Oklahoma State University Athletics
Living Legend
Story by Clay Billman
Photography by Dan Beyers
This story was originally published in the December 2013 edition of POSSE Magazine.
In the fall of 1936, Oklahoma A&M sophomore Stanley Henson was being sized up by head wrestling coach Edward C. Gallagher. (NCAA rules at the time prohibited freshmen from competing, and the rangy two-time state champion from Tulsa was finally getting his chance to compete for the top collegiate program in the country.)
“At the beginning of that year — my first year — Mr. Gallagher took me in and put me on the scales,” Henson says. “I weighed 143 pounds.”
It wasn’t the number Gallagher was hoping for.
“I remember that very well, because he looked a little disappointed,” Hanson recalls. “He said, ‘I’m sorry. I wanted to use you at 155 so I could use Dale Scriven at 145.’ I said, “Coach, I can wrestle 155. I can handle that weight. I’ll be glad to.”
Gallagher, the patriarch of the most decorated wrestling program in NCAA history, acquiesced.
“I didn’t try to put on weight or take it off, either. I just wrestled, you know. That was my weight. I was a light 145-pounder, really.”
Despite giving up 12 pounds on the competition, Henson more than handled the 155-pound weight class that season. In fact, he dominated. The only setback was a brawny grappler from the University of Oklahoma named Bill Keas.
“Bill Keas was a big, tough, muscular guy. The first time he and I wrestled was down at OU,” Henson says. “It went to extension period, and he had more riding time than I did, so he won that match. The next week Mr. Gallagher called me in and said, ‘Well, I thought you were a 155 pounder, but I think you’re 145. You’d better wrestle 145 from now on.’
“I said, ‘Coach, I told you at the beginning of the year I’d wrestle anywhere you want me to, but with one exception. I want Bill Keas again when they come up here. I want to stay at 155.’ And I did. I wrestled him there in the old gym (OAMC Armory and Gymnasium, now the Donald W. Reynolds School of Architecture).”
Determined to avenge his loss, Henson went on the offensive.
“I remember I just decided I had to do something to win that damn match, and just grabbed old Bill and did what I call a whipover and just whipped him right over on his back ... but in doing so, I dislocated my left shoulder.”
Time was called as Henson was being treated.
“It hurts like hell when it’s out,” Henson says, vividly recalling his injury. “I remember that match so well, I can even feel what went on. I can feel it ... They reduced my shoulder, and when it’s back in it’s kind of tolerable. So I felt pretty good. I kind of figured this was the last shot I was going to get at Bill Keas, and I didn’t want to lose this match, so I asked coach if I couldn’t continue. He said if I thought I could, go ahead and do it. So we started again.
“I didn’t think I could take him down again, so I knew that I had to ride him. He won the toss and chose to take down in his period, and I just rode him as tight as I could. I kept him just smothered the whole match.
“Then it was my period down, the last period. I remember he got down on my left side, and I just did a sit-out, a turnover, and he had about two seconds time advantage on me and I had all three minutes on him. So I won that match.
“The shoulder bothered me on occasion from then on, but I never stopped a match,” he adds.
Two weeks later, Henson won the 1937 NCAA title at 145 pounds, while Keas took the 155 crown. Henson was named the tournament’s Outstanding Wrestler, helping Gallagher’s squad win its eighth team title.
Henson would go on to win two more individual titles, with the Bedlam bout being his only career defeat.
“My older brother Kenneth went to OU, but he didn’t wrestle,” Henson says. “I always said, after I lost that match to Bill Keas, I never spoke to those damn guys from OU anymore ... That’s not true of course, they were fine wrestlers, and I knew all of ’em well, but we used to kid about that a little bit.
“We had the rivalry in wrestling, had it in football, in everything. We still do, and that’s good. That’s good for both teams, I think.”
Campus Courting
It was in Stillwater where Henson met the love of his life: Thelma Burnell, from Yale, Okla.
