Dave White didn’t create the Battle for the Bell, the name and prize for one of the longest-standing rivalry games in Orange County high school football.
But the Edison coach was there for the first game between the Chargers and Fountain Valley Barons, back in 1969 – several years, in fact, before the game even earned its official title.
“I was an eighth-grader who was headed to Edison the following year when the two schools first met,” White recalled. “It was Edison’s first year as a new high school in Huntington Beach, and Fountain Valley was only a few years older. The schools were so close that they even were built from the same physical (blueprint).”
A crowd of 4,600 jammed Huntington Beach High’s football field for the first game. The rivalry wasn’t just geographical.
Those old enough to have been around tell a story that Fountain Valley coach Bruce Pickford knew which student-athletes from the Barons team were going to be transferred to Edison, so he removed them from the team’s preseason preparation ahead of time.
Edison’s first coach, Bill Vail, said it was a plot to slow the development of Edison’s first team, which was devoid of seniors, had no regular practice field nor a locker room.
Edison had suffered two emotional losses the week leading up to the game: a JV player died from head injuries and a varsity player, Sam Fuga, was partially paralyzed after suffering broken vertebrae in a game.
Fountain Valley was seemingly headed to the CIF playoffs when the teams met. Edison junior Jerry Hinojosa rallied Edison to a 21-14 lead in the fourth quarter.
The Barons scored to draw within one, but Edison’s Rocky Whan sacked quarterback John Svoboda on the two-point conversion and the Chargers held on for the upset.
Edison won four of the first five games in the series and the fifth game was a 0-0 tie. Fountain Valley’s first win came in 1973, when White was the Edison quarterback.
“That was a nightmare,” he said. “We fumbled the ball away with 31 seconds to go.”
Edison has won the last 10 games in the series and holds an all-time series edge of 32-14-1. That doesn’t include one Edison playoff win over Fountain Valley.
The 2015 game Friday night at Orange Coast College is the 48th in the series, and this year’s matchup has the extra juice of being for the Sunset League title.
Fountain Valley (6-2, 3-0) has won six straight after starting the season 0-2, with four of the last five wins by margins of 20 to 43 points. Edison (5-3, 3-0), after suffering losses to power teams Tesoro, Servite and Mater Dei, has won three straight.
The game didn’t become known as the Battle for the Bell until 1975, after the game had already become a huge rivalry between the two schools, drawing crowds that forced the schools to move the game to a bigger stadium.
In honor of the growing rivalry, the activity directors of the two schools – Fountain Valley’s Dave Hagen and Edison’s Ben Garrett – decided to find a prize that would go to the annual winner. Several ideas were considered, including a World War II howitzer cannon the pair found at a nearby armory. It seemed like a perfect choice, except that it was a fully working howitzer and school officials had safety concerns.
Hagen and Garrett eventually found a rusty but working train bell at a Mission Viejo antique shop for $600.
The shop classes at both schools worked to restore the bell to mint condition, and it has been on the sidelines for each game since 1975.
The school that wins gets to display it for a year.
Over the years, the clapper inside the bell opened a crack on the front of the bell, giving the bell a more authentic feel of having been the quarry in a battle.
By the time the bell became part of the lore, the series was already one of the biggest rivalries in the county, drawing huge crowds that forced the game to be moved from campus sites to Orange Coast College or Angel Stadium.
“The best time to rob a house in Fountain Valley or Huntington Beach was when Fountain Valley and Edison were playing, because nobody was home,” former Edison coach Bill Workman said years later. “The whole community was evacuated.”
The height of the series probably was 1980, when the two teams met twice in the same season. In the regular season game, before 18,516 at OCC, Edison rallied for a 15-14 victory on Ken Major’s touchdown and two-point conversion runs with 19 seconds to play. They met again five weeks later for the CIF-SS Big 5 championship before a crowd of 28,969, with Edison winning, 14-0, to cap a 14-0 season.
“This is the one game that all of the students go to,” White said. “Kids paint their faces the school colors, and the excitement all week long is electric.
“Fountain Valley has gotten better and better each week. It’s always a little extra special when we’re playing for a league title.”
Fountain Valley coach Ray Fenton, relatively new to the rivalry, having taken over the Barons in 2013, already finds it special: “Playing Edison is hard enough, so this is special. There’s no two ways about it. Then you compound it by it being a great, passionate rivalry.”
Contact the writer: 949-466-6994 or bkeisser@ocregister.com
