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Fact or Fiction?

By Rick Harmon • August 2, 2010

Sidney Lanier High School's centennial once again brought up one of the city's great stories about a football game -- a game that either changed the city's history or created one of its most enduring urban legends.

In the early '80s, a historical marker went up at Lanier commemorating the story: That Cloverdale High School and Sidney Lanier High School met in Cramton Bowl on Nov. 3, 1928, to determine not only the state championship, but which would survive as a high school.

Because of changing demographics only one high school was needed, and the story contends the schools played a football game to determine which would remain a high school and which would become a junior high. Sidney Lanier won the game 21-0 and won its survival. Cloverdale lost the game and its identity, becoming a junior high and having all its high school records and honors expunged when the two schools combined.

It's a remarkable story. But it may be just that -- a story.

Years after the historical marker went up, Montgomery architect Ralph Loeb Jr. wrote a letter to the Advertiser praising his son-in-law's father, who had been a member of the Lanier team whose victory had ensured Lanier's survival as a high school.

His letter got a quick response from Cash Stanley, who played on the Cloverdale team in the contest. Stanley said that while it was true Lanier had won the game, the rest of the sto ry was rubbish.

Loeb asked Montgomery historian Wesley P. Newton to help him find out the truth. The pair researched the question and researched it some more, and then still some more, until they finally determined that not much could be determined.

Lanier players they contacted all remembered the game being played for their school's future. Cloverdale players they contacted all remembered that is was a big game but had never involved either school's future.

The issues of The Oracle and The Cloverleaf, the yearbooks of Lanier and Cloverdale, that came out following the game made no mention that the football game was played for the survival of either school. School board records didn't mention it. Neither did the Advertiser's pre- or post-game coverage.

Newton said after doing the research that if he was forced to make a decision based on what he'd found, he'd have to say the story probably wasn't true and that the game didn't determine the fate of the two schools. Still, the story survives, and was part of some of the stories celebrating Lanier's centennial, which is probably how it should be.

As the quote from that famous Jimmy Stewart/John Wayne Western "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" says "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."