“Her brother, Howard, was a wrestler and my roommate at the Sigma Chi house,” he says. “She was a Theta.”
For young couples, Henson says the popular hangout of the day was Swim’s Campus Shop, located just across the street from the fire station.
“Let me tell you, we didn’t have many dates — we didn’t have any money,” he laughs. “But at Swim’s you could get a milkshake for 10 cents, you could get a hamburger for 10 cents, you could get a lot of other things for 5 cents ... so we’d have a whole weekend and the whole thing would cost about a dollar and a half. It’s not like that now.”
This past summer, the couple celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary. They were married the same year Gallagher Hall opened.
“Thelma and I talked about getting married, but we really hadn’t made any plans for it,” he recalls. “I was working in the oil field at the time on one of my dad’s crews. I was a derrick man, hanging that steel together. That’s how I got through school, working in my dad’s crews in the summertime.
“I was working somewhere up around Pawnee, and Howard and his girlfriend drove by and said they were going to go over and get married and keep it a secret. They thought that was a good idea. Well, that sounded like a pretty good idea to me, too. So I took off my overalls, and we went with them over to Noel, Missouri. It’s just a beautiful little mountain town in the Ozarks. We found an old retired Presbyterian preacher to marry us, and we stood up for Howard and Lucille, and they stood up for us. We spent the night in a little motel there somewhere by Noel. They dropped me off the next day the same place they picked me up. I was back in my overalls the next day working.”
Their elopement wasn’t a secret for long, he says.
“We didn’t tell anyone for a while, and my dad, when I remember taking Thelma in saying, ‘This is your new daughter-in-law,’ said, ‘Well, I’m not surprised.’ He had called that night to see how the work was going, and they had to make excuses because I wasn’t there.”
Gallagher's Hall
While Gallagher was forging a dynasty on the mat, OAMC athletic director and basketball coach Henry P. Iba was overseeing construction on the 4-H Club and Student Activity Building (named to help garner funding from the state legislature).
“I knew Mr. Iba real well,” Henson says. “I thought he was wonderful. He was a wonderful man, just like Mr. Gallagher.”
At a cost of nearly half-a-million dollars and featuring more than 5,000 theater-style seats and air conditioning, contractors dubbed the grand arena the “Madison Square Garden of the Plains.” Some called it “Iba’s folly,” predicting the arena would never be filled to capacity. Most simply referred to it as “Gallagher Hall.”
Henson recalls the need for a larger, modernized facility.
“My first two years we wrestled in what became the women’s gym,” he says. “That was a smaller building, and that place would just be stuffed with every wrestling mat. There wasn’t a place to stand or sit or anything in that little gymnasium. There was a running track on the second floor above the arena, and people would be sitting on that all the way around the wrestling room, and so that made it a pretty intimate wrestling atmosphere. After we left it, we went to Gallagher Hall. We were pretty proud of it.”
As a captain his senior year, Henson recalls the new building’s dedication in honor of their beloved coach, who by then was suffering from the latter stages of Parkinson’s disease. “Gallagher Day” was held February 3, 1939.
“We wrestled Indiana that night for the dedication. As I recall, we filled it that night. I remember all those matches, but I remember that match in particular. That was my last year, and I happened to be captain of the team. I was asked to present Mrs. Gallagher with a bouquet of yellow roses. She was a very gracious lady.”
Ed Gallagher would pass away just a year-and-a-half later while on vacation in Colorado. He was 54.
“He was a sweet and gentle little Irishman,” Henson says. “That kind of describes him entirely. All the time I knew him, he was an invalid. He had Parkinsonism, as you know, so bad that his hands shook. During a match he’d sit on his hands to just keep them quiet.
“But he was a great athlete when he was in his prime. He told me he used to lie down on the starting line of a 100-yard dash on his back, and his opponent was ready to run. When the gun went off, he could turn over with his right leg up and got started and said he could lose no more than a stride. And then he would catch his opponent and win the race.
