After serving in the war, most of Ryderwood's own soldiers returned to work in the woods. One who did was Luther--for awhile. Then one day a football recruiter came to town to persuade some of Ryderwood's best athletes to play for Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon. The recruiter attracted not only Luther but also Sonny Merchant, Roy and Ruth's oldest son. The two young men played some good football for Linfield, and ultimately earned teaching degrees from the college.
At its prime, Ryderwood produced some of the best teams in the area. Long-Bell sponsored men's town teams in both basketball and baseball, which would take on amateur teams from other Southwest Washington and Northwest Oregon towns. Perhaps Ryderwood's winning records resulted from the fact that, as Luther recalls, "if you was a good ballplayer, you could get a job" with Long-Bell.
The school teams shared the winning ways of the working men. Ryderwood's biggest sporting highlight came in 1941 when the school's football team won the Washington State "B" title, traveled to Oregon to play that state's title holders, and returned home the Washington-Oregon six-man football champions.
Perhaps surprisingly, Ryderwood High produced just as many scholars as athletes. What seems a significant percentage of Ryderwood graduates attended junior colleges and four-year schools throughout the Pacific Northwest. With more than a touch of smugness, Luther tells about a professor who visited Ryderwood and determined that the schoolchildren "would have trouble makin' it in the outside world" because of their isolation from the "real world." That professor surely missed the mark, Luther thinks, because twenty-six of those youngsters grew up to teach school, and others have returned to reunions as doctors, lawyers, state patrolmen, college coaches and advisers, and even a U.S. District Court Judge.
Nola, herself now the Fulbright Fellowship adviser for the University of Washington, offers a reason for the success of these students outside the Ryderwood schools. The school board, sensitive to the fact of young people's attraction to Ryderwood's steady jobs and cheap housing, structured the curriculum so that graduation requirements could be completed in three years instead of the usual four. For those who completed the core in three years, their senior year was spent on more of such basics as English because, as Nola says, "We didn't have any extra classes; they taught us hard-core stuff, and that was it."