Updated 10/24/2024 1:02 AM

CORVALLIS — With Halloween on its way, it was only fitting that they gathered from across the region to pay tribute to “The Great Pumpkin.”

Dee Andros has been gone for nearly 21 years, but his spirit — and the effect he had on those around him — lives on.

That was evident last Friday night at the CH2M Hill Alumni Center as a crowd of 175 — including 83 of his former Oregon State players — broke bread, quaffed beverage, told stories and enjoyed the company as friends and family feted the late football coach of the Beavers.

The event — billed as “The 100th Year Remembrance Celebration” — was held on October 18, 100 years and a day after the birth of Andros in Oklahoma City. It was organized by former players Craig Hanneman, Scott Freeburn, Jim Sherbert and Scott Spiegelberg and underwritten by the 15 living captains from the Andros era — Hanneman, Sherbert, Bob Grim, Russ Kuhns, Skip Vanderbundt, Steve Preece, Jon Sandstrom, Jess Lewis, Mike White, Rob Jurgenson, Steve Brown, Rod Petersen, Jerry Hackenbruck, Greg Krpalek and Bob Horn.

The evening included a cocktail hour, a buffet dinner, remarks by master of ceremonies Mike Parker and six speakers and then an open-mic session in which ex-players offered thoughts on their beloved coach.

It was 4 1/2 hours from the start of the affair to the gathering for the team photo. But with Parker masterfully orchestrating the agenda, rarely has time gone so quickly.

Many of those in attendance stayed and watched from the terrace together at Reser Stadium as Oregon State lost to Nevada-Las Vegas 33-25 on Saturday night.

The event stemmed from informal get-togethers involving Andros and the four senior starters from his 1970 team — Hanneman, Freeburn, Mark Dippel and Bob Jossis.

“The four of us have stayed close, and we all lived in the (Willamette Valley),” Hanneman said. “In 1991, we got together and said, ‘Let’s take Dee to The Gables (Restaurant, in Corvallis) for dinner.’ ”

They did that annually for a few years, and then Dee’s wife, Lu, joined them.

“And during that dinner, Lu looked at us and asked, ‘Where are the wives?’ ” Jossis said. “Sure enough, the wives were with us after that.”

Andros died at age 79 in 2003 and Lu on October 17, 2009 — 85 years to the day of her husband’s birth — but the four ex-players and their wives continued on with the annual tradition.

“At the last dinner, we realized that Dee would have been 100 years old (in 2024),” Hanneman said. “Through our conversation about that grew the idea of putting something on in Dee’s memory.”

Hanneman, Freeburn, Sherbert and Spiegelberg took on organizational duties, having Zoom calls once or twice a week for the good part of a year. They were surprised with the number of positive responses they received.

“We thought we would have somewhere between 100 and 140 people in total,” Hanneman said, “but our numbers went far beyond that.”

It was an emotional night for many. Several speakers teared or choked up while talking about the man of the hour. Parker, a six-time winner of the NMSA’s Oregon Sportscaster of the Year award, called serving as emcee for the event “as high an honor as I have ever received.”

Andros was a giant of a man, both literally and figuratively. He was rotund of girth and one of those larger-than-life personalities who was born to lead young men onto the gridiron battlefield.

The Alumni Center occasion was centered on Andros’ memory, but it was more.

“This is also about all of you,” Jeanna Andros Baker, Dee’s daughter, told the ex-players. “To be a part of this night means so much to me, to share in all the love in this room and caring for my father, and for each other.”

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Demosthenes Konstandies Andrecopoulos was one of three boys born to a Greek immigrant father and an American mother. Thankfully for headline writers, he later shortened his name to Dee Andros. (During his time at Oregon State, he would just call himself “The Punkin.”)

At age 17, Andros enlisted in the Marine Corps during World War II and served four years. At 18, he was assigned to be a field cook, but he turned in his spatula for a rifle as part of the platoon that fought the battle of Iwo Jima. Of the 200 men in the company who stormed Iwo Jima beach, 40 survived.

