A REAL HONOR
Former Giants made ultimate sacrifice
YEARS ago, there was a popular trivia question: Name the four 1963 MVPs who wore No. 32. Answer: Sandy Koufax, Elston Howard, Jim Brown and Cookie Gilchrist, fullback for the AFL Bills — except it was half-myth. Gilchrits didn’t wear 32 and Brown didn’t win it that year.
Here’s another: Who was the last NFL Giant to wear No. 32?
Hint: You likely never heard of him.
But given the day, the time, the temperature and the way the wind has been blowing, perhaps we can change that.
He was Al Blozis, a 6-foot-6, 250pound two-way tackle out of Georgetown, and before that Dickinson High School in Jersey City. Born in Garfield, N.J., he played two rising-star seasons for the Giants, 1942-43, then, on furlough from the Army, three games in 1944, including the championship game, lost, 14-7, to the Packers in the Polo Grounds.
Even with World War II raging, he’d been deemed “too big” for combat, too big for equipment and uniforms — sea ships and air ships didn’t have the headroom. But he insisted. Still, after breaking the Army’s hand-grenade-throwing record, inches short of 95 yards, he was assigned a desk job.
But Blozis finally was given the OK to join the fight.
There are conflicting stories from Jan. 21, 1945, but it’s clear Blozis was in the Vosges Mountains of Eastern France, near the German border, when at least two of his men failed to return from a patrol. Blozis, alone and in the snow, went to find them. He didn’t return.
He was reported missing in action until April, when his death was confirmed. He, along with 10,488 American WW II military, is buried at the Lorraine American Cemetery near Saint-Avold, France. Blozis was 26.
Jack Lummus, a 6-foot-3 offensive end — they didn’t call them tight ends or wide receivers back then — made it to 29, the number he wore with the Giants. A star athlete from Baylor, he played nine games for the Giants in 1941, his first and last pro football year.
After Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Marines. At 25, older than most, and a college man, he was commissioned a first lieutenant.
Among the first to hit the black, volcanic sand of Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945, Lummus was killed there on March 8, nearly two weeks after the famous flag-raising on Mount Suribachi, and two weeks before Iwo was finally taken.
Though the need to take Iwo Jima was questioned for its cost — 26,000 U.S. casualties, 6,800 dead — U.S. fighter, bomber and scout air crews made the island’s two air strips a sortie base and a life-saving emergency stop.
Lummus’ initially was buried near his boyhood home in Ennis, Texas, and later moved to Texas State Cemetery in Austin. His tombstone reads: Jack Lummus, Medal of Honor, 1st Lt., USMC, World War II, Oct. 22, 1915, March 8, 1945.”
That’s right, a Giant earned the Medal of Honor. Commanding a rifle platoon, he’d already been wounded in the shoulder and twice been knocked flat by grenade concussions when he rose to lead three successful assaults on entrenched positions.
Pressing a fourth assault, a land mine blew off his legs. Mortally wounded, he continued to command his men.
A large Naval container ship is named in his honor.
Lummus’s commanding officer, a Major Antonelli, wrote to his mother:
“Jack suffered very little for he didn’t live long. I saw Jack soon after he was hit. With calmness, serenity and complacency, Jack said, ‘The New York Giants have lost a good man.’ We all lost a good man.”