“And so another Illini warrior has fallen, not the first or the last, but an Illini. And this indeed brings the war home, home to us who have watched these same Illini in friendly combat on the athletic fields. Though they have changed uniforms and the game is ‘away,’ our Illini athletes are displaying the same fight that gave them recognition on the athletic fields.”
— Glenn Roberts, Daily Illini, June 30, 1944
The 19th annual Champaign Rotary Club dinner honoring the University of Illinois football team was held on Nov. 22, 1937, at the Champaign County Country Club and offered a Thanksgiving dinner with all of the trimmings and a night of honors and celebration.
Presided over by Edwin “Eddie” Jacquin, sports editor for The News-Gazette, the banquet was attended by 200 Rotarians, University of Illinois President Arthur Cutts Willard, former Illinois football players, coaches and what Perry Blain of the Daily Illini referred to in a Nov. 23, 1937, article as “the Illinois gridiron warriors of present, the real guests of honor” — the 1937 team.
The banquet program that wintry Monday night highlighted the silver anniversary of legendary Illini football coach Robert “Zup” Zuppke and the naming of Jack Berner as the 1937 MVP. But according to Blain, the “center of the glow” of the “greatest banquet in Illini football history” was James McDonald, the newly elected 1938 team captain.
Prior to attending the UI and becoming a Fighting Illini, James attended school in Champaign, but before moving there, he was a Douglas County boy with strong and deep ties to the Arcola community.
James William “Jim” McDonald was the son of James “Jimmy” McDonald Jr. and Lillian Gee McDonald of Arcola.
After their marriage, the McDonalds lived in Humboldt briefly before moving to Arcola, where Jimmy worked as a clerk and salesman for a hardware store. They had four children — their only daughter, Marie, was born in 1903, while two sons died within days of birth, one in 1906 and one in 1909. On June 28, 1917, James William “Jim” McDonald came into the world.
On June 20, 1921, friends of Jimmy McDonald Jr. were shocked to hear he had unexpectedly died the previous evening, possibly of complications from a recent appendectomy. Lillian buried her husband in the Arcola Township Cemetery. Their son, Jim, was just one week shy of his fourth birthday.
Widowed at 43, Lillian McDonald worked as a nurse and served as town clerk. Marie went to work in a bank and in 1926, she moved to Champaign to work in a law office. James went to live with her.
Lillian remained close to her children, visiting with them often and spending holidays together, and she even visited Jim while he attended Boy Scout camp at Lake Paradise near Mattoon in July 1929.
In 1927, Marie married Lloyd Bierfeldt. Bierfeldt was born in 1901 and raised in Tuscola, but at the time of his marriage he was a salesman for Joseph Kuhn & Co. in Champaign. (Jos. Kuhn & Son opened in Champaign in 1865 and it is still open and operated by the Kuhn family today.)
Jim McDonald attended school in Arcola through the sixth grade and transferred to Champaign schools after going to live with his sister, where he played football for Champaign High School and was an all-Big 12 and all-state tackle and captain of the team.
‘Courageous fighter’
In the fall of 1935, Jim McDonald entered the School of Commerce at the University of Illinois, majoring in business. Jim was a member of the Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity and the Ma-Wanda senior recognition society, and he joined the Fighting Illini football team. He played tackle his freshman year but was sidelined during his sophom*ore year after he hurt his hand while working at an ice plant.
In his junior year, Jim McDonald hit his stride when Zuppke switched him from tackle to center as a replacement for El Sayre, the previous center who was about to graduate. He did well in that spot. On Nov. 22, 1937, at the end of McDonald’s junior season, his teammates elected him to captain for the coming year.
On Aug. 18, 1938, on the eve of the 1938 season, the Mattoon Journal-Gazette profiled James McDonald in an article, saying that his friends, coaches and teammates all characterized him as “just a plain, ordinary swell fellow.” After his injury his sophom*ore year, Jim lettered as a junior, playing three full games, 48 minutes against Notre Dame, and 40 minutes against Indiana, and while he was considered “a dark horse at the beginning of the season,” he had “a dramatic rise to the captaincy” at the end of the season due to his “outstanding ability, sportsmanship, and leadership.”
The article went on to say that the Illini coaches thought there wasn’t a better “pivot man” in all the Big Ten, that he was an accurate and deft passer, a bulwark of strength, and a consistent and deadly tackler. His coaches said he was “easy to coach, easy to get along with, and a courageous fighter” with a scholastic record “well above average despite the fact that he has to work to pay part of his expenses.”
The Journal-Gazette rounded out the image of Jim McDonald as a well-built, husky and quiet 21-year-old, standing 6 feet, 1 ½ inches tall, and weighing 190 pounds. And when he wasn’t studying, working or playing football, he liked to hunt and fish.
In 1938, Jim was invited to play in the East-West Shrine Bowl in San Francisco and in 1939 he was a member of the All-Star team that played the New York Giants at Soldiers’ Field in Chicago on Aug. 30.
He was drafted by the Detroit Lions and Fred Vance reported in the Daily Illini on Feb. 23, 1939, that Jim had been notified that he would receive a definite offer from the club, and he was considering playing for a season or two as a “stepping stone into the business world.” But it does not appear that he ever played for the team; whether the offer failed to materialize or by choice is unknown.
