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Lafayette mourns the passing of Joe Marhefka ’24 of Easton, the College’s oldest alumnus, who died Monday, June 30, in Easton Hospital. He was 101.
A memorial service will be held at 4 p.m. Tuesday, July 15, in Colton Chapel.
Joseph Cyril Marhefka, known as “Mr. Joe,” and his wife, the former Gladys Walker, celebrated their 56th wedding anniversary last November.
A halfback on Lafayette’s 1921 national championship football team and an avid supporter of Lafayette sports throughout his life, Marhefka was saluted by the College on his 100th birthday, Feb. 16, 2002, at halftime of the Lafayette-Navy varsity basketball game. In addition, Easton Mayor Tom Goldsmith ’63 proclaimed “Joe Marhefka Day” in the city.
A longtime Easton resident, he was a beloved teacher of Latin and English and sports coach at March Junior High School for 40 years before retiring in 1968. Born Feb. 16, 1902, in Phillipsburg, he graduated from St. Precopius Prep School before attending Lafayette.
Marhefka played professional football for the Pottsville Maroons and the Philadelphia Quakers and officiated at many high school and college football games.
He had been a member of the Pomfret Club, Northampton Country Club, YR Club, all in Easton, and the National Education Association and Eastern Association of Intercollegiate Football Officials, which recognized him with an award for his many years of service.
In addition to his wife, Marhefka is survived by two grandchildren, a great-grandson, and nieces, nephews. His only son, Dr. Joseph Marhefka, died in 1981.
Contributions in his name may be made to the College.
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The article below was reprinted and edited in the Lafayette Alumni News, January 2000, with the permission of The Morning Call (Allentown, Pa.). It originally appeared in the Call April 4, 1999.
The Morning Call Inc., Copyright 4/4/99
By Terry Larimer
When Lafayette College’s unbeaten 1921 football team was declared the national champions by pollsters, Head Coach Jock Sutherland said part of the reason was that his team was able to hold its first off-campus preseason training camp.
But 97-year-old Joe Marhefka, a backup halfback on that team, recalled that the main thing most Lafayette players learned in that training camp was how much they wanted it to end.
In the 1926 book, “Athletics at Lafayette College” by Francis A. March Jr., Class of 1881, Sutherland wrote about his 1921 team, which he said trained somewhere on the Delaware River, about 20 miles from Easton.
Marhefka said possibly his former coach didn’t want to get any more specific because the team actually did some training literally on the river. That’s how they got from their rundown hotel on the New Jersey side to their practice field — “more or less a cow pasture” — on the Pennsylvania side.
Some teams talk about the road to a national championship; Lafayette “rowed” to a national title. But this wasn’t Lafayette’s first or last national football title. The first came in 1896 and a third followed in 1926.
But the 1921 title was the first of this century and Marhefka said it got off to a fast start, again because of Sutherland’s “camp.”
Marhefka recalled of the camp accommodations, “The hotel had a generator for electricity that was turned off every night at 9 o’clock.” As a result, Marhefka said, he and his teammates left camp in a bad mood, which translated into a 48-0 win over Muhlenberg in the season opener.
Despite being Lafayette’s fastest player — “I could beat them all,” Marhefka recalled –and weighing what was then a respectable 155 pounds, Marhefka said he watched the 1921 season mainly from the bench.
Players were required to play both offense and defense, and Marhefka said of Sutherland, “He didn’t substitute any more than necessary.”
Maybe it had something to do with what he survived under Sutherland, who Marhefka recalls was a “very strict fellow who wasn’t very friendly at all.” But he could coach and he proved it in the second game of the season against Lafayette’s toughest opponent that year, the University of Pittsburgh. It was the kind of win over a “name” school that might have impressed pollsters enough to consider Lafayette for No. 1.
Lafayette won that game 6-0, but it simply trampled its other eight opponents, allowing four of them to score just one touchdown apiece and shutting out the other four. And in an era of offenses that were almost entirely grind-it-out running games, the Leopards averaged 33.5 points against opponents who weren’t Pitt.
For Sutherland, not yet indoctrinated into the importance of the annual Lafayette-Lehigh football game, the Pitt game was the biggest of the year. Sutherland had played guard for Pitt while in college preparing for a career as a dentist. He played under the legendary Pop Warner and would be pitted against his old coach on Saturday, Oct. 21, 1921.
Lafayette completed its perfect season with a 28-6 win over Lehigh and some people thought the Leopards should have gone on.
Sutherland wrote, “After this game there was a great deal of talk about playing a postseason game. Teams and game promoters from the Southwest seemed anxious that we play them, but the policy of the athletic committee, and I heartily favored it, was to leave well enough alone.”
The Leopards had already made a good argument that they were the No. 1 team in the country and two of six pollsters who rated teams for that season — William Boand and Parke Davis –agreed.
Davis agreed that the 1926 Lafayette team also was the national champion, two years after Sutherland had moved on to become Pitt’s head coach, leaving Lafayette in the capable hands of Herb McCracken. Perhaps as noteworthy, McCracken invented the huddle that season when he suspected players from the University of Pennsylvania were stealing Lafayette’s signals at the line.
Marhefka said he knew most of the players on the 1926 team and met them at reunions for years afterward. “I was very fond of McCracken,” Marhefka said. “He was very friendly.”
Marhefka said Lafayette was making a regular practice of beating Pitt, even in Pittsburgh and when some of Sutherland’s former players scored touchdowns, they’d run over to him and ask, “How do you like what your old substitute is doing to you?”
Marhefka took a stab at law school that ended with the Great Depression and returned to teaching in his hometown, where many of Lafayette’s football players of the time were recruited.
He said kids from Easton would sneak in to March Field to be among packed houses of 5,000 to 6,000 who would fill the wooden grandstands.
He played professional football for a time as one of the last of the Pottsville Maroons, officiated high school and college football and ran a summer camp in Easton where he taught many youngsters how to swim.
Marhefka is known for his daily swims in Lafayette’s pool where he says professors joke with him, asking how they can live as long as he has. Getting into the water daily probably helped; rowing over it as a member of a national championship football team probably didn’t hurt.