Eagles, Landmark had to learn to fly

A hundred years of football at Eastern Washington University will be toasted Saturday – the journey, and not just the destination.

“In my day, you didn’t worry about the plane trip,” said Mick Landmark. “Wait, we did fly a couple of times – and that was a scary deal.”

The Eagles have landed here in 2008 with legitimate entrée into any conversation about the eventual winner of the NCAA’s Football Championship Subdivision sweepstakes – another tribute to the program that took wing 25 years ago under Dick Zornes and kept flying under Mike Kramer, Paul Wulff and now Beau Baldwin. The godfather of it all, of course, was the late Dave Holmes, for whom Zornes played and Landmark, too, as an NAIA All-American guard in 1966 and a nervous passenger on …

“Eddy Airlines,” he remembered.

As in Cousin Eddie? Or Eddy as in backwater, swirling against the current, going nowhere?

“We flew to Tacoma and they missed it twice – overshot the runway,” Landmark said. “Three weeks later in Utah they crashed the same plane. I guess we counted ourselves lucky.”

It’s not the first time Eastern football has been cast as a survivor.

Mothballed for two wars, once mired in a 22-game winless streak, forced to mark time in the Big Sky waiting room and write protest songs to keep campus jackals at bay, the Eagles have earned a big birthday party.

To celebrate, they picked the school’s 100 best players and invited the public to vote on the all-time team. If the ballot is skewed to the FCS era – 60 of the nominees are from the last quarter century – there’s a reason.

“They’re a lot better now than we were,” Landmark laughed.

Hard to imagine that the stories are.

Landmark grew up in Kamiah, Idaho, where he sells insurance today, and played a year at Boise Junior College.

He came home to enroll at Lewis-Clark State and work for his father’s logging company. He wasn’t through with football, but it seemed for a time it was through with him.

“I wrote some letters – one to Idaho and one to Eastern,” he said. “I got no response from Idaho. I finally got one from Eastern, after I’d given up.”

Actually, he still needed an in. Through his brother’s fraternity at UI, Landmark had met Eastern assistant Bob Ames, a former Vandals player who really only knew that Landmark was the right size, 6-foot-2, 235 pounds – “big for that time.”

He also came cheap.

“I got in-state tuition, which was 77 bucks a quarter,” Landmark recalled. “I had to pay the out-of-state, which was $30. And they gave me a dollar-an-hour job sweeping floors at Martin Hall – and you had to stay the whole three hours. Except Zornes. He got fired and they put him to work clipping articles out of the newspaper. We were all envious of that position.”

But he had the one he wanted on the field, for Holmes’ attack started with the guards. Tackles handled the seal blocking on the edges “and he’d let us get out in front of Mel Stanton, zeroing in on a 180-pound defensive back,” Landmark said.

“How could you fail?”

He and Barry Randall were, in fact, early – if undersized – examples of what became EWU football’s special conceit: developing offensive linemen. Of the 100 players to be honored Saturday, 26 played O-line – and appeared in 369 NFL games.

Landmark never made it that far. He got a brief sniff in Canada, then took a bus (“I didn’t know they had to fly me”) to Norfolk, Va., and the old Continental Football League. He taught school by day and the quarterback was Dan Henning, who would eventually coach the Atlanta Falcons, and for three years at practice Landmark lined up across from Otis Sistrunk, before Alex Karras made him famous by telling the audience for “Monday Night Football” that Otis graduated from the University of Mars. And the stories got better.

“You made no money, but the general manager made sure there was plenty of beer on the plane after the game,” Landmark said. “Once we went to Charleston, S.C., and they couldn’t start the engine on one side, so they told everybody to get off and ‘we’ll run it down the runway and let the wind whip the propeller to get it started.’ Everybody said, ‘Right,’ and grabbed the garbage cans full of beer and headed out. Guys were getting back to Norfolk the next Wednesday and Thursday on trains, buses, hitch-hiking, with three days growth of beard.”

On another trip, to Wheeling, W.Va. – where visiting players wore helmets on the sidelines lest a miner hurl his whiskey bottle from the stands – the airport crew backed a flatbed truck up to the airplane door. They had no boarding stairway big enough.

Hey, they could have called Eastern. There used to be one parked behind the football press box, to allow camera crews access to the roof.

Simpler times. As much as the Eagles can be jazzed about their recent gains, it’s OK to be nostalgic, too, for the days when no one fretted much about attendance, when games didn’t have to be scheduled to pay off building debts, when there was no worry of getting tangled up in NCAA red tape, when no one had heard of marketing.

But, of course, there were still worries – the specter of Eddy Airlines, for instance. But on a journey of 100 years, you get there however you can.