At Oregon State, Andros would run out ahead of his players onto the field before games. (By the end of his career, he was so slow, his 40-yard dash was being timed with a sundial.) There may have been a psychological connection to his time at war, former player Clyde Smith observed.

“His leading us onto the field was a safe way for him to deal with the horrors and the carnage he witnessed,” Smith told the crowd. “For Coach, I believe it was therapy. He was able to lead a group of young men — of the same age as those he was with at Iwo Jima — onto a sports field of battle, and knowing we would all be safe.”

Andros played at Oklahoma from 1946-49 and was a starting guard for the legendary Bud Wilkinson; among his teammates were Jim Owens and Darrell Royal, who would go on to fame as head coaches at Washington and Texas, respectively. Dee was a prominent player but liked to joke about his ability in self-deprecating fashion, saying he made the “Greek All-American Team” his senior year.

“There were 12 Greeks playing college football that year,” he would say. “I beat out one of them.”

Andros’ peripatetic career as an assistant coach took him to Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas Tech, Nebraska, California and Illinois before landing the head coaching job at Idaho in 1962.

In 1957, while living in Berkeley, Dee and Lu adopted their only child.

“Daddy’s best friend, Junior Simon, owned a steakhouse in Oklahoma City,” Jeanna told me. “They were going to adopt a baby, but they found out (his wife was) pregnant. They knew my parents had been trying to adopt a baby, too. So they got me.”

Andros arrived at Oregon State in 1965 after Tommy Prothro departed for UCLA, leaving behind some good players from the Beaver squad that lost to Michigan in the 1965 Rose Bowl. Dee’s OSU teams enjoyed five straight winning seasons using the “Power-T” offense, with a full-house backfield featuring such fullbacks as Pete Pifer, Bill “Earthquake” Enyart and Schilling. His defenses employed a six-man front and were tough and physical.

Dee’s 1967 team was his most-celebrated. Nicknamed “The Giant-Killers,” they went 7-2-1, beating No. 2-ranked Purdue and    tying No. 2-ranked UCLA. After the game against the Bruins, Andros told reporters, “We’re tired of playing No. 2 teams. Bring on No. 1.” The Beavers then knocked off top-ranked Southern Cal and O.J. Simpson 3-0 at Parker Stadium in one of the greatest moments in school sports history.

Andros’    pre-game speeches were legendary. He often employed his favorite poem, “Man in the Glass,” for motivation. Several of his players who went into coaching also used it, including Rich Brooks, who went on to coach 18 years at Oregon. “There’ll be blood on the moon, men,” Andros would often cry, perhaps imploring his troops to hit so hard that the opponents’ hemoglobin would fly into the sky.

Winning became more difficult in the ‘70s, and Dee’s last team went 1-10 in 1975. He then spent a decade as Oregon State’s athletic director before retiring in 1985.

Dee’s folksy diction at times could be pure Okie from Muskogee. He could mangle names with the best of them. Vanderbundt was “Vanderbrundt.” (“When I became a senior, he started to refer to me as ‘Old Skip,’ ” he said.) Preece was “Priest.”    Dave Schilling was “Schillings.” After awhile, Sal Cirrincione became “Sal from Chicago.”

Sometimes it wasn’t names. Offensive tackle Chris Veit cited a pre-game talk.

“Dee said, ‘Men, for us to win this game, you’re going to need a lot of unininity.’ ” Veit said. “I’m thinking, OK, ‘I better look that one up.’ ”

Andros made it a vendetta to beat Oregon. He won his first seven games against the Ducks and nine of 11 overall. He called winning the game “for the right to live in the state of Oregon.”

“The Ducks make my stomach hurt,” he would say. “And when the Punkin’s stomach hurts, I’ll guaran-God-damn-tee-ya, he’s sick all over.”

Before his final Civil War contest, Andros said, “I’ve won nine of 10, and I’ll guarantee you, the worst year I spent was the one I lost to the Ducks.”

► ◄

For his daily radio talk show on KEJO (AM) in Corvallis, Parker interviewed several of the key people in Andros’ life.

“All the stories and the conversations have been insightful, poignant, heartwarming — some of them even true,” Parker quipped.

