Few Leghorns left, but the legend lives on

The Petaluma Leghorns, football variety, are becoming almost as scarce as their namesake as time takes its inevitable toll, but while the players pass on, their legend lives.

The Leghorns blazed across the Petaluma sports scene from 1946 through 1958. At their peak, they were the biggest sporting draw not only in Petaluma, but arguably, in the North Bay and beyond. Their story has been well chronicled by a multitude of scribes from historian Skip Sommers to columnist Bob Padecky. In 2016, Scott Baker wrote a capsule history of the team as part of a series on the history of Petaluma football for the Argus-Courier.

Petaluma author and attorney David Traversi, himself a former Leghorn, chronicled the team’s history in his 2005 book, “Hail the Hometown Heroes.”

There are still a few who know first-hand the glory that was the Leghorns, but there are a few who can recall what it was like to play for the legendary semipro team.

Ray Colaizzi was a 19-year-old recent graduate of St. Vincent High School when he tried out for, and made, the Leghorn roster in 1954. He played just one season before he was drafted and marched off to Korea. He was a four-year varsity starter for the St. Vincent football team, perhaps the first freshman to letter in football.

“It was one of the best years of my life,” he recalled of his season playing for the Leghorns. “We had a super group of guys and some great ball players. We worked hard, but we had a lot of fun.”

As a rookie, Colaizzi not only had to make the team, but also be accepted by his veteran teammates. “I wanted to make the team so much that they made me take care of the mascot,” he said. The mascot was, of course, a Leghorn rooster. “I had a 20-foot string on that chicken so it wouldn’t get away,” he said. “Later they promoted me to taking care of the field and passing out the orange slices.”

Two days after playing in the 1954 Egg Bowl, Colaizzi’s friend and teammate Bob Berry drove him to San Francisco where he was inducted into the Army, trained at Fort Ord in Monterey and shipped to Korea. “That wasn’t much fun,” he said.

The original Leghorns were made up of many veterans from an earlier war, World War II. The team was coached by Gene Benedetti, himself a war hero who ferried troop ashore during the D-Day invasion of Europe.

It was Benedetti, Bob Acorne and Herm Jensen that founded the team that would, through the years include some of the most famous players in Petaluma sports history.

In four years under Benedetti’s coaching, the Leghorns had a record of 40-6-2.

Not only did the Leghorns give returning veterans and high school and college players a place to play, it gave war-weary fans a source of entertainment before live television and the circus of the NFL.

Their games became a magnet for sports fans not only from Petaluma, but from around the Bay Area. Visiting teams loved to play before packed stands at Durst Field, not only for the fans but also for the pay day that far exceeded what they could make on their home fields.

The Leghorns were the originators of the Egg Bowl, now played annually between Petaluma and Casa Grande high schools. In Leghorn days it was a big event played at the end of the season for charity and preceded by a parade and presided over by the Egg Bowl Queen and her court.

Colaizzi and a handful of others are reminders of a different time in our history when our sports heroes were our flesh and blood neighbors and not virtual images on a computer.