Ernie Hahn
By Terry Mosher
Editor, Sports Paper
Before there was a Dawgfather at Washington – Don James – there was a Dawgfather in the South Kitsap School District. That would be the guy with the crew cut, the scowl, the Marine Drill Sargent look – Ernie Hahn.
Hahn began taking numbers and kicking butt – when it was acceptable to give hacks to students – back in the mid-1950s when he became armed with a education degree from Central Washington and arrived in Port Orchard to teach at East Orchard Elementary School.
Within a few years he was teaching physical education and coaching football and baseball at Marcus Whitman Junior High as his legend started to take shape. When Cedar Heights Junior High opened in 1969 there was Hahn teaching PE and coaching football and wrestling for the Rain Devils.
Hahn, 81, is now retired. He gave it all up in 2001 for the green pastures of being a senior citizen and hanging out with his bride of now 61 years (Barbara) at the home he build in 2000 at Watauga Beach in Port Orchard. He build the home so well that he jokes he can’t get Barbara out and about anymore to do all the things they used to do.
Of course, if you can sit in a cozy home and watch aircraft carriers, submarines and ferry boats make regular passes just outside your window on the waters of Puget Sound, you might not be too eager to go skiing, hunting, fishing, camping, either.
Hahn, though, gets out when there is a SK sports activity, especially a football game at Joe Knowles Stadium. You can see him there, stalking the sidelines, offering his opinion to the coaching staff or to players. And the coaches don’t mine. They want him there. He is as much a part of the SK athletic fabric as anyone since the late Maynard Lundberg, who walked the SK sidelines in his 90s.
What will follow is a window into the Hahn story that will culminate Jan. 25 with his induction into the Kitsap Sports Hall of Fame at Kiana Lodge. The Hall of Fame is a place where he certainly is overdue to belong.
Hahn grew up in Seattle and went to high school at Queen Anne where he graduated in 1951. He played on Queen Anne football teams that he says might have won four games in each of the two years he was a starter as a left tackle and defensive end.
“We were terrible,” says Hahn. “I wasn’t any player. I kind of loved the game, but I was (NCAA) Division II or III, or whatever.”
His folks moved to Port Orchard after he graduated, and he followed them. He took the PSNS apprenticeship test, got a good score and expected to be called soon enough to begin an apprenticeship.
In the meantime, Hahn got a job with a contractor and was digging a ditch one day when it struck him this was a hellevua way to make living. So he decided to enroll at Olympic College and paid a visit to the school’s football coach, John Zeger (Zeger would be coaching Ingraham High School in 1978 when the Rams beat Chuck Semancik’s Bremerton High School Knights, 3-0, in the state semifinals at Seattle Memorial Stadium in a rain storm. The winning field goal was kicked in pouring rain just minutes before time expired).
“I was in a ditch with a shovel,” says Hahn. “I didn’t think that was a good way to make a living so I talked to Zeger and he said he didn’t have any scholarships, but if I made the team he would get me a job. I made the team and got a job at KBRO (Radio) where I ran into (the late Bremerton business man and OC booster) Linc Perry and all those characters.”
Hahn played noseguard for the 1951 Rangers, who were coached by Lynn Rosenbach, whose son Timm played at Washington State and later in the NFL with the Phoenix Cardinals and New Orleans Saints and in the Canadian Football League with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, and is now offensive coordinator at UNLV.
The Rangers were really good on the football field back then. The previous year (1950) the Rangers had played in the Potato Bowl in Bakersfield.
That 1951 OC team opened what would be a highly successful (their only loss was to the semi-professional Seattle Ramblers) season against Compton Junior College, playing the California power to a 13-13 tie. What is kind of funny about the game is OC flew to California. It was a first for Hahn, who was used to walking with teammates to the games at Seattle Memorial Stadium when he played for Queen Anne.
“We were only 15 blocks from Memorial Stadium so we walked from Queen Anne to the stadium carrying our duffle bags,” says Hahn. “Then we’d get a ride home from our folks. So when we flew to Compton it was like, ‘Holy mackerel, all the other kids on the team took school buses to games on Friday nights, but not me.’ ”
The Rangers went on a rampage that season, setting state junior college records that probably still stand.