“The other thing he used to tell me was that he could stand on a hard wood floor and turn a backflip just as easy as a lot of men got out of a chair. Those skills were long gone when I knew him. He was an invalid all the time. But that didn’t detract from his ability to motivate people.”
Henson recalls Gallagher’s unique coaching style.
“There was a fella we had on the team who was a muscular kid, about my weight. At tryout matches, I pinned him with a head scissor, which is illegal now and ought to be, because it’s pretty hazardous. Mr. Gallagher told me, he said, ‘Now I don’t want you to use that on him anymore because you don’t need to in order to win.’ The next time I wrestled him, I pinned him with something else. And Mr. Gallagher told me the same thing. ‘I don’t want you to use that anymore.’ Then it was another hold. Well, hell, he took away so many of my moves that I had to develop something new to make it work. I had to do something different it seemed like every week.”
At Tulsa (Central) High School, Henson had wrestled for Art Griffith, a Gallagher protege who would go on to succeed his mentor at OAMC in 1941.
“There’s no question about it, those were the two greatest coaches in the whole world,” he says. “But they were different. Coach Griffith’s contribution to me was discipline. It was discipline to train, discipline to work hard, discipline to do everything. Art Griffth was the best in the world at that, and he really went over the technique of wrestling a whole lot more than Mr. Gallagher did. When I was there, Mr. Gallagher would get us all together early on in the year and go over various maneuvers, and then we’d walk through that a time or two without any resistance. Then we’d add a little resistance until you got the thing ingrained in your mind. And wrestling became a reflex. I talk about that a lot. Wrestling has to be a reflex. If you have to think what to do you’re one step behind. If you have to think what your coach wants you to do, you’re two steps behind. and so you have to do it over and over and over again until it becomes a reflex.”
Gallagher’s influence in the sport reached far and wide, Henson says.
“All the coaches knew him, all over the country. They all admired him and respected him. They’d come to Stillwater and spend time with him to learn from him. We’d go to a national tournament and there would always be one or two kids there that had gone there by themselves, and their coach wasn’t with them, and they’d come talk to Mr. Gallagher, and he’d come in and treat ’em just like he would his own boys. He was such as wonderful man.
Former Cowboy wrestlers permeated the coaching ranks across Oklahoma and in colleges throughout the country.
“Mr. Gallagher was kind of a center and his wrestlers went out into the high schools all over the state and coached, just like Mr. Griffith who had graduated with an advanced degree from Oklahoma A&M before I knew him.”
A Life of Service
It was a former OSU wrestler coaching at the United States Naval Academy who influenced the next chapter in Henson’s life. Although he was a civil engineering student at OAMC, Henson became interested in pursing a medical career.
“Ray Schwartz had been our assistant coach under Mr. Gallagher when he got that job at the Naval Academy. He wanted me to come up and be his assistant. He thought I could do that and go to medical school. Mr. Gallagher’s son, Clarence, was a doctor in Oklahoma City, and he’s the one that kind of got me interested in medicine.”
Henson took the assistant coaching job at the Naval Academy, despite being a few hours short of graduating.
“I didn’t really feel like I needed a degree,” he admits, “Although I did enroll in St. John’s College there in Annapolis there for a year while I was coaching there.”
Before he could pursue medical school, the United States became involved in World War II.
“The war started when I was there, so I applied for a commission and went to sea.” He served as a gunner for two-and-a-half years on the USS San Francisco (CA-38), a heavy cruiser that saw significant combat in the Pacific.
“We handled the 5-inch/25 (caliber) guns on the starboard side. That was my battle station. We had kamikazes coming in at us at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Every morning and every afternoon we were shooting at 'em.
"Thelma had gone back to Yale and was finishing her degree in Stillwater while I was at sea during World War II. We kind of thought that if I didn't make it back, she would be a lot better able to take care of our two daughters with a degree, so she went back to school."
