photo from the 1942 Mizzou Savitar.

Darold Jenkins, All-American

A waist-high brick wall surrounds Faurot Field inside Memorial Stadium on the University of Missouri campus. On the wall, names of legendary coaches and all-American football players who wore the black and gold are set in concrete plaques.

On the west side, about mid-field, one commemoration reads: “Darold Jenkins, 1941.” Of the thousands of students and fans who have witnessed Mizzou games since his heyday, few have probably noticed the name, and still fewer, knew the man. I am one of the fortunate few.

A strapping, six-foot, 190-pound athlete, Darold graduated from high school in Higginsville, Missouri, in 1938 and headed to Mizzou with dreams of being a Tiger fullback. But by his sophomore year, he was one of fourteen fullbacks sitting on the bench. He decided to tryout on the line as a center.

According to the Windsor Daily Star (Ontario, Canada), “At the start his junior year, he still was playing the bench. By mid-season he had driven the No. 1 centre out of the starting lineup” and earned All-Big Six Conference honors. Remarkably in 1941, his senior year, he repeated as an All-Big Six selection and was named to the all-American first team by the Associated Press and 15 other rating organizations. He was the first Associated Press all-American in Mizzou history.

In November 1941, Missouri Coach Don Faurot remarked to the Daily Capital News in Jefferson City that Darold “was the finest defensive center in the country. The fact that he worried not about himself but his team is one reason why he was such a good influence to our football squad.”

Quoted in numerous sources, Faurot later said, “I would put him on my all-time Missouri team.” Faurot was prescient. The Fall 2011 edition of MIZZOU Magazine named Jenkins to the All-century team.

Darold was selected as team captain of the Tiger 1941 Sugar Bowl team that lost a heartbreaking game 2-0 to Fordham on a mud-soaked field in New Orleans. In the 1970s, he was inducted into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame and the College Football Hall of Fame. His number 42 was retired by the University, one of only three to receive that honor.

The New York Giants drafted him to play professional football, but in 1942 with the world at war, Uncle Sam had other plans for Darold. He entered flight training and became a bomber pilot with the Eighth Air Force, flying a B-17 Flying Fortress, nicknamed “Ol’ Smoke,” from a base in southern England.

In March 1944 on his 27th mission, a German Messerschmidt shot down Ol’ Smoke over Germany forcing the crew to bail out. One crew member was killed in the aerial attack. Darold spent 17 months as a prisoner of war in Stalag Luft 3, which was made famous by the movie, “The Great Escape,” starring Steve McQueen and James Garner. Darold played a part in the actual escape.

One of the tunnels (there were three) was in Darold’s barracks, but security was so tight he didn’t know of its existence until he had been in camp for two months. In a 1976 Kansas City Star article, Darold indicated he did a little work in the tunnel, “but was too damned big.” And he was one of the prisoners who scattered excavated dirt from pouches in their pantlegs. Surprisingly, he said, “his main contribution to the escape was knitting civilian caps for the escapees to wear on the outside.”

Even with over 5,000 Allied prisoners held at the Stalag Luft 3, an unlikely meeting occurred. Renown St Louis sportswriter Bob Broeg quotes Darold in his book Ol’ Mizzou. “Less than three years later [after the Sugar Bowl] I ended up in a German POW camp with an end off that Fordham team. I think his name was Lansing. We used to walk the perimeter of that prison camp for exercise. We’d play that game over and over and over—and it always came out 2-0.”

For his distinguished military service, Darold received the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters. After discharge, he returned home to marry his college and high school sweetheart, Mary Beth Holke. While he was in college, a reporter asked him if he had a girl, and with his natural sense of humor said, “Oh, I have a girl alright. We’ve been going together a long time. She’s my mother.” Then he added, “Well, there might be another.” Of course, there was.

After returning to Columbia, he graduated from law school in 1951 and began practicing law in Jefferson City in the law firm of Lieutenant Governor James T. Blair. Quoted in the Jefferson City Sunday News and Tribune, Governor Blair, said, “Jenkins tackles legal cases with the same drive he displayed while playing football for the University of Missouri.”

Darold moved to Marshall, Missouri, and set up his own practice. He served as a workmen’s compensation referee and later became the Saline County prosecuting attorney for five years. In 1965, he took a position as a trial counsel for the State Highway Commission in the Kansas City office, which is where I met him when I landed my first job as a lawyer.

Jenkins rarely commented about football, and only once mentioned his war experience, and that was to explain why he never locked a motel room when he traveled. He would brace a chair against the doorhandle from the inside, but would never lock it. Being a lawyer was more important to him, but those experiences galvanized him. He told the Kansas City Star in 1976, “I wanted so much to be accepted in the legal profession as a lawyer than as a football player.” It is worthwhile to note he received an academic scholarship to Missouri Law School.

Then and now, Jenkins impressed me as a good lawyer. Out of a half-dozen lawyers in the Kansas City office, Darold was the one I sought when I needed advice. Scholarly in his approach, he began every consultation with, “What do you think, Counselor?” As I think about it, he never used my name. He always referred to me as “Counselor” or “The West Plains Flash.” He claimed there couldn’t be any place named Willow Springs.

As part of my training, I would often travel with Darold for court appearances to experience “frontier justice” in the rural, western parts of the state. But it was the remarkable characters I met on his route deviations that made the trips memorable. Trips in late summer required a stop at a watermelon patch farmed by an ex-professional baseball player, who retired after a high inside fastball careened off his head.

Darold would load the back of the state car with watermelons to give to the mechanics and road crew back at the office garage. To those who raised an eyebrow at his extracurricular use of the government vehicle, he argued it wasn’t as bad as the Highway Commission lawyer, who shall remain anonymous, that hauled bird dogs in the backseat of his state car. By the way, that same lawyer was reportedly pulled over by a highway patrolman for pulling a boat and trailer behind the state car.

At one court appearance, Darold introduced me to opposing counsel, the inimitable Christian Stipp. A former state representative and Lafayette County prosecuting attorney, Mr. Stipp was the last person admitted to the Missouri Bar without having graduated from law school. Until about 1948, it was possible to be admitted by apprenticeship. Nevertheless, he was formidable in the courtroom.

When Darold passed away in September 1986, obituaries appeared in newspapers in Los Angeles, Tampa, Phoenix, to mention a few, but a quote from Darold in Bob Broeg’s tribute in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch sums up how I think he would like to be remembered. “But I’m a pretty good trial lawyer for a country boy, and I think that helps, also. Now and then, some of those metropolitan lawyers do what I learned in football you never do—they underrate me.”

I never did.

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