“We beat Everett 56-6, Centralia 82-0 and beat Grays Harbor 92-6 or something like that,” Hahn said of the biggest blowouts.
The Rangers ended the 1951 season by playing in the Gold Dust Bowl In Vallejo, Calif. against Yuba City. That game also ended in a tie, 14-14.
Hahn played two years at OC (the second year for coach Dick Ottele). Buck Gehring, who would later open Buck’s A&W in Port Orchard (it is now run by his son Rick), came back from Washington State to play on the team. Gehring later would teach and coach at Marcus Whitman Junior, and be succeeded in 1959 as the head baseball coach by Hahn.
After two years at OC, Hahn transferred to Central Washington where he suffered a knee injury three weeks into turnout that ended his football career.
“That was it for football,” says Hahn, who married Barbara that year. “I had gotten married so I thought I better get my education.”
He graduated in 1955 with an education degree, majoring in physical education with minors in history and science, and quickly got a job teaching PE at East Orchard Elementary School. After kicking around at the elementary level for three years, he was hired as PE teacher at Marcus Whitman in 1958 and coached football for two years and baseball from 1959-69.
So started a long run as a coach in the South Kitsap School District. It’s a run that lasted 42 years and earns him the nickname “Mr. Coach” from Ed Fisher, the highly successful former SK football coach
Fisher finally convinced Hahn to coach with him at SK in 1988, the year he finally retired from teaching and coaching at Cedar Heights. He coached with Fisher from 1988 to 1996 and then with D.J. Sigurdson from 1996 to 2000. He took 2000 to build his house and then came back for one year in 2001 before finally giving up the coaching gig.
Along with being successful as a coach, Hahn became successful in molding his students into good character people. Fisher and others are quick to point out that many former students came to respect and love the man who looked fearsome with his Mariner crew cut, his scowl, his rough and tough ways.
But beneath that exterior there always was a soft heart.
“He comes across very gruff, but underneath that gruff exterior is a heart of gold,” says. Sigurdson, now a vice principal at the school. “I can’t remember a (football) banquet where he didn’t get emotional about the kids he coached, especially his seniors who had been with him for three years.”
It was 1969 that Cedar Heights Junior High opened its doors, and Hahn was there. He became the school’s first PE teacher, it’s first football coach and its first wrestling coach. He in 1973 would be joined by one of his Marcus Whitman students and one of its players on the PE staff – Elton Goodwin.
Goodwin, of course, won over 500 baseball games and three state championships at the longtime coach at South Kitsap. But he first started out at Cedar Heights.
When Goodwin was a sophomore at SK, he lost his father to a heart attack and two men quickly filled the need for a father figure – the late SK wrestling coach Larry Maguire and Hahn.
“At the time he scared (the bleep) out of me,” Goodwin said of when he first met Hahn as his PE coach at Marcus Whitman when he was just 12 and a 7th grader. “He was like a Marine Drill Sargent. That’s the way teachers were back in those days. You had to stand in line in the gym and you had a number, and you didn’t move from that number while he took roll. He had that crew cut, and he’s always had that gruff voice, and he looked mean.”
When Goodwin joined the Cedar Heights staff he became an assistant football coach to Hahn, and over the course of time the two of them bonded and Goodwin considered his old PE coach a vital mentor to him.
Hahn has been an avid hunter and fisherman and Goodwin thinks it was 1980 that he first went with Hahn to Ilwaco on one of the many fishing excursions he took there over the years. And fishing there is not always a picnic because of the rip tide that crashed into the bar. Goodwin remembers one particular bad trip.
“This one time we come into the bar at the wrong time,” says Goodwin. “I don’t know why he came in the wrong time, but we did. He tells me to put on a life jacket. I was scared (bleep). I thought the boat was going to sink. I don’t think I was ever so scared in my life. We just about didn’t make it. It was touch and go.”
Get Hahn to talking and he will regale you with countless stores about Ilwaco fishing. There is one that is his favorite. He and Barbara have two daughters – Cheri, a PE teacher at SK, and Patti – and when they were eight and six years old were on this Ilwaco trip. Both of the girls wanted to go out on the boat and go fishing. Dad was reluctant to take them out because it would take away from his fishing if he had to constantly watch over them.
