Hobbies Fill Retirement of Famous Coach, Athlete
By PEGGY GREENE, 1963

Caption: ONE OF THE GREATS --> Although H. W. (Bill) Hargiss has an illustrious career as an athlete and coach to look back on, he prepared for his retirement with new interests. They include oil painting, wood working, tea rose culture, travel, golf, and an avid interest in sports, both as a spectator on the scene and as a TV viewer. He graduated at Emporia State College, then the Kansas State Normal, and coached both there and at Kansas University. The plaque in the foreground is his membership in the Kansas Athletic Hall of Fame. He is also in the National Athletic Hall of Fame.

     The qualities that made Bill Hargiss one of the greatest athletes and coaches Kansas ever produced are evident in the interesting life he has made for himself since his retirement. He paints in oils, he works in wood with power tools, he plays golf, he looks after his yard and grows tea roses, he travels, and is an educated spectator at football games and other athletic events.
     Hargiss distinguished himself as an athlete when he was a student at Kansas State Normal in Emporia, now known as Kansas State Teachers College. Later as a coach at Emporia and at KU, he stamped himself indelibly on Kansas athletic history. He has been elected to both the Kansas Athletic Hall of Fame and to the National Athletic Hall of Fame. He was a charter member of the former.

Praise From Successor
     Fran Welch, who played football under Hargiss for four years, became his assistant, and succeeded him as head coach at Emporia, said, in naming some of the fine players of the time, "But it was Bill Hargiss who made us click. His intelligence, imagination and aggressive leadership and his ability to gain the confidence and respect of all of us made these teams the successes they were. He came up with strategy that other coaches hadn't thought about. He was creative."
     His name is really Homer Woodson Hargiss, but early in life was tagged with the name of Bill. He grew up in a family of five boys and one girl on a farm in Crawford County and went to high school at Beulah, a vanishing town that was five miles south of Girard.
     Beulah had a great football team. Not all the players went to school, but that was not thought important. There was Frank Schofield, a big tackle who had played at Northwestern, and Bert Potter, a quarterback from Iowa State University.   The coach, for that matter, was not employed by the school, or by anybody. He was the Presbyterian minister and had graduated from Princeton. Lights were rigged up for night practice, which may have been the first high school practice at night.
     Four of the five Hargiss boys graduated from college and others besides Bill played on the Normal team, the "Yellow Jackets."

Versatile Athlete
     Hargiss graduated from the Normal in 1909. He played football, basketball, was active in track and was the regular first baseman in baseball, when a game did not coincide with a track meet.
     Hargiss was not only a great athlete. He sang in the glee club, he was in the debating society and he took a course in watercolor painting. Besides all this, he worked to pay his own way, waited tables for $2.25 a week, which paid for his board, and later had a laundry route. A friend who was at the Normal during those years, Oscar S. Stauffer, was earning a princely $3.50 a week.
     Hargiss was a regular Saturday night attendant at "Dr. Iden's Upper Room." Dr. Iden was a teacher of chemistry and physics and the upper room was a hall above the Emporia Gazette which William Allen White gave for his use. The practical, personal talks on ethics and character were attended every week by 300 to 400 college men.

First Job at Marion
     Hargiss' first job was coaching and teaching two classes at the Marion High School. Players on his team included the late Randolph Carpenter and the late Laird Dean. E. W. Hoch, who later became governor, was chairman of the school board.
     A year later Hargiss became coach at the College of Emporia (C. of E.), a Presbyterian school, that was the avowed enemy of the Normal in their classic football game on Thanksgiving Day. No matter who else they beat or did not beat, the ambition of the Normal was to "whip the Preachers", and C. of E. felt the same way about the Normal.
     His star player at the C. of E. was Arthur Schabinger, who could "throw strikes" with a football and became Hargiss' assistant when he was invited to become head coach at the Normal in 1914. That year the Yellow Jackets won six games, lost one. In 1916 they won the Kansas Conference championship.
     In 1918 Hargiss accepted an invitation to coach at Oregon State College in Corvallis. While there something happened that he has never mentioned before. His success as a coach was soon established on the West Coast and at an athlete meeting in Palo Alto he was asked to become coach at Stanford the next year. Strict secrecy was imposed on him. Stanford did not want it to be known until it was announced there.
     Hargiss told nobody except his wife and she did not mention it to a soul. But at Christmas time the Portland Oregonian announced in inch-high letters "Hargiss to Go to Stanford."
     The author of the story would not say where he got the information—he had not talked to Hargiss—but he became a prophet without honor, for in the in pleasantness that followed, Hargiss did not go to Stanford.

Back to Emporia
     Instead, he listened to an urgent invitation to return to the Normal as coach, and the news, "Hargiss is coming back", brought a resurgence of football enthusiasm to the campus in 1920.
He was there for eight years. The first year was marked with the tragedy of two players killed and the death of another from complications.
     The 1926 team was one of the greatest. It won the Kansas Conference championship, was undefeated and untied, its goal line was never crossed and it scored 149 points to the opponents' three. The team placed six men on the all-conference team and two on the all-state eleven.
     His track teams were phenomenal winners. Hargiss thinks track is ideal for the individual to develop on his own. His teams won seven state track championships during his two periods of coaching. His football teams won three conference titles and tied one. The 13 gridiron teams he coached won 61 games, lost 23 and tied 12. Three teams were undefeated, one was undefeated and untied and one never had its goal line crossed.
On to KU
     In 1928 he went to KU as football and track coach and in his 16 years there, added to his illustrious record.
Many of his students won honors. He coached Glenn Cunningham, the great miler who held the world's record for a number of years, and Jim Bausch, who broke a record in winning the decathlon in the Olympic Games in 1932. John Kuck won the shotput at the 1928 Olympics and Earl McKown was national pole vaulter.
     Alfred Hill, a fellow player with Hargiss and now a newspaper publisher at Swarthmore, Pa. said, "Bill Hargiss stood out and still does in my opinion as the greatest of all Emporia State athletes. Certainly his individual performances in football and track place him as the first of the early greats."
     He was the first coach to use the huddle, despite claims of Eastern coaches, and also the first to run his guards as interference for the ball carrier. He used the T-formation for many years.
     Hargiss took a leave of absence from KU and served three years in the armed forces, both in Europe and the Pacific. In 1946 he became executive secretary to the Kansas State Athletic Commission and was also athletic commissioner of the Central Intra-Collegiate Conference.
     In 1960 he was asked by the Air Force to coach selected personnel in track for the Olympics and went to Oxnard, Calif., for the assignment.

Begins Painting
     That was the year he began painting in oils. He now has a studio in his home at 1277 Randolph and pictures in various stages standing against the walls. Most are landscapes and are extremely well done, with a good sense of color.
     "People are awfully nice," he said with a humorous twinkle. "They brag on them and say how good they are, but I know they're not."
     His wife, who was a musician, died 10 years ago. His daughter, Dr. Genevieve Hargiss, lives with him and teaches at KU in the music division of the department of education.  Another daughter, Mrs. George Oberheide, teaches music in the Hickman Mills, Mo., junior high school. A son, Clark, is an engineer with the North American Rocketdyne at Canoga Park, Calif. A brother lives at Palm Springs. Hargiss has visited the West Coast every year for the last 10. He has six grandchildren.
     As retirement neared, Hargiss began preparing for it.