Henson still had dreams of becoming a doctor and realized that he might need that undergraduate degree after all.
“Let me tell you how I got that degree,” he says. “The war ended, and we were still in the Philippines. I wrote to Thelma and I asked her to apply for my degree. This was back in ’45, and I hadn’t been there since ’39. Schiller Scroggs was the dean of Arts & Sciences, and he said I had more than enough credits and they could give me a degree. It’s not in engineering, although all my credits were in engineering.”
Henson’s wife also applied to medical schools on his behalf, citing a pair of influential personal references.
“She put down two names for recommendation: Dr. (Henry) Bennett, the president of the college and the top educator in Oklahoma at the time, and Dr. Scroggs. I tell people, it didn’t hurt any that they were both wrestling fans and I knew them well. It helped get me admitted to the University of Maryland. After four years there, I interned there in Baltimore with the Public Health Service. When I applied for a fellowship in surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, she gave the same two names for recommendations. Again, I was accepted immediately.”
After a distinguished career spanning five decades as a general surgeon in Colorado, Henson finally retired in 1998.
“I did the first operation of nearly every kind in Fort Collins because I was the only surgeon here for a long time,” he says.
Extraordinary Gentlemen
In 1978, Henson was inducted as a Distinguished Member of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.
Sportswriter Mike Chapman of WIN magazine has ranked Henson as the eighth best collegiate wrestler of all time.
"Of course it's an honor to have anybody think that, but you can't compare people from different eras," Henson says. "I think John Smith may be the greatest wrestler of the last century, to tell you the truth. He didn't get started quite as early as I did as far as his winning ways, but he's done a lot more than I did. He also won the Olympics twice. He was a great wrestler."
As for his contemporaries, Amateur Wrestling News tabbed Henson “Wrestler of the Decade” for the 1930s — an era that includes several Hall of Famers who just happened to live under the same roof.
“Our Sigma Chi house had the outstanding wrestler trophy at the national tournament four years in a row,” Henson says. “The first one was Frank Lewis, who was an Olympic champion in ’36. The next one was (Harley) “Doc” Strong, who was a Silver medalist in the ’36 Olympics. The third was myself, and the fourth was Joe McDaniel, who was a pledge at that time. That’s pretty good wrestling material.
“To be picked for the 1930s ahead of all those guys was really quite an honor, but I’m the first one to tell you, you can’t decide whether one fella was better than another.”
Henson admits he may not have even been the best wrestler in his own family.
“My younger brother went to the naval academy while i was there. he turned out to be a great wrestler.”
Josiah “Joe” Henson won two NCAA titles competing for Navy, as well as a bronze medal for the U.S. in the 1952 Helsinki Games. He joined his brother in the Hall of Fame in 2006. The toughest competitors Henson ever faced didn’t go on to collegiate fame or Olympic glory, he says.
“One of the best wrestlers I ever wrestled you never heard of. His name was Bill Peck. He was from Tulsa, same as I was. He was just behind me in high school, and he did everything I did, only he did it better. I remember another kid in high school by the name of Floyd Benson. I think he was about as good a wrestler as I ever wrestled. And you never heard of him. I don’t think he ever went to college.”
A number of years ago, Henson compiled a booklet of advice for young wrestlers, titled Wrestling: A Lifetime Endeavor Helping Boys Become Men. Although it features dozens of illustrated wrestling holds and maneuvers, Henson says the primary purpose is to instill a winning attitude, promote sportsmanship, and imparting valuable life lessons that go beyond the mat.
“When you step on a wrestling mat, you are all alone,” it reads. “There is no teammate to help you. you win or lose by how well you have prepared, and how much you really want to win. Life is like that.
“Wrestling teaches you to 7 compete according to a set of rules; rules that help you through your life. Ideally, wrestling should teach you to win graciously when you win, and if you lose, to lose like a gentleman.”
Spoken like a true gentleman indeed ... a gentleman whose legacy remains as one of the first legends of Gallagher-Iba Arena.