Barbara gave her ok, so they jumped in the boat. But Hahn figured out a way to discourage the girls. He would take them through the rip tide, likely scare them to death and make them cry to get back to land.
It was a pretty bad rip tide with water splashing into the boat and when they got through it Hahn felt for sure the girls would be begging to be taken back. Instead, he got the biggest surprise of his life.
“My oldest (Cheri) came up to me and said, “Dad, can we do that again?’ “
So much for that. Hahn says after that the two girls became avid fishermen and couldn’t be denied a seat in the boat. And he’s pretty proud they have taken to the water and to fishing.
“I grew up hunting and fishing,” says Hahn. “(Former SK teacher and coach) Pat Bunten and I would go hunt deer every fall, even shoot a few, but it was mostly hiking. I have fished fresh water and salt water my whole life. I loved fishing at Ilwaco every August for kings and silvers.”
While at Cedar Heights, Hahn coached some real good athletes, not the least of which was Jim Cutchell, who won a state heavyweight wrestling champion in 1977 (3-0 over Hayward “Spud” Harris of Lakes) and it can be argued he might have been the best heavyweight in the big school category in state history.
He also coached the Rill brothers – Mark and David, who run the Rill Chapel’s Life Tribute Center in Port Orchard – Eric Canton, the current SK football coach, Reed Richardson, head football coach at Squalicum (Bellingham), and Casey Selfridge, head football coach at Lakeside, and many others too numerous to mention.
Sigurdson talked about Hahn’s Red Shirt day at Cedar Heights. When he wore a red shirt to school that meant his PE students would have to do double the calisthenics that day. But student leaders, guys like David Rill, would ask Hahn questions and once Hahn got going on his answers they quickly turned into stories and his students would stand back with faint smiles knowing that time would run out before they could do double the calisthenics.
Then there is what Sigurdson thought might be the “Stud Pole or “Demon Pole” at Cedar that Hahn started. When one of his kids did something extraordinary he would mark in orange on this pole at school the kids’ name and accomplishment. As far as Sigurdson knows, other coaches have carried the tradition forward.
“It is a right of passage at the junior high,” says Sigurdson. “He was really good at setting a standard and when kids lived up to it he really celebrated it. He set a pretty high bar, but it wasn’t so high that a kid couldn’t reach it.”
Then there was the year that Fisher got gold helmets. Apparently there has been a continual problem over the years with bees at Joe Knowles Stadium at SK. This particular year, the bees were flourishing. And the bad part is they were attracted to the gold helmets, and were getting inside of them.
Fisher didn’t know what to do.
Hahn did, though.
“He drives home and comes back with an old rotten piece of salmon,” says Fisher. “He hangs it from the goal post at one end and he gets a bucket of water, about 25 gallons, and the bees fly to the rotten salmon, eat as much as they can and fall into the water.
“And there is no more problem with bees.”
Sigurdson recounts the time former assistant football coach and head wrestling coach Lyle Ballew was listening to an interview of the Lynyrd Skynyrd band on a Seattle radio station and the disc jockey asked where the band name came from. He was told it was named after one of their high school physical education teachers, Leonard Skinner, who was famed for being tough and enforcing school policy against long hair.
”Whoever the DJ was, he said if he would have a band he would call it Ernie Hahn,” said Sigurdson, amazed Hahn’s famed toughness reached Seattle.
There aren’t many Ernie Hahn’s who take a special in interest in building up their students and athletes. Yeah there are plenty of good teachers and coaches, but a special section is reserved for the ones who are not forgotten years after they have left teaching and coaching like Hahn has.
“He did a really nice job of developing work ethic and mental toughness,” Sigurdson added. “He understood stuff real well. He understood the important of athletics, not that it will lead you to be a professional athlete, but to the character traits you will possess if you do well, and coach holds you to accountability.”
Now Hahn ‑ the Dawgfather of SK athletics – spends well-deserved time in comfort in the Watauga Beach, splitting wood, watching aircraft carries, submarines and ferry boats motor by the house he build with Barbara.
But on Friday nights, he ventures to do what he has done for too many years to count, watch a little SK football from the sidelines and to offer suggestion how to get better to the kids and to the coaches.
And the kids and coaches would have it no other way.
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