When Tom Russell walked onto Clinton’s football field, he couldn’t have known that he wouldn’t walk off.
The ECHS football team had traveled to Clinton for a November 20, 1914, game against Cordell.
Interest in the contest against the Washita County opponent was high. The previous day’s “Elk City News-Democrat” even told readers that a train would be available to carry Elks fans to Clinton to watch.
The day turned tragic, though.
Elk City’s Tom Russell was hurt so severely during the game, one attendee called his injury “gruesome.”
Russell never walked again.
According to a Western Oklahoma Historical Society blog story by Judy Haught, the November 26, 1914, “Elk City News-Democrat” reported that “Tom Russell was severely injured and is now lying in the Frances Hospital paralyzed from the waist line down unable to move or have any feeling in the lower limbs. Physicians give no hope of his recovery….”
Still, Russell’s family sought treatment in the state and beyond. He even traveled to the Mayo Brothers Sanitarium in Rochester, New York.
But his legs wouldn’t work. Though he was wheelchair bound, Russell stayed in Elk City and made a life for himself. He owned a business that developed and printed photographs, and he was elected Justice of the Peace in 1919.
Russell died in his Elk City home in 1943. According to Haught, his obituary recounted the life-altering injury he sustained in the game against Cordell nearly 29 years earlier.
Elk City was so shaken by Russell’s 1914 injury that ECHS stopped playing football until 1923.
Tom Russell