Photography by Dan Beyers
This story was originally published in the December 2013 edition of POSSE Magazine.
In the fall of 1936, Oklahoma A&M sophomore Stanley Henson was being sized up by head wrestling coach Edward C. Gallagher. (NCAA rules at the time prohibited freshmen from competing, and the rangy two-time state champion from Tulsa was finally getting his chance to compete for the top collegiate program in the country.)
“At the beginning of that year — my first year — Mr. Gallagher took me in and put me on the scales,” Henson says. “I weighed 143 pounds.”
It wasn’t the number Gallagher was hoping for.
“I remember that very well, because he looked a little disappointed,” Hanson recalls. “He said, ‘I’m sorry. I wanted to use you at 155 so I could use Dale Scriven at 145.’ I said, “Coach, I can wrestle 155. I can handle that weight. I’ll be glad to.”
Gallagher, the patriarch of the most decorated wrestling program in NCAA history, acquiesced.
“I didn’t try to put on weight or take it off, either. I just wrestled, you know. That was my weight. I was a light 145-pounder, really.”Despite giving up 12 pounds on the competition, Henson more than handled the 155-pound weight class that season. In fact, he dominated. The only setback was a brawny grappler from the University of Oklahoma named Bill Keas.
“Bill Keas was a big, tough, muscular guy. The first time he and I wrestled was down at OU,” Henson says. “It went to extension period, and he had more riding time than I did, so he won that match. The next week Mr. Gallagher called me in and said, ‘Well, I thought you were a 155 pounder, but I think you’re 145. You’d better wrestle 145 from now on.’
“I said, ‘Coach, I told you at the beginning of the year I’d wrestle anywhere you want me to, but with one exception. I want Bill Keas again when they come up here. I want to stay at 155.’ And I did. I wrestled him there in the old gym (OAMC Armory and Gymnasium, now the Donald W. Reynolds School of Architecture).”
Determined to avenge his loss, Henson went on the offensive.
“I remember I just decided I had to do something to win that damn match, and just grabbed old Bill and did what I call a whipover and just whipped him right over on his back ... but in doing so, I dislocated my left shoulder.”
Time was called as Henson was being treated.
“It hurts like hell when it’s out,” Henson says, vividly recalling his injury. “I remember that match so well, I can even feel what went on. I can feel it ... They reduced my shoulder, and when it’s back in it’s kind of tolerable. So I felt pretty good. I kind of figured this was the last shot I was going to get at Bill Keas, and I didn’t want to lose this match, so I asked coach if I couldn’t continue. He said if I thought I could, go ahead and do it. So we started again.
“I didn’t think I could take him down again, so I knew that I had to ride him. He won the toss and chose to take down in his period, and I just rode him as tight as I could. I kept him just smothered the whole match.
“Then it was my period down, the last period. I remember he got down on my left side, and I just did a sit-out, a turnover, and he had about two seconds time advantage on me and I had all three minutes on him. So I won that match.
“The shoulder bothered me on occasion from then on, but I never stopped a match,” he adds.
Two weeks later, Henson won the 1937 NCAA title at 145 pounds, while Keas took the 155 crown. Henson was named the tournament’s Outstanding Wrestler, helping Gallagher’s squad win its eighth team title.
Henson would go on to win two more individual titles, with the Bedlam bout being his only career defeat.
“My older brother Kenneth went to OU, but he didn’t wrestle,” Henson says. “I always said, after I lost that match to Bill Keas, I never spoke to those damn guys from OU anymore ... That’s not true of course, they were fine wrestlers, and I knew all of ’em well, but we used to kid about that a little bit.
“We had the rivalry in wrestling, had it in football, in everything. We still do, and that’s good. That’s good for both teams, I think.”
Campus Courting
It was in Stillwater where Henson met the love of his life: Thelma Burnell, from Yale, Okla.