In 1998, Parker was hired as Oregon State’s play-by-play radio announcer. Shortly thereafter, he was pulled into an office with Andros and former basketball coach Paul Valenti.

“There was a little bit of a taint in my life in the past,” said Parker, who attended Oregon and was a diehard Duck fan until his hiring in Corvallis. “They did all they could to work that out of me. They welcomed me with love and kindness in those early days. That meant everything to me. I was talking to two great men in Oregon State sports history.”

Rich Brooks was the first speaker. Brooks never played for Andros — he was a starting safety and backup quarterback playing for Prothro on the ’65 Rose Bowl team — but he was twice an assistant coach on Andros’ staff at OSU.

As a young assistant, Brooks was tasked with taking Dee’s wife to physical therapy every morning after she broke both feet in a fall. He didn’t mind.

“There wasn’t a better woman in the world than Lu Andros,” he said. “She was special.”

Brooks, about his time coaching at Oregon State in the late ‘60s and ‘70s:

“We were amongst a really close, special group of people — not just in football, but the entire athletic department. We had some people who all came together and supported each other. We would have an annual Christmas party and give gifts to all the children, and I’ll tell you, ‘The Great Pumpkin’ made a great Santa Claus.

“The experience of being at Oregon State — small town, special connection — gives me great memories. I’m not sure even in today’s age at Oregon State, there is going to be this kind of reunion again for a coach who would have been 100 yesterday. It was tight-knit, supportive of each other. Now it’s a different game because of the NIL and the transfer portal. I don’t think there will be long-lasting relationships that cover the breadth and width that we witness in this room from so many young men with whom I had the pleasure to interact and coach.”

Vanderbundt came to Oregon State as a quarterback from Placerville, Calif., recruited by Prothro. He left as star linebacker and co-captain of the Giant Killers and went on to play 10 years in the NFL.

Andros recruited Vanderbundt when he was coaching at Idaho.

“He was the only head coach who ever walked in our house,” Vanderbundt said. “He talked about getting an education and my mom was a schoolteacher. Guess who she fell in love with?

“But I had already made up my mind I was going to Oregon State to play for Coach Prothro. Tommy was a genius at planning a game. He was a statistician who played things ahead of time. With Dee, it was an entirely different deal.”

Vanderbundt read from an article Bay Area sportswriter Dave Newhouse had written in 1973, quoting Skip:

“One thing can be said about Dee Andros football. It is no-nonsense, no dilly-dally kind of football. It is rough, tough, outwork your opponent. It is strap on the helmet and the shoulder pads, because you are going to get hit. It’s hit and be hit with the attitude you are going to hit your opponent harder and faster than he will. By doing so, you outlast him. It is execution of your opponent by execution of play. For several days, your opponent’s body is going to remind him he just played the Oregon State Beavers. You tackle and block with your forehead, and the helmet you wear.

“One of Dee’s football practices was comparable to a rough, brutal street fight in pads. The rules were short haircuts, no facial hair, and a ‘yes sir, no sir’ attitude. Coach Andros was an ex-Marine and he believed in the camaraderie of battle, of being able to rely on the man next to you regardless of race, creed or ethic background. Everyone was done with purpose and no individual was more valuable than the team.”

“I almost screwed up and went to Idaho because of him,” Vanderbundt told the audience. “I ended up with the best of both worlds — the best university and the best coach. Coach Andros was a major influence in my life.”

Preece, highly recruited out of Boise, Idaho, also had parents who fell in love with Andros.

“My dad just adored him,” said Preece, the quarterback for the Giant Killers who would play nine years as a defensive back in the NFL. “My parents were looking for somebody who was going to take care of their son for four or five years, was going to get him through school and get him ready to play football, not let something happen to him.

“The other coaches at Oregon State were all the same. They worked us, but they loved us, and cared about us. Of all the places I visited, this was the only where I felt safe and secure, felt I would never be told something that wasn’t true, that I would never be asked to do something that you shouldn’t be doing.”

Preece was an exceptional option runner but threw an average of fewer than 13 passes a game during his two seasons as a starter.

