Ralph Robert Wensinger

West Point, 1959

Be Thou At Peace

Posted by Jerome Lewis on January 22, 2002:

I remember Ralph Wensinger, but I only recall meeting him and talking to him once. It was in the locker room Plebe Year, either before or after a Cross Country / Football practice. We were talking about where we were from. He seemed like such a humble and nice guy compared to the legend I had heard about in high school. We grew up about 20 miles apart on the San Francisco Peninsula, along with Mel Morrill and Jack Burke both also deceased. While Mel died a hero in air combat like Ralph, Jack fought a courageous battle with a brain tumor for 19 years. During our first two months of Beast Barracks, Jack, whom I had met at the entrance exams, told me that he had met a schoolmate, Ralph Wensinger. Both had gone to Father Junipero Serra High School in San Mateo, CA. Serra has produced some big names in sports such as John Robinson, Jim Fregosi, Lynn Swann, Gregg Jefferies, Barry Bonds and more recently Tom Brady of the New England Patriots -- a 6-4 quarterback who led his team into the 2002 AFC Championship game. When I first heard of Ralph, I was a struggling high school football player who was working at Stanford football games directing traffic. One of the other high school workers was telling me about this great quarterback at Serra who could heave the ball a long distance. One would have expected him to move on to a college football team on a scholarship, but this was the time of 2-platoon football, and I would have expected that his size was not great enough. He was 5' 10" and weighed 170 when he was on the Army varsity his sophomore (Yearling) year. Ralph had told his sister Rosalyn that he was too light for the varsity, because he was getting roughed up a lot and had his nose broken pretty badly on one occasion. She said that his nose was never the same since. Then, I read the article from the San Mateo Times (by John Horgan on Jan. 9, 2002), and realized that he did not even graduate from Serra, nor San Mateo High where he went next! Yet, he would later be awarded a masters degree in aeronautical engineering, and he graduated third in his class from the Air Force Institute of Technology (in Dayton, OH). Ralph was also a member of Tau Beta Pi (honorary engineering society). I recall seeing his picture in the reprint from the Penn State 1955 game in Sports Illustrated. He was on the Army varsity bench along with Dave Bourland, who later became the 1st string quarterback and played in the East-West Game in the Fall of 1957. This was the time when 2-platoon football was discarded for a while, and teams with 2-way players were generally lighter. There were complex substitution rules: once a player left a during a quarter, he could not return. That was too stringent so they divided the game into 8 uneven periods and the referees kept track. Of course, he was still small for a quarterback. The article in the San Mateo Times stated that Ralph played on "lightweight football" which made its debut into the Academy in the Fall of 1957. Later, according to Rosalyn, Ralph ate celery for two weeks prior to weigh in, and he got his weight down to 154 pounds, the actual maximum allowance for the newly formed 150 lb. football team. I was glad he had the opportunity to play 150 Pound football, and especially on a unbeaten team. Ralph led the team over Navy 7-0 with a bootleg around end, not a QB sneak - as mentioned in the Howitzer, according to John Gurr, his teammate and roommate). It was a major highlight of his own football experience: Beating Navy, at Navy, with President Eisenhower attending. He was not just a great athlete, but had a brilliant and too brief of a military career. May he rest in peace, Jerry Lewis, B-1, USMA '58, Mountain View, CA

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