“Her brother, Howard, was a wrestler and my roommate at the Sigma Chi house,” he says. “She was a Theta.”
For young couples, Henson says the popular hangout of the day was Swim’s Campus Shop, located just across the street from the fire station.
“Let me tell you, we didn’t have many dates — we didn’t have any money,” he laughs. “But at Swim’s you could get a milkshake for 10 cents, you could get a hamburger for 10 cents, you could get a lot of other things for 5 cents ... so we’d have a whole weekend and the whole thing would cost about a dollar and a half. It’s not like that now.”
This past summer, the couple celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary. They were married the same year Gallagher Hall opened.
“Thelma and I talked about getting married, but we really hadn’t made any plans for it,” he recalls. “I was working in the oil field at the time on one of my dad’s crews. I was a derrick man, hanging that steel together. That’s how I got through school, working in my dad’s crews in the summertime.
“I was working somewhere up around Pawnee, and Howard and his girlfriend drove by and said they were going to go over and get married and keep it a secret. They thought that was a good idea. Well, that sounded like a pretty good idea to me, too. So I took off my overalls, and we went with them over to Noel, Missouri. It’s just a beautiful little mountain town in the Ozarks. We found an old retired Presbyterian preacher to marry us, and we stood up for Howard and Lucille, and they stood up for us. We spent the night in a little motel there somewhere by Noel. They dropped me off the next day the same place they picked me up. I was back in my overalls the next day working.”
Their elopement wasn’t a secret for long, he says.
“We didn’t tell anyone for a while, and my dad, when I remember taking Thelma in saying, ‘This is your new daughter-in-law,’ said, ‘Well, I’m not surprised.’ He had called that night to see how the work was going, and they had to make excuses because I wasn’t there.”
Gallagher's Hall
While Gallagher was forging a dynasty on the mat, OAMC athletic director and basketball coach Henry P. Iba was overseeing construction on the 4-H Club and Student Activity Building (named to help garner funding from the state legislature).
“I knew Mr. Iba real well,” Henson says. “I thought he was wonderful. He was a wonderful man, just like Mr. Gallagher.”At a cost of nearly half-a-million dollars and featuring more than 5,000 theater-style seats and air conditioning, contractors dubbed the grand arena the “Madison Square Garden of the Plains.” Some called it “Iba’s folly,” predicting the arena would never be filled to capacity. Most simply referred to it as “Gallagher Hall.”
Henson recalls the need for a larger, modernized facility.
“My first two years we wrestled in what became the women’s gym,” he says. “That was a smaller building, and that place would just be stuffed with every wrestling mat. There wasn’t a place to stand or sit or anything in that little gymnasium. There was a running track on the second floor above the arena, and people would be sitting on that all the way around the wrestling room, and so that made it a pretty intimate wrestling atmosphere. After we left it, we went to Gallagher Hall. We were pretty proud of it.”
As a captain his senior year, Henson recalls the new building’s dedication in honor of their beloved coach, who by then was suffering from the latter stages of Parkinson’s disease. “Gallagher Day” was held February 3, 1939.
“We wrestled Indiana that night for the dedication. As I recall, we filled it that night. I remember all those matches, but I remember that match in particular. That was my last year, and I happened to be captain of the team. I was asked to present Mrs. Gallagher with a bouquet of yellow roses. She was a very gracious lady.”
Ed Gallagher would pass away just a year-and-a-half later while on vacation in Colorado. He was 54.
“He was a sweet and gentle little Irishman,” Henson says. “That kind of describes him entirely. All the time I knew him, he was an invalid. He had Parkinsonism, as you know, so bad that his hands shook. During a match he’d sit on his hands to just keep them quiet.
“But he was a great athlete when he was in his prime. He told me he used to lie down on the starting line of a 100-yard dash on his back, and his opponent was ready to run. When the gun went off, he could turn over with his right leg up and got started and said he could lose no more than a stride. And then he would catch his opponent and win the race.