Said Preece: “(Andros) always said, ‘When you throw the ball, three things can happen, and two of them are bad.’ ”

But, said Preece, Andros was “a master motivator. He would talk for about 10 minutes before a game and had us so fired up, we’d run through a brick wall for him.”

Preece played for five different teams in the NFL, “but Coach Andros and the coaches at Oregon State were as good as I ever played for,” he said. “It was all because of one thing, because of them caring. Dee loved us all.”

Spiegelberg’s career as a quarterback was curtailed by a back injury as a sophomore that caused him to quit the game. Andros kept him on scholarship as a graduate assistant for the next three years.

“Coach Andros was there for me as someone I loved and respected as a father figure,” Spiegelberg said. “His voice, his handshake, his smile and, down the road, his hugs made all the difference and certainly changed the direction of my life in a positive way.”

In 1973, Spiegelberg was standing close to Andros when he was talking to the team during practice.

“I’m wearing my white Nikes,” Spiegelberg said. “Dee has a big chaw in (his mouth), and hits me right on top of one of my new shoes. It was leaking into the shoe. He looks down and says, ‘Scotty, if you can’t move any quicker than that, we could be in trouble.’ ”

Later, during his time as Oregon State’s director of sports marketing, Spiegelberg traveled with Andros on summer “Beaver caravans” throughout the state and also at luncheons on the week leading up to the Civil War.

“Those were some of the most fun and memorable days of my life,” Spiegelberg said. “He would say. ‘Scotty, I think there’s a rest area up ahead. At my age, you don’t want to pass any of those by.’ Or, ‘Scotty, you feeling like a Blizzard? I think there’s a Dairy Queen at the next stop.’

“Dee knew everybody in Roseburg and Klamath Falls and Medford and Bend and Salem and on the Coast. The man knew no strangers. He never missed a Beaver club meeting or golf event or auction. He made it to dozens of weddings, and you can’t count the number of eulogies he gave at memorial services. What an incredible ambassador for the university. His spirit inspired us then, and it’s still inspiring us today.”

Jeanna Andros Baker’s husband, Phil Baker, is bass player for the Portland band Pink Martini. He was unable to make the Alumni Center event because he was performing.

“My mom told me to never marry a coach,” Jeanna said. “I asked her why. She said, ‘Because they are never home.’ So what do I do? I marry a touring musician. He’s never home.”

Jeanna wore an oversized orange jacket that her father sometime wore.

“If you look really close, you can see stains from the chewing tobacco,” she quipped.

Jeanna made mention of her mother.

“It’s true about how much Daddy loved, cared for and adored every one of you,” she said. “You all felt it. But my mother also did. And not only did she love the men, but she loved the women who stood next to the men. She wanted you to be seen and heard and acknowledged.”

Sherbert was an outstanding defensive end who also coached for Andros.

He spoke of Dee’s leadership abilities.

“If you assume the definition is getting other people to perform at their maximum abilities for a common purpose, that’s leadership, not individual achievement,” Sherbert said. “Dee was outstanding at that. He was able to create an environment where coaches and players respected one another and resulted in a lot of success.”

When Sherbert arrived at OSU, he was already a married man. He and wife Tina are together 57 years later.

“People like Dee embraced us,” he said. “He was so supportive, and it really saved our lives.

“Somebody once said that sports build character. I think it’s the opposite. People with strong character build sports. And nobody did it better than Dee.”

► ◄

After the speakers, the microphone was passed around to those ex-players in the audience. Former tight end Gary Houser read something tackle Tom Greerty, poet laureate of the Giant Killers, wrote long ago about their coach.

Dee moved with grit, with glee, and sense of football history,

He believed in the full-house T, with a big fullback, a fast quarterback and a nifty scatback. He believed in big guards to get him plenty of yards. He liked his tackles a bit wired and unshackled. On defense, it was blood and guts, rough and tumble, go get that fumble!

On game days, he’d go down to the lockers to be near his blockers. He’d shake each hand and touch each man. And then the Beavers would all stand and listen to this man, who would speak of war and esprit de corps, who would speak of foxholes and young men’s souls.

