chuckran was taking over a program that had fallen on hard times after achieving statewide acclaim in the 1940s. Tyrone had gone 2-9 in 1952 and 2-8 in 1953, so it would be hard to get much worse, but Chuckran did in his first season in 1954, when the Golden Eagles finished 0-8-2, the first winless campaign in program history.
If ever a team needed to shake things up, it was the Eagles during this era. On the field, they did it through the rise of All-State players like Nick Koback and Slug Drake.
Aesthetically, they did it by altering their look completely. In 1955, Chuckran outfitted the team in uniforms that looked like a combination of the Black Knights of Army and UCLA. Tyrone would alternate black jerseys with shoulders ringed in gold with white jerseys with shoulders decorated with a black/gold/black patterned ringers. Their pants were gold as well, with a singe black stripe.
The helmets would also be gold, with one black racing stripe down the middle, and in another revolutionary change they would be the first helmets in school history equipped with a single-bar facemask.
The shift in colors, though brief, created a look of the quintessential high school team in the 1950s, simple but neat, and very much in line with the conservative values that permeated the nation at that time.
Along with the new duds came a new attitude, and 1955 became a year that revitalized Tyrone’s program and set it up for the success it would experience throughout the 1960s. The Golden Eagles went 6-4 that season, with highlight wins over rival Bellwood-Antis – the first since 1948; Lewistown – the first since 1950; and an 8-1 Hollidaysburg team. The victory over the Golden Tigers in the County Seat in Week 10, which secured Tyrone’s first winning season since 1948, ended in not one but four fist fights after the Golden Eagles attempted to keep the game ball (They were allowed once school officials promised to replace it).
But there was more to come, much more as Tyrone entered the era of Slug Drake.
Lynn “Slug” Drake remains the most highly decorated and heavily recruited player ever to come out of Tyrone. Over six feet tall and 220 pounds by the time he was a senior, he was the ultimate alpha. When not cracking skulls on the gridiron, he ran the 220 in 25 seconds, set a school record in the shot put, and ran a leg on the school’s 880-yard relay team.
That’s pure athleticism. Apply it on the football field and you’ve got something pretty special, which Drake was. He would be named to four All-State teams, make the Big 33 team twice, and be named Sporting News All-American in 1957.
At the 1958 Big 33 game, which was contested on the field for the first time in a game that pitted the best of PA against the best of the nation, Drake was named Outstanding Lineman while playing against future NFL Hall of Famer Lance Alworth. A week later, he earned the same accolade in an East-West showcase in Memphis.
When he made the first team on the Sporting News All-American list, way down on the chart on the sixth team was another future Hall of Famer, Merlin Olsen.
Even among the elites, Drake was elite, and Tyrone rode his superior strength and speed to an incredible season in 1956, when the Eagles finished 9-1. Chuckran never had to worry about run-blocking or pass protection with Drake in the lineup, and defensively he was a feared down lineman. Once, in a game against Hollidaysburg, be broke an opponent’s facemask with one particularly jarring hit.
By his senior season Drake was being courted by no less than 30 schools including powerhouses like Texas, Notre Dame, Purdue, and North Carolina. He eventually settled on Penn State.
In an era when freshmen weren’t permitted to compete on Saturdays, he outplayed upperclassmen at practice during his first season and was on track to be a starter as a sophomore. In 1959, he was one of 34 freshmen to earn a letter.
But Drake wasn’t committed to the life of a student athlete, especially at a school like Penn State, where Rip Engle was in the middle of a legendary career with the help of a young assistant named Joe Paterno (It was actually Paterno who made the visit to Slug’s home in Northwood to seal the deal with the Nittany Lions).
When things didn’t work out at Penn State, Drake transferred to Tennessee, but by his own account his heart was no longer in the game. He stayed there one season before giving up football altogether.
From the outside looking in, Drake’s story is one of what-could-have-been, but that’s not the case for Drake himself, who had never really dreamed of playing football to begin with. His friend Koback convinced him to join the team when he was a freshman and practically had to drag him from his home on Meade Street to get him to the first practice.
It’s hard to imagine now, when hundreds of photos are taken every game, but few pictures remain from Drake’s time on the roster in the late 50s. But in those that do he and his teammates are decked in the unique gold and black uniforms that look like something out of a dream for those unfamiliar with the Chuckran Era.
The color change wouldn’t last longer than the life of those particular uniforms and were gone by the time the 60s rolled in.
Chuckran didn’t last long either. After the 1958 season, he moved on to coach at Allegheny College, where he stayed for 12 seasons before returning to State College in 1970 to work on Paterno’s staff as the offensive line coach and one of his top recruiters. He later became the athletic director at Rhode Island.
The Chuckran Era was important for a lot of reasons. Up until the 1950s, Tyrone’s football program had experienced nothing but success upon success, consistently building from its roots in 1921 to become a state champion in 1940 and the Western Conference power by the end of the 40s. But the 50s were hard times, and Chuckran’s teams helped restore the program’s sense of confidence and pave the way for future champions and contenders a decade later.
But the era is also memorable for its unforgettable look. If you’re going to play around with a school’s traditional colors (up until the mid-30s the team was called the Orange and Black, after all), you’d better have something to back it up, and Chuckran’s teams did, thanks in no small part to the generational talent of Slug Drake.
ORANGE AND BLACK 