Mount Union borough

When The High School Was Captain Jack

The corner of Shirley and Jefferson streets in Mount Union, a recent photograph.Wikimedia Commons (CC0) CC0

In the 1950s, Mount Union's high school went by its jointure's name: Captain Jack. A Cambria County weekly in 1954 called it "Capt. Jack High at Mount Union," a comparatively new jointure with 764 students, a Class A enrollment.

That summer the Capt. Jack Joint School District, with headquarters in Mount Union, chose a new head, a Cambria County native from Colver. His name was John D. Jack. When Mapleton's new elementary school opened in February 1959, the first name on its staff list was John D. Jack, supervising principal.

The football team played as the Trojans. Under head coach Irvin Hess they went 3-5-1 in 1954, and the same paper reported that Captain Jack opened the 1955 season with 19 returning lettermen.

A later Trojan team was remembered more than fifty years on. On June 10, 2017, at its 20th annual induction banquet, the Huntingdon County Sports Hall of Fame honored the 1964 Captain Jack Trojans football team, along with five new inductees and a group of high school senior athletes. Since 2009 the Hall has recognized outstanding teams from each of its five regions on a rotating basis, and 2017 was the Mount Union region's turn. The Huntingdon Daily News wrote that many fans consider that team perhaps the most talented in program history. Its feature gave the record as 8-2 in the headline and a 4-6 record the year before, and called 1964 the team's final year under the Captain Jack banner.

The band traveled. "Capt. Jack Mt. Union" was on the list of bands at Penn State's band day in the fall of 1951, when, a letter writer reported, more than 1,300 players swung into Sousa's "Washington Post March" as one band. Captain Jack was listed again in 1958 for the ninth annual Band Day, when more than 4,500 band members were to form a giant PSU on Beaver Field at halftime and the Blue Band planned rock 'n' roll hits, "Splish Splash" and "Yakety Yak" among them. In May 1961 the Mapleton American Legion post gave $100 to the Captain Jack High School Band, which was raising money for a trip to Atlantic City. In 1964, the post's own history says, it sponsored film for the Captain Jack football games.

Both names were in use. In 1957 the same Legion post had given $50 toward an electric scoreboard for the Mount Union High School football field. As for Captain Jack himself, Charles Welch wrote in his 1909 history of Mount Union that just who he really was will probably never be known.

Checked and confirmed. Checked 31 October 2026 against the sources listed, each sentence matched to a passage in its source. The 2017 Hall of Fame details and the 1964 film entry were checked 1 November 2026. The 2017 details come from three Huntingdon Daily News articles, read as far as their free openings, since the rest is behind a subscription. The 8-2 record comes from the paper's headline, and we have not seen a 1964 game report to check it. Where sources disagreed on a number, the number was left out. Still open: the year the school took the Captain Jack name, the year it stopped using it, and why the name was chosen. The phrase "final year under the Captain Jack banner" comes from one newspaper feature about the football team, so it does not settle when the school dropped the name.

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