As the Eagles celebrate 90 years, a look back at their largely forgotten first coach

I’d arrived at Section G of rambling Ivy Hill Cemetery, across a shady path from a mausoleum and a few blocks inside the Philadelphia city limits, to pay my respects to James R. Ludlow Wray (1894-1967). His unremarkable gray tombstone, which is shared with his late second wife, Frances, makes no note of his contributions to Philadelphia sports history.

Lud Wray, who was known as “Old Rough and Ready,” was the first head coach of the Eagles, who made their NFL debut 90 years ago on Monday when they lost to the New York Giants, 56-0. Wray also was the team’s first co-owner, having bought the remnants of the Frankford Yellow Jackets for $5,000 with his college teammate and pal from Penn, Bert Bell.

The Eagles won just nine games in Wray’s three seasons as coach, losing 21 and tying one. They also lost $80,000, and Wray decided to bail after Bell told him he had to take a 66% pay cut. Bell hung on, buying Wray out for $4,000. Bell, who died at an Eagles game in 1959, later became the NFL’s commissioner and is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Bell, not surprisingly, is one of about 50 members in the Eagles Hall of Fame — but Wray, more surprisingly, is not. After Wray passed away on July 24, 1967, in fact, The Inquirer slapped a headline on his obituary that read, “Lud Wray Dies; All-American Center at Penn,” referring to his glory days as a collegiate football player nearly two decades prior to the Eagles.

Even many Eagles experts don’t seem to know all that much about him. He had no children to talk about his legacy. It is as if just about all the memories of Wray have been erased. I needed to find out more. The short answer: “Old Rough and Ready” was too rough on his players. But there was more.

I’d seen Wray’s funny name dozens of times doing research while covering the Eagles for The Inquirer three decades ago. Recently, for fun, I dug in. I found out that Wray, a Chestnut Hill native, was the head coach of the Penn varsity football team in 1930. In 1932 he was the first coach of another first-year NFL team, the Boston Braves (now Washington Commanders).

Wray successfully coached the Abington High School team while playing professional football for four teams, including the Yellow Jackets. He was a respected assistant college coach at several schools after leaving the Eagles and continued to win sailboat races off the Jersey Shore after he retired as a coach. He’d been a U.S. Navy pilot in World War I.

Wray, I also found out, was a taciturn, old-school guy who had really terrible timing.

“I just think Lud was one of those people who was always at the wrong place at the wrong time,” Upton Bell, Bert’s 86-year-old son, told me two years ago. “What happened with Lud happened to a lot of people.”

Wray caused many of his own problems. He was an obvious choice to be a head coach at Penn because he’d played with distinction and had been an assistant there. But he was run off after a 5-4 season in 1930 during which several players rebelled. After an upset loss at Wisconsin, he angrily took a brush and painted the score — 27-0 — in red on the locker room wall.

“How many of his players were opposed to his methods, I am unable to say,” John Arthur Brown, a member of the executive committee of the council of athletics at Penn, told The Inquirer when Wray was asked to resign. “We were not dealing in that [team strife] primarily, but, suffice it to say, there was friction.”

Wray landed with the Braves in 1932, but pro football was much less popular than college football then. Boston finished a respectable 4-4-2, but the owner, the infamous racist George Preston Marshall, grew bored with Wray’s offense, which scored more than one touchdown in only two of 10 games.

Marshall wanted an upbeat offense, so he hired a Native American coach, “Lone Star” Dietz (whose heritage was later brought into question), to institute the fast-paced “Indian” style made popular in the 1910s by Jim Thorpe at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Still, observers in Boston thought Marshall had made a bad move.

“Evidently, only a championship eleven is going to satisfy the Boston promoters of professional football,” Bob Dunbar wrote in the Boston Herald on Jan. 14, 1933.

Marshall would rename the team the Redskins. They’d moved to Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, and Marshall, who called himself “The Big Chief,” wanted to use the Braves’ uniforms with the “Indian” playing style. So Wray and Bell, with financial help from Philadelphia businessmen, bought what was left of the failed Frankford Yellow Jackets.

Bell was the front man, the one who came up with the Eagles’ nickname, having seen a National Recovery Association logo. Wray was the coach because he was better at it than Bell. The Eagles lost their first three games by an aggregate score of 116-9 but rallied to finish 3-5-1. That was as good as it got for Wray. In 1935, they lost nine of 11 games, and Wray was soon out.

Wray, who was once thrown out of a Penn game for kicking a Dartmouth player, never took it easy on the Eagles. One newcomer, Alabama Smith, notoriously a former inmate at Sing Sing (making him a gate attraction), refused to leave the locker room after halftime of a 1935 game because Wray had gruffly described his play as “dogmeat.”

Wray wanted to fight an official during, or after, what would be his last game as an NFL head coach.

Wray wanted to fight an official during, or after, what would be his last game as an NFL head coach, a 13-6 loss at home to the Green Bay Packers. According to The Inquirer, Wray said, “I would punch you right in the nose, except for the fact that it would cost me $500, but if you come underneath the stands after the game, I’ll see that it is done in proper fashion.”

Wray spent two months in a hospital in 1937 after he was seriously injured in an automobile accident. Wray’s first wife, Juanita, just 58, collapsed and died of an apparent heart attack in 1950 while on a train from Chestnut Hill to Broad Street Station. Wray had to dissolve his insulation business in 1959 after suffering a stroke. He had to stop racing sailboats.

Long before that, he’d learned a lesson about how to treat other people, especially on the gridiron: “It’s taken me years to learn that tact and diplomacy are 75 percent of coaching,” Wray, then coaching at Holy Cross College, told Dunbar in 1943.

And there it was, a life lesson for other impatient Philadelphians learned the hard way by the Eagles’ first head coach: People can have really high standards and can even be gruff and combative, but they don’t need to be jerks. For that, Wray belongs in the Eagles Hall of Fame.

Dave Caldwell lives in Manayunk and covered sports for The Inquirer from 1986 to 1995.