The following column was written by Connecticut Post feature writer Charles Walsh last year after the reopening of Fairfield Ludlowe High School. Walsh is an alumnus of Andrew Warde High School in Fairfield.
Warde's first football coach, Fern Tetreau, came from rival Ludlowe and helped the Crimson Eagles win a state championship in 1959. He coached at Warde until 1970, served as president of the Connecticut High School Coaches' Association in 1965-66, and was elected to the Connecticut High School Hall of Fame.
The school's football field will be named in honor of him and legendary gridiron coach Bill Davis at ceremonies Thanksgiving morning marking the 50th anniversary of Andrew Warde High School.
The Coach isn't home when I call.
"He's at the dentist," says his wife. "He should be back soon. I'll have him call you."
Ten minutes later the phone rings. It's The Coach himself, Ferdinand Tetreau. Probably a root canal, without Novocain.
"Hey, Charlie, good to hear from you," he says, sounding almost exactly like he did one beastly hot August day 51 years ago, when, after a couple of hours of running dummy plays, he put his smallish hands on his hips and said, "OK, fellas, good practice. Now just gimme a half-dozen 50-yard wind sprints and we'll call it a day!"
"Call it a day? Is this guy kidding?" thought one slightly overweight and very out-of-shape sophomore hopeful. The world had taken on an eerie yellow tint, probably the preliminary stages of heat stroke, he reasoned. Peering through the horizontal bars of his face protector, everything was corkscrewing downward. Never in his 16 years of semi-coddled life had the spongy sophomore sprinted anywhere, much less to the wind.
But there he was, lined up at mid-field with 30 or so only slightly less depleted hopefuls, staring at the goal posts, at least 50 miles away.
"Go!" The Coach shouted, as if it were as simple as putting one foot on front of the other. The sophomore, dragging one foot after the other, a good 10 yards behind the main body, could hear The Coach shouting, "Remember, fellas, when the going gets ..."
"Oh God," the sophomore thought, "if you are listening, make this man shut up."
Ferdinand Tetreau, today age 84, concluded his distinguished 17-year coaching career (1953 to 1970) at two Fairfield high schools, Roger Ludlowe, and then at the brand-spanking-new Andrew Warde, 35 years ago. But you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who played on one of his teams call him anything but "Coach."
I thought of Coach Tetreau (he's Fern, of course, to non-players), when reading that the new Fairfield Ludlowe High School — the worthy, if geographically removed descendant of that red brick, hard-by-the-tracks old Roger Ludlowe — will play its first varsity football game this year.
Coach Tetreau, who had had some great teams at Ludlowe, including one ranked third in the state, won (or drew the short straw for, depending on how you look at it) the honor of being the first head football coach at the town's second high school, Andrew Warde, now Fairfield Warde High School.
In the spring of 1956 the new school was still under construction as the students arrived. The place was chaotic; bulldozers rumbling about, carpenters banging away. Somehow, the students, administration and teachers muddled through the year.
Athletically, it was a different story. The veteran football players were divided between the two schools, weakening both programs. Worse, none of the Warde athletic fields were even close to complete. The Crimson Eagles (now Mustangs?) had to play all their home games at Ludlowe's field.
Even finding a place to practice was tricky. Coach Tetreau lined up Sturges Park, a tiny wedge of grass and dirt just across the street from Miss Irene Comer's dance and manners academy.
The park had only one drinking fountain and no bathrooms. Everything had to be carried in, and sometimes overheated players carried out.
Not surprisingly, Coach Tetreau's first Warde football team lost all nine of its games, many by embarrassingly lop-sided scores.
The next year things were better, but not by much. The team practiced at the school that had an actual locker room with a shower. The practice field (the same field as the real games were played on) was spacious and flat.
Unfortunately, it was covered with billions of stones the size of hazelnuts. Falling down, which football players do a lot, was like being dragged behind a car on a dirt road. Raspberries and black-and-blue appendages were common.
"When [late Housemaster] Ken Peterson saw the condition of the field, he sent a bunch of students out to pick up the stones," The Coach says, "It helped but it was still pretty rocky out there."
That year (1957) Warde won two games. The next the team had its first winning record (5-4). Then in 1959, Coach Tetreau fielded one of the greatest high school teams in state history. It went undefeated, and as often as not held its opponents scoreless. That team — and Coach Tetreau's emphasis on turning kids into men (no smoking, drinking or, well, or anything) — is why Coach Ferdinand Tetreau is now in the Connecticut High School Hall of Fame.
As for the exhausted sophomore, he never amounted to much on the field, but every now and then when the going gets tough, he hears somebody shouting though the spinning yellow haze, "C'mon, fellas, time for the tough to get going."
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