Episode 19: 1946 Harry Agganis and Lynn Classical

It's Christmas night, 1946, in Lynn, Massachusetts.

Lynn is a blue collar city of 100,000 north of Boston, with ethnic neighborhoods, and a large General Electric factory.

If you are a kid in Lynn you are glued to a radio broadcast.   It's a football game from the Orange Bowl in Miami Florida.  Two high school football teams play for the de facto national championship. 

One of those teams is Classical High of Lynn.  The other is Granby High of Norfolk, Virginia.

Lynn Classical's quarterback is a 17-year-old junior named Harry Agganis, a first-generation Greek-American known at school as The Golden Greek. Handsome, well-mannered and popular, Agganis will encounter a tragic fate.

But on December 25, 1946, Agganis’ star rises over Miami.   He introduces himself to a national audience and harkens a bright future. Classical triumphs, 21-14, and the team gets a police escort when it returns home on December 31st.

A year later Agganis and Classical decline an invitation to the same championship game because they are told that their two African-American players are forbidden to play in Miami.

Agganis graduated from Lynn Classical in 1948 and went on to star in football and baseball at Boston University. He served a year in the Marines and graduated from BU in 1953. Agganis then chose baseball for his career and signed with the hometown Boston Red Sox. He made the Sox in 1954 as a left-handed hitting first baseman.

Agganis was hitting over .300 in May, 1955, when he was hospitalized with pneumonia. Shockingly, he died on June 27, 1955, from a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot to his lungs. The reaction to his death in Boston was likened to that after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and his wake and funeral procession were witnessed by thousands.

Today, Agganis is memorialized by a charitable foundation and annual all-star games that bear his name, an arena and bronze sculpture at Boston University, an annual basketball tournament at St. George’s Church in Lynn, and trophies and photos at Lynn Classical High.

Thanks to Lynn native Ozzie Gauvain for his memories of Agganis. Thanks also to Richard Johnson, curator of the Sports Museum of New England and author of “Unfinished Odyssey: The Life and Legend of Harry Agganis”, for his research and comments. Another source book is “Harry Agganis: The Golden Greek”, by Nick Tsiotos and Andy Dabilis.