Harry Gilmer nearly missed his moment.
For a girl.
Five months after jump-starting the Alabama football program, in the shadow of the liberation of Paris and the first Kamikaze attacks by the Japanese, Frank Thomas sat on a bus outside the athletic offices, impatiently looking at his watch. The long-time Alabama head coach was not the sort of man who liked to be kept waiting, especially by the unquestioned leader of his team, who should have known better.
Anyone with a set of eyes could tell the 18-year-old Gilmer was something special.
“But I was still pretty immature,” he said with a laugh in 2010, an 84-year-old man looking back on one of the defining moments of his life. “I was just a kid, a foolish kid.”
Straight out of Birmingham’s Woodlawn High School, where he gained attention for mastering the jump pass, Gilmer wound up in Tuscaloosa after being classified 4-F because of a nervous stomach. Every few months, the draft board summoned him for another battery of tests, leading him to believe he could be shipped overseas at any moment, but the doctors kept rejecting him, allowing him to become one of the leading college football players of his generation. Gilmer, a wiry 5-foot-11 and 160 pounds, could do it all, leading Alabama in passing, rushing, punting, punt returns and kickoff returns.
In the autumn of 1944, the multi-talented rookie directed Thomas’ small band of so-called War Babies—comprised mostly of fellow 4-Fs and freshmen, recruited after the suspended 1943 season—to a 5-1-2 record, good enough to garner an invitation to face Duke in the Sugar Bowl.
But love very nearly intervened.
Gilmer’s war-time romance with his future wife, the lovely Katherine, was in full bloom, causing him to spend much of the 1944 season driving back and forth to Birmingham to see her. On the day the Crimson Tide was scheduled to leave for New Orleans, Gilmer was late returning to campus—so late, in fact, that he almost missed the bus.
“The truth is, I was in love and didn’t really care whether I made that bus or not,” Gilmer said. “I pulled up just as the bus was getting ready to pull out. It sure looked like Coach Thomas was going to leave without me, and I can’t say I blamed him. He was pretty mad. You should have seen the way he looked at me as I took my seat.”
First of four stories about Alabama’s New Orleans bowl history.