“The other thing he used to tell me was that he could stand on a hard wood floor and turn a backflip just as easy as a lot of men got out of a chair. Those skills were long gone when I knew him. He was an invalid all the time. But that didn’t detract from his ability to motivate people.”
Henson recalls Gallagher’s unique coaching style.
“There was a fella we had on the team who was a muscular kid, about my weight. At tryout matches, I pinned him with a head scissor, which is illegal now and ought to be, because it’s pretty hazardous. Mr. Gallagher told me, he said, ‘Now I don’t want you to use that on him anymore because you don’t need to in order to win.’ The next time I wrestled him, I pinned him with something else. And Mr. Gallagher told me the same thing. ‘I don’t want you to use that anymore.’ Then it was another hold. Well, hell, he took away so many of my moves that I had to develop something new to make it work. I had to do something different it seemed like every week.”
At Tulsa (Central) High School, Henson had wrestled for Art Griffith, a Gallagher protege who would go on to succeed his mentor at OAMC in 1941.
“There’s no question about it, those were the two greatest coaches in the whole world,” he says. “But they were different. Coach Griffith’s contribution to me was discipline. It was discipline to train, discipline to work hard, discipline to do everything. Art Griffth was the best in the world at that, and he really went over the technique of wrestling a whole lot more than Mr. Gallagher did. When I was there, Mr. Gallagher would get us all together early on in the year and go over various maneuvers, and then we’d walk through that a time or two without any resistance. Then we’d add a little resistance until you got the thing ingrained in your mind. And wrestling became a reflex. I talk about that a lot. Wrestling has to be a reflex. If you have to think what to do you’re one step behind. If you have to think what your coach wants you to do, you’re two steps behind. and so you have to do it over and over and over again until it becomes a reflex.”
Gallagher’s influence in the sport reached far and wide, Henson says.
“All the coaches knew him, all over the country. They all admired him and respected him. They’d come to Stillwater and spend time with him to learn from him. We’d go to a national tournament and there would always be one or two kids there that had gone there by themselves, and their coach wasn’t with them, and they’d come talk to Mr. Gallagher, and he’d come in and treat ’em just like he would his own boys. He was such as wonderful man.
Former Cowboy wrestlers permeated the coaching ranks across Oklahoma and in colleges throughout the country.
“Mr. Gallagher was kind of a center and his wrestlers went out into the high schools all over the state and coached, just like Mr. Griffith who had graduated with an advanced degree from Oklahoma A&M before I knew him.”
A Life of Service
It was a former OSU wrestler coaching at the United States Naval Academy who influenced the next chapter in Henson’s life. Although he was a civil engineering student at OAMC, Henson became interested in pursing a medical career.
“Ray Schwartz had been our assistant coach under Mr. Gallagher when he got that job at the Naval Academy. He wanted me to come up and be his assistant. He thought I could do that and go to medical school. Mr. Gallagher’s son, Clarence, was a doctor in Oklahoma City, and he’s the one that kind of got me interested in medicine.”
Henson took the assistant coaching job at the Naval Academy, despite being a few hours short of graduating.
“I didn’t really feel like I needed a degree,” he admits, “Although I did enroll in St. John’s College there in Annapolis there for a year while I was coaching there.”
Before he could pursue medical school, the United States became involved in World War II.
“The war started when I was there, so I applied for a commission and went to sea.” He served as a gunner for two-and-a-half years on the USS San Francisco (CA-38), a heavy cruiser that saw significant combat in the Pacific.
“We handled the 5-inch/25 (caliber) guns on the starboard side. That was my battle station. We had kamikazes coming in at us at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Every morning and every afternoon we were shooting at 'em.
"Thelma had gone back to Yale and was finishing her degree in Stillwater while I was at sea during World War II. We kind of thought that if I didn't make it back, she would be a lot better able to take care of our two daughters with a degree, so she went back to school."
Henson still had dreams of becoming a doctor and realized that he might need that undergraduate degree after all.