We would all soar and he would roar, “There’s gonna be blood on the moon, men, coming soon.” We’d run on the field with Dee in the lead, yielding nothing except fair play. Up and over the pile, men, he’d say. Katy bar the door. Beavers forever more, ready for war.

► ◄

Thurman Bell played one season for Andros after playing most of his career under Prothro.

“Tommy was a tactician,” said Bell, who would go on to a storied career as head coach at Roseburg High. “Dee … was the greatest motivator I’ve ever seen. I took much of that from him in my coaching career.

“I’ve been in (the OSU locker room) pre-game and listened to him talk. The lights were out. When I coached, the lights were out before a game, too. He always talked about visualization. I believed in that, too. (As a player) I’d sit there in that darkness and think about getting up enough courage to go tackle somebody.”

Jeff Hart and his sister grew up in Salem with an absentee father.

“Dee was my father for four years,” said Hart, an offensive tackle who played seven NFL seasons. “He taught me how to study film, not only of my opponent but of myself. He was a tremendous leader. What he taught me got me through those days when I was down and I didn’t think things were worth it anymore, and to keep fighting. I love that man.”

Like Hart, Hackenbruck had an absentee father. Andros filled the role for four years.

“I’ve been around a lot of coaches, but Dee was the most inspirational person I’ve ever been around,” said Hackenbruck, who had a successful career coaching at several Oregon high schools. “He inspired me in many ways. In this day and age, (coaches) are breaking rules and not behaving themselves, but Dee was a man of great character. He was a character, but more than that, he was a person of character.

“He was a huge factor in my life and in many lives around this room. I love Dee Andros. I’ll always love him.”

Jim Walker echoed that sentiment.

“After I was done playing, my father had cancer,” Walker said. “I don’t know how Coach Andros found out, but he called twice to talk about life and about me, which made my dad very happy. That’s the kind of man Dee was. He cared for his players. He was inspirational. He helped me become a better man, a better person and a better football player.”

Jossis played on winning teams at Oregon State.

“We never lost to the Ducks during my time,” he said. “It’s easy to love a coach when you’re winning. I always wondered what the players thought of Dee when they weren’t having winning seasons. I talked to a player from the 1974 and ’75 teams and asked him, ‘What did you guys think of Dee?’ He said, ‘We loved him.’ Not ‘I loved him,’ or ‘Some of us loved him,’ but ‘Every damn one of us loved him.’

“That’s a credit to Dee, regardless of what the season was like and the adversities you faced, they loved him and he loved us.”

Peterson noted that Andros was instrumental in helping him get his first coaching job.

“He looked out for everybody,” Peterson said. “If you put your two nickels in, he was going to give you a dollar’s worth back. All he wanted was for you to get the best of out of you.”

Mike Riley never played for Andros, but he knew him well. His father, Bud Riley, coached for Dee at Idaho and at Oregon State. Mike later was the head coach at OSU in 1997 and ’98 and from 2003-14.

“When I came to Oregon State, he was still the greatest ambassador for the school ever,” Riley said.

Riley remembers taking his wife, Dee, to a function shortly after he was named OSU’s coach.

“Dee was there speaking, and he told everyone, ‘Mike likes me so much that he named his wife after me,’ ” Riley said with a smile.

Riley paid homage to Andros’ legacy.

“The legacy is right here in this room,” Riley told the crowd. “It’s about love. You might be a group of dinosaurs — and I’m not talking about your age.

“I spent a lot of time here and watched every year as this group of guys who played for coach Andros came back. The camaraderie of this group, the loyalty to one another, the obvious sign of love and respect in a teammate — there Is nothing more than a coach would want than to have this kind of feeling from his players.

“All I can say is, congratulations to Dee for having the kind of impact that has lasted for half a century and will continue on as long as we can have these functions.”

► ◄

Jossis observed that the Andros would be celebrating their 75th wedding anniversary this year.

“They’re looking down on us right now,” Jossis said. “Dee is having peppermint ice cream, and Lu is having her double scotch.”

Bottom’s up to that.

► ◄

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