Danny LaRose: then we ended up killing Nebraska

Danny LaRose

Danny LaRose was arguably the best to ever pad up for the Crystal City Hornets football squad. That is quite a statement about a program as storied as CCHS. The 1957 grad went on to become one of the top linemen in the history of the University of Missouri Tigers. After his 1960 senior year, LaRose, a two way end, was named to several All-American teams. He finished in the top ten in that fall’s Heisman Trophy balloting for top player in the nation, the highest rating that season of any lineman. A first round NFL draft choice of the Detroit Lions, LaRose played offensive tackle for four NFL teams over a seven year career. LaRose retired from a second career, selling medical equipment; and lived the good life with his wife in a riverside log cabin in upstate Michigan until his passing today at the age of 80. 

“Danny was just a big old kid in high school,” remembers CCHS and University of Missouri teammate Dick Cook. “He played in the line and didn’t get a lot of recognition. But when he got to Mizzou, he just took off."

“Coach (Arvel) Popp knew I was on my own a lot and he looked out for me,” LaRose said in a 2016 interview I did with him. “Coach was a hard-nosed old school type of guy. He is one of the most honest people I've ever met. Sometimes he would be too honest, and it could hurt your feelings. But that

Tackling Navy's Heisman Trophy Winner 

Joe Bellino in the 1960 Orange Bowl

honesty was what a kid like me needed to hear. His son, Jerry, was my age and Coach was really hard on the poor guy, use to make him box me in the gym and I was a lot bigger, but I better not let up, either, or coach would have been all over me. But, Coach also had a soft side he tried hard to hide. He knew I needed some special looking after and he saw I got it.”

“For me, growing up in Crystal City, sports were everything,” LaRose recalled. “My mom died when I was 13 and my older sister was in nursing school, so it was just me and my dad at home. Every other week he worked the evening shift over at PPG, so for a week I would not see him, at all. I was always up at the school playing sports for something to do. Once, I was home cooking some  Spaghetti O’s and I forgot it was Friday night and we had a game and the bus pulls up to my house and Coach Popp is yelling at me to get my big dumb butt on the bus.”

“Sports in high school kept me in school, no doubt,” LaRose says. “I just had so much fun in high school. In 1957, Richard

Mel West

Byas and I were a two man track team and we won the state track meet. Richard won both sprints and the hurdles race and I won the shot and discus. Fifty points between us and it was good enough to win. Richard was so fast, unbelievably fast. His mom had never seen him play football and she finally came to a game one night. Richard scores four touchdowns that game and his mom makes him quit football. Said she never realized it was so rough. Can you believe that? But man, was he fast, fast as anyone I played with in pro ball. Only one who could slow him down, I guess, was his mom.”

In 1954, the United States Supreme Court handed down its landmark Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education decision, a ruling that outlawed the racial segregation of the nation’s public schools. As a southern border state, the evil of separate but equal Jim Crow was deeply rooted in rural Missouri’s social norms. Many Missouri school districts initially ignored the federal edict then challenged it in the state courts first, and then the federal courts, often delaying school desegregation in most Missouri rural towns until far into the 1960s. 

In 1955, LaRose's senior year at Crystal City High School, the local district became one of the first in rural Missouri to voluntarily integrate its schools. That fall three newly enrolled black students, Richard Byas, Bennie Evans, Don Riney, joined LaRose and the other white members of the Hornets' football roster. LaRose would credit the experience at CCHS with helping him grow as a man and to deal with the issue of race at a very volatile time of national upheaval and unrest.  

LaRose was an established star player at the University of Missouri in 1958 when St. Louis Vashon High School graduate Norris Stevenson became the first African-American to earn a football scholarship to the state’s flagship university.  Years later, upon his induction to the Missouri Athletic Hall of Fame, Stevenson gave a newspaper interview in which he recalled the positive role LaRose played in Stevenson’s trailblazing and sometimes rocky path as a Tiger. 

Norris Stevenson, Vashon High School

“When I first came to (Missouri) Danny LaRose was a team leader and (he) went out of his way to make me feel welcome,” a still grateful Stevenson remembered. Racism was a constant companion for Stevenson in his years at Mizzou. With many football players from the South on the roster and a campus heavily decorated with the Confederate Flag and a “Dixie gonna do it again” mentality, without the symbolic message the respected LaRose’s actions sent to the rest of the squad, Stevenson feels his road to acceptance, or at least tolerance, would have been much steeper. “It says a lot about LaRose’s character,” said Stevenson. “It wasn’t a popular stance he took with many on the team at the time.” But it was a just stance and LaRose’s actions validate his strong commitment to fairness and equality.

1970

Later in life, LaRose eschews with a cavalier shrug his role in Stevenson’s story and plays down any noble intent on his part in befriending him. “Anybody that knows me, knows I am a big jokester,” LaRose says. “I just liked the guy because he was like me, always kidding around. I am not political and never have been. The other black player on the team at the time was Mel West from Jefferson City. Mel and Norris were two of my best friends on the team. Mel was very light-skinned for a black guy. (LaRose gave West the nickname that would stick with him the rest of his life: Rose Bud.) I had been outside all summer working construction and I was really dark from the sun. One time, Mel and I went downtown together and this lady in a restaurant says, ‘Oh, you two boys are so tan.’ We laughed and laughed at that one.” 

1955, First Integrated

 Hornet Team

Together, the trio of LaRose, Stevenson and West became the team jokesters. On a road  trip to Nebraska to play the mighty Huskers, Mizzou Head Coach Dan  Devine found the three "singing and carrying on" down the streets of Lincoln after curfew. At the team breakfast the next morning before the game, Devine was livid and raged at the three, convinced the Tigers would lose. LaRose remembers trying very hard but to no avail to control his giggling. As the coach  grew more irate, the players tried, and failed, to stifle smiles. Finally, Devine left the room, slamming the door behind him. "We just burst out laughing," LaRose says. "And we ended up killing Nebraska."