An Ascent Shadowed By Questions on Race

After a painful 1968 loss, George and his brother Gregory elected to go home with neighbors rather than face their father's black mood. In her vivid family memoir, "Fifth Quarter," his sister Jennifer Allen described violence at home, including her father breaking Gregory's nose in a fight at the dinner table after a 1969 playoff loss.

Neither Jennifer nor Gregory Allen responded to requests for interviews. Bruce Allen, who said he doesn't remember the incident, said his sister's book was written "from a little girl's eyes" and should not be taken literally.

Allen's mother, Henrietta, known as Etty, is a gracious woman with a bitter and sometimes fiercely vindictive side, especially when it comes to protecting her husband's reputation. She effectively raised the Allen children on her own.

"Etty ran the show," said Melvin Durslag, a columnist for the now-defunct Los Angeles Herald Examiner and a longtime family friend.

She also carried the pain of her own turbulent childhood. Born in Tunis to French-Jewish parents, Etty Lumbroso endured the 1942-43 Nazi occupation and Allied bombing that destroyed her home. She watched her father, Felix, a wine importer, taken to a labor camp by the Germans. She met Allen in 1950 while visiting friends in Sioux City, Iowa, where he was coaching at Morningside College. They married a year later.

On summer evenings when the coach and the boys were at training camp, Jennifer Allen wrote, Etty would sip wine and lament the death in a motorcycle accident of a French fiancé she called "the love of my life."

Etty told The Washington Post last month that her husband, who died in 1990, asked her to conceal her Jewish identity from his family and that she and Allen wanted to protect their children from the fear she experienced during the war. It remained a secret between her and her husband, she said, until a dinner conversation with George in August.

There was a price to pay for the long years of keeping the secret. Her daughter hints at the private pain in the form of boxes from Tunis and France, stacked in the garage in Palos Verdes. Etty told Jennifer she would never unpack them. Jennifer wrote that she always looked at her mother's life before she met her father as "an unopened box."

Young George and his two brothers filled the gaps at home with friends Jennifer described as "greasers, surfers, crew-cutters" who were "toughs."

"My brothers led each pack," she said. As the oldest, George was sometimes the enforcer. When Jennifer refused to go to bed, he dragged her upstairs by her hair.

One of Allen's friends, Deke Applegate, said Allen's crowd was rough-and-tumble but disputes Gause's recollection of racism. "That's not the guy I hung out with," said Applegate, a Las Vegas businessman.

Allen and Applegate did share an affinity for the Confederate flag. Yearbook pictures show them with pins on their collars. Applegate said it was a "symbol of rebellion against the establishment," nothing more.