“Let me tell you how I got that degree,” he says. “The war ended, and we were still in the Philippines. I wrote to Thelma and I asked her to apply for my degree. This was back in ’45, and I hadn’t been there since ’39. Schiller Scroggs was the dean of Arts & Sciences, and he said I had more than enough credits and they could give me a degree. It’s not in engineering, although all my credits were in engineering.”
Henson’s wife also applied to medical schools on his behalf, citing a pair of influential personal references.
“She put down two names for recommendation: Dr. (Henry) Bennett, the president of the college and the top educator in Oklahoma at the time, and Dr. Scroggs. I tell people, it didn’t hurt any that they were both wrestling fans and I knew them well. It helped get me admitted to the University of Maryland. After four years there, I interned there in Baltimore with the Public Health Service. When I applied for a fellowship in surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, she gave the same two names for recommendations. Again, I was accepted immediately.”
After a distinguished career spanning five decades as a general surgeon in Colorado, Henson finally retired in 1998.
“I did the first operation of nearly every kind in Fort Collins because I was the only surgeon here for a long time,” he says.
Extraordinary Gentlemen
In 1978, Henson was inducted as a Distinguished Member of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.
Sportswriter Mike Chapman of WIN magazine has ranked Henson as the eighth best collegiate wrestler of all time.
"Of course it's an honor to have anybody think that, but you can't compare people from different eras," Henson says. "I think John Smith may be the greatest wrestler of the last century, to tell you the truth. He didn't get started quite as early as I did as far as his winning ways, but he's done a lot more than I did. He also won the Olympics twice. He was a great wrestler."
As for his contemporaries, Amateur Wrestling News tabbed Henson “Wrestler of the Decade” for the 1930s — an era that includes several Hall of Famers who just happened to live under the same roof.
“Our Sigma Chi house had the outstanding wrestler trophy at the national tournament four years in a row,” Henson says. “The first one was Frank Lewis, who was an Olympic champion in ’36. The next one was (Harley) “Doc” Strong, who was a Silver medalist in the ’36 Olympics. The third was myself, and the fourth was Joe McDaniel, who was a pledge at that time. That’s pretty good wrestling material.“To be picked for the 1930s ahead of all those guys was really quite an honor, but I’m the first one to tell you, you can’t decide whether one fella was better than another.”
Henson admits he may not have even been the best wrestler in his own family.
“My younger brother went to the naval academy while i was there. he turned out to be a great wrestler.”
Josiah “Joe” Henson won two NCAA titles competing for Navy, as well as a bronze medal for the U.S. in the 1952 Helsinki Games. He joined his brother in the Hall of Fame in 2006. The toughest competitors Henson ever faced didn’t go on to collegiate fame or Olympic glory, he says.
“One of the best wrestlers I ever wrestled you never heard of. His name was Bill Peck. He was from Tulsa, same as I was. He was just behind me in high school, and he did everything I did, only he did it better. I remember another kid in high school by the name of Floyd Benson. I think he was about as good a wrestler as I ever wrestled. And you never heard of him. I don’t think he ever went to college.”
A number of years ago, Henson compiled a booklet of advice for young wrestlers, titled Wrestling: A Lifetime Endeavor Helping Boys Become Men. Although it features dozens of illustrated wrestling holds and maneuvers, Henson says the primary purpose is to instill a winning attitude, promote sportsmanship, and imparting valuable life lessons that go beyond the mat.
“When you step on a wrestling mat, you are all alone,” it reads. “There is no teammate to help you. you win or lose by how well you have prepared, and how much you really want to win. Life is like that.
“Wrestling teaches you to 7 compete according to a set of rules; rules that help you through your life. Ideally, wrestling should teach you to win graciously when you win, and if you lose, to lose like a gentleman.”
Spoken like a true gentleman indeed ... a gentleman whose legacy remains as one of the first legends of Gallagher-Iba Arena.
