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“I just got a notice in the mail that our 50th class reunion is canceled,” said Bob DeSaulniers, a senior defensive lineman for the 1969 Crusaders. "Reminded me of what happened to us back then.''
Holy Cross was still a Division 1 football school in 1969, annually scheduling the likes of Syracuse, Rutgers, and Boston College. The Crusaders had a new coach and high hopes when they went through workouts late in the summer of 1969, and they put up a decent battle, losing their opener, 13-0, at Harvard Sept. 27.
"It felt like our feet were stuck in the mud in that game,'' recalled running back Eddie Jenkins, who went on to become a member of the undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins before he started his own law practice in Boston (Jenkins’s Holy Cross roommate was the infamous Ted Wells). “We should have been much better that day. Harvard was not that much faster than us.”
“I was cramping up for no reason,” recalled DeSaulniers, who went on to a long career as a Massachusetts high school principal and coach. "One of our guys [defensive end Bob Cooney] had been sick just before the Harvard game, but we thought it was an isolated thing."
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It was not an isolated thing. Public health officials and specialists discovered in late August that Holy Cross players and coaches had ingested hepatitis-infected groundwater that seeped into submerged pipes feeding a faucet near the team’s practice field. The incubation period of hepatitis A is approximately 28 days. Cooney tested positive Sept. 29, two days after the Harvard game. It was only the beginning.
"People started dropping off, two or three a day during the next week when we were getting ready for Dartmouth,” said Jenkins.
“I remember going to the infirmary and getting a blood test and then getting on the bus to Dartmouth,” added DeSaulniers.
Tom Lamb, a senior captain from Western Mass. who later gained fame as Doug Flutie’s Natick High School football coach, said, “We got up there on Friday night and guys were getting sick during dinner and we were sending them home. Everyone was wondering what was up. I was a fullback, but our tailback was sent home so they called me into a coaches’ meeting and told me I’d be playing tailback instead of fullback.”
Dartmouth beat a woozy Holy Cross team, 38-6.
In the next day’s Globe, sports editor Ernie Roberts led his story with, "This report should be going to the American Medical Journal. Unbeaten Dartmouth demolished a Holy Cross team hobbled by seven hospitalized starters . . . ''
"That game got out of hand,'' said DeSaulniers. "I played nose tackle, then center. We had people playing out of position. Guys were dropping.''
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"We only had about 14 players by the end of the game,'' recalled Jenkins. "I think I played wide receiver, running back, and ended up on defense and special teams. We had guys throwing up on the sidelines. It was awful. We knew something was going on.''
Two days later, Holy Cross president Rev. John Brooks, medical personnel, and new coach Bill Whitton addressed the team in the naval surplus airplane hanger that served as the Holy Cross campus field house. Players were informed that the season was over because of an outbreak of hepatitis A. Ninety of 97 players and coaches had the virus. Those presenting with severe symptoms were dispatched to the infirmary, while the rest of the team was ordered to Hanselman Hall, a relatively new dormitory on the upper campus. The plan called for the team to be quarantined 4-6 weeks. Meals and classwork assignments would be delivered to their rooms. Nobody was to leave. Or enter.
"They turned our dorm into a hospital and told us, ‘Tell your parents you’re going to be in there six weeks,' ‘’ recalled Jenkins. “They took blood every day, maybe twice a day The food was great. They’d bring steak to your room because they wanted us to have a lot of protein. They told us alcohol could kill us. I think the fact that our campus was so isolated and in Worcester helped to control the disease.”
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“I still remember walking up the hill by Hanselman and looking at all the football players, waving out the window,” said Michael LaVigne, a freshman soccer player at Holy Cross in 1969 who later coached in the women’s varsity program at Boston College for 25 years. “It was great for those of us on the soccer team. We had big crowds coming to our games.”
“The funniest thing was when people would come to bring you food,” senior co-captain Bill Moncevicz told the Worcester Telegram. “It was like the lepers in ‘Ben-Hur.' They would leave food and treats at the door and then we would open the door and we would pull them in."
Players read assignments delivered by professors. They took tests. They met with doctors and nurses daily. They congregated in the room of offensive guard Sean Higgins to watch the Miracle Mets beat the Baltimore Orioles in the 1969 World Series.
Reporters from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek found their way to Worcester, as did teams of doctors and researchers. A hepatitis outbreak of this scope was rare. The National Communicable Diseases Center in Atlanta sent two doctors to the practice field to run tests. The director of the infectious disease division at Saint Vincent Hospital in Worcester led an investigation, which took almost a year and was eventually published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The report stated that 32 team members had hepatitis with jaundice, while 58 contracted the illness without signs of jaundice.
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Lamb was allowed to redshirt and came back as a senior captain for the following season. The year after hepatitis, Holy Cross went 0-10-1, which gave the school a 14-game winless streak stretching back to 1968. The final game of the 1970 season was a 54-0 loss to rival Boston College in Chestnut Hill. Holy Cross’s sophomore punter, Rich Pelletier of Salem, was cited in the Globe’s game coverage as a player who "performed minor miracles in averaging 40 yards with 13 punts."
"It was an experience I’d like to forget,'' Pelletier said last week. "On the 14th punt attempt, maybe the long snapper was tired. The ball bounced to me and I ran a few yards for our third first down of the day. It was humiliating.''
A half-century later, those once-young men live lives of social distancing and self-quarantine. And like a lot of American high school and college athletes, they know what it feels like to have a season erased by a virus.
“This brings memories, it really does,” said Lamb. “I know it’s hard for people who are not in sports, and I know there are a lot of things more important right now. I have that perspective. But this is such a loss to these high school and college athletes who’ve put so much into it. When you’re on a school team, so much of your day is directed toward academics and sports. These kids today have lost both of those things. That happened to us and it stays with you.”
Dan Shaughnessy is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at daniel.shaughnessy@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @dan_shaughnessy.
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