Fans in the Midwest were sometimes confused due to the fact there were two football players in the Big Ten named Jim McDonald and a basketball player at Wheaton College named Jim McDonald in the late 1930s. This confusion was noted in a Mattoon Journal-Gazette article on Dec. 31, 1937, titled “Too Many McDonalds.” The other football McDonald, a fullback with Ohio State, did play a couple of seasons for Detroit, adding to the confusion.
‘A watery grave’
On June 12, 1939, James W. McDonald was one of 2,500 students to graduate from the University of Illinois. After graduation, James worked for Illinois Bell Telephone in Chicago, where he met Virginia Busse of Elmhurst, an honor student and 1940 graduate of Kent College of Law.
They were married in June 1940. James soon found employment with the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company in San Francisco, and it was there that their daughter, Susan, was born on Oct. 5, 1942.
But the lives of Jim McDonald and his family were about to change.
On Dec. 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Naval Air Service executed a surprise attack on the United States naval fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii and the United States was soon a nation at war. In February 1942, Jim joined the Navy and attended the Harvard University Naval Training School, graduating as a supply officer.
Lt. (junior grade) James W. McDonald was assigned to the USS Kalk, a 2,395-ton Benson-class destroyer. The Kalk was laid down by Bethlehem Steel on June 30, 1941, in San Francisco launched on July 18, 1942, and commissioned on Oct. 17 of that year.
In naval terminology, destroyers are fast, maneuverable, long-endurance warships used as defense escorts for larger, less-maneuverable ships in fleets or convoys. They were developed in the late 19th century as a defense against torpedo boats and were referred to as “torpedo boat destroyers.” By World War I, they had become more widely known as just “destroyers.”
After convoy duty in the Atlantic in late 1943, the USS Kalk sailed for convoy and escort duty in the Pacific on Jan. 2, 1944. While on patrol off the southern coast of Biak, Geelvink Bay (present-day Indonesia), near New Guinea, on June 12, 1944, an enemy plane dived out of clouds and dropped a bomb just behind the USS Kalk’s forward stack at the base of her starboard torpedo tubes. The bomb exploded, damaging the ship’s superstructure amidships.
Electrician’s Mate 1st Class Dwight Edmisten was aboard the Kalk’s sister ship, the USS Hobby, and witnessed the bombing. His son Gary shared the following entry from his father’s war diary:
“Arrived at Biak. While cruising around waiting for LSTs to unload, had an air attack. The Kalk, our sister ship, took a bomb hit on the starboard side of torpedo tubes between the stacks. It went into torpedo shack, completely demolishing it, the machine shop and electrical shop. Torpedoes were blown over the side. Main steam line in forward engine room was broken. All men who got out were badly burned. Some didn’t get out. Don’t know how many casualties but it’s thought that most all men topside from break of fos’cle to 40mm’s were killed. Six or seven signalmen and gunners on bridge were killed.
“The men topside were torpedo men, gunners and forward repair party. The doctor and supply officer were killed and chief engineer missing. Haven’t been into engine room to see how many didn’t get out. On the whole, casualties were heavy. Eight were brought aboard for first aid for burns and shrapnel wounds. One man in serious condition. We went alongside to help as much as possible to clear away debris and dead men. Smell of burning flesh. Legs, arms, heads and guts strewn everywhere.
“Underway late this afternoon escorting LSTs and Kalk. We gave her water and with one fire and engine room still intact is able to steam. The flag was just masted for the burial of the dead. A watery grave. This might have been us except for a cloud which shielded us from Jap plane. I hope to God I never see the same thing again.”
‘Profoundly shocked’
The crew of the Kalk suffered 70 casualties, 30 of them crew members, including supply officer Lt. James McDonald. Crew members extinguished the fire and buried the dead at sea. The Kalk made it to Hollandia, New Guinea, for emergency repairs, then returned to Mare Island near San Francisco for complete repairs.
On June 29, 1944, Virginia McDonald and Lillian McDonald received word from the Navy Department that Jim had been killed.
The following day, newspapers around the country carried the news. In his “After the Deadline” column on June 30, Glenn Roberts of the Daily Illini said the news “came as a blow to many Illini football fans, James’ friends and his coaches.” He reported that Coach Zuppke said Jim was “a topnotch boy and a fine football player,” and Doug Mills, the Illinois athletic director, said Jim was “an outstanding example of a true Illini in every sense of the word.”
A front-page article about the loss of James McDonald in the same edition said that Coach Zuppke had been “profoundly shocked” by the news.
Roberts only had time to reach one of James McDonald’s former teammates, Mel Brewer, before going to press, but he said he knew that Brewer’s words echoed the sentiments of his absent teammates when he said, “I don’t like to speak of Jim now, he was such a good fellow and a close friend. He was tops all around, and I never hope to meet a better guy. In what game was he outstanding? He was great in all of them.”
Below a photo of James wearing his Illini football uniform with his No. 58 upon his chest which accompanied his article, Glenn Roberts had written “Lt (JG) James McDonald … The Last Full Measure.”
A few years later, Virginia McDonald married a Macon County man, attorney William F. Price, and together they had three children. James McDonald’s mother, Lillian Gee McDonald, passed away in 1959 and is buried with her husband in Arcola.
Carolyn Cloyd, a historian with a passion for military history, has worked as a sports reporter for the Mattoon Journal Gazette and Times-Courier and is currently a freelance writer of history for the County Chronicle. Her father served in the military for 23 years — three years in the U.S. Army and 20 years in the U.S. Air Force as a missileer. Carolyn was born on Fairchild Air Force Base near Spokane, Wash., shortly before he retired and settled in Arcola. She currently lives in Mattoon.
