There are bins of every color sitting on top of the cabinets in the room formerly known as Teresa Yetter’s office. Shoeboxes and plastic containers and scrapbooks containing God knows what tucked so deep that it’s hard to imagine the room used to contain empty space.

If you’ve ever wondered what Ancestory.com looked like before the internet, Yetter’s office would have made fine headquarters. She sighs as she swivels in her leather black chair. The room feels like it’s closing in on her, the bins getting bigger with months, probably years, of work in front of her.

There are article clippings and photos and whatever else sitting in those bins from three separate centuries. Maybe it’s four. She doesn’t know. And she won’t until she’s meticulously looked through every piece of tattered newspaper that has even a mention of one of her ancestors and scanned it to her computer for posterity.

Yetter’s 91-year old mother, Shirley, recently moved in with her, bringing along an imposing collection of family history. Among the pile was a scrapbook big enough for a president. Yetter recently tore out most of the pages, going through the process of cutting out the newspaper articles her grandmother glued to black paper and stuffed inside a self-made encyclopedia.

It’s a 18x20 shine of the athletic achievements of Yetter’s father, Wilford “Whizzer” White.

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If the stress of the project has overtaken Yetter, she isn’t showing it. Her face offers a sense of curiosity and appreciation for the past. Her hair is like a dirty blonde forest that provides a shadowed outline of her oblong face. Her brown eyes are concaved in her sockets, the toll of raising six kids showing itself. Her wrinkles are subdued as she talks, giving way to pearly white teeth that make her cream-colored skin look rosy.

And hanging from her grey shirt is a pair of black, rectangular reading glasses, primed at the ready to search through small 75-year old newspaper articles.

Most of which have merely filled in details of the mammoth figure she already knew her dad to be. He was the fleet-footed track star; the Mesa High tailback who routinely ran 80 yards to gain 10; the phenom who transformed Arizona State football after World War II; the school’s first athletic celebrity whose impact still reverberates in Tempe.

But as Yetter digs through the articles of her father stacked high on a maroon rug, she knows little about her dad’s recruitment as the most sought-after high-school prospect in the country -- the one who nearly took his talents out of state.

The drama surrounding where Wilford “Whizzer” White was going to school is an adventure of a different era.

Back when something as little as a family returning from vacation was plastered in the papers, there is just a small article on one of the wildest recruiting tales, one that captures the essence and celebrity of White.

And Yetter had never heard the story.

The I-10 wasn’t yet built when White and Charles Beall, his Mesa High counterpart, ventured to Los Angeles on June 22, 1947. It’s possible they hitchhiked -- they frequented local roads with their thumbs in the air -- but it’s more likely they either took Beall’s car or White’s 1930’s black Ford Model A Coupe. Either way, the coaches over at the University of Southern California opened their campus and ideas to the most spectacular athlete in the west, hoping it was enough to make him a Trojan.

Seven decades later, some aspects of White’s recruiting experience remain. Others don’t. For one, it’s unclear whether White or Beall’s parents knew their sons were driving to L.A. that summer Sunday. What’s surely known is if they told their parents they were headed west, they left out their plans to make a return-trip pit stop at a friend’s house, which was planted along the state border in Yuma, Ariz.

The sun fell over the desert that clear-skied Sunday, one in which White’s family most definitely attended service at their Mesa church, and two beds remained empty. The anxiety of their parents heightened.

The absence of phones and GPS complicated the process, but White and Beall’s family contacted the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office and explained their worry. Radio dispatches were sent out across the state and, late in the night, were finally picked up by Yuma residents who had recognized White and Beall -- the two later claiming they had no clue anyone was looking for them.

To Arizona residents, another case of adolescent miscommunication didn’t raise too many alarms. Rather, White’s “disappearance” sparked worry over his destination. A meeting with USC was met with local disgruntlement, that like the cotton in Clark Gable’s shirts, another Valley byproduct could be lost to the lights of Hollywood with little mention of its roots.

That came on the heels of news that White flew to the South and participated in summer football practices with the University of Tennessee, training for a few days under esteemed coach Bob Neyland. Soon after, White would say Tennessee’s campus “sure looked good,” which piled on speculation to the point it was being written as near-fact.

“It appears today that the University of Tennessee will have the nation’s top high school player,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel wrote then. “He is Wilford ‘Whizzer’ White of Mesa, Arizona … a medium-sized well-built son of the Old West.”

Despite White’s involvement with Neyland’s freshmen, his parents denied White was committed to or enrolled at Tennessee. Over the years the Whites only did a handful of interviews, most to clear up misconceptions. One time during White’s senior season, they shot down a rumor their son told a Tucson High fan he was going to matriculate to either Army or Navy.

Regardless, whether to Knoxville, L.A. or some other wild card, hope was grim for arguably Arizona’s greatest homegrown talent to stay in the desert.

“There are still some who think he may choose the University of Arizona or Arizona State College at Tempe,” The Arizona Republic wrote after news broke of White practicing with the Vols. “But chances of either of those courses materializing appear rather remote at the present.”

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Larry Kentera arrived in Tempe during a time of change. World War II concluded the year prior. Arizona State Teachers College dropped the “Teachers,” which afforded it the ability to grant bachelor’s degrees. And ASC’s enrollment quadrupled to include more than 2,000.

Kentera joined the rag-tag 1946 ASC football team, a squad built out of thin air following a three-year gridiron hiatus for the war.

The results were as you’d expect. But in a season full of lows, none struck the chords of disgrace more than the Bulldogs’ 67-0 loss to Arizona in Tucson.

It left a stain of humiliation school president Grady Gammage vowed would never be replicated.

Change swiftly crept through the buttes. The athletic booster organization, the Sun Angel Foundation, was founded, soon flooding ASC with cash. Then, by their suggestion, the Bulldog mascot was changed to a Sun Devil, confirmed by an 816-196 student body vote that November.

But the 2-7-2 record in football clouded thoughts of prosperity and led to coach Steve Coutchie’s resignation. Coutchie had been hired the year prior after 18 years at Mesa High. And, perhaps, it was he who informed Kentera and the Tempe collective of his former standout, the one they called “Whizzer,” the one who could expedite ASU’s quest for football relevance.

“At that time, the ASU program was down real low,” Kentera said. “We just heard about how good of a player he was in high school and we’re all wondering, here’s the top athlete probably in the West coming out of Mesa, where’s he going to go to school?”

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It’s clear the Arizona sportswriters grew accustomed to White’s on-the-fly artistry. He played four sports -- track, baseball, basketball and football -- and dominated in such a way that, over time, colorful descriptions turned to simple quips to overcome the monotony.

The accolades racked up as records were set and the Jackrabbits sustained success. There are only so many ways to describe a 5-foot-9, 165-pound halfback weaving backward in serpentine patterns until enough forlorn defenders cleared a path for the end zone.

Take these two quotes, the first from a 1944 Arizona Republic article and the second from a 1946 column by Arizona Daily Star scribe Bill Nixon.

“If the Mesa speedster can break into the open, it is doubtful there is a player on this (Tucson High) Badger team who can catch him -- and the Badgers are noted for their fast-traveling backs,” The Republic wrote.

Said Nixon: “Mesa’s Jacks have Wilford (Whizzer) White -- nuff said.”

(It was local sportswriters, too, who coined his nickname. White had jacked his father’s harmonica one day and stuck it in the flank of one of the probably dozen cows he milked that day. Soon, despite never learning to read music, he learned songs just by listening. The papers dubbed him “The Wizard of the Harmonica” after he dazzled a freshman talent show at Mesa High. Later “Wizard” turned into “Whizzer,” writers connecting the mix-up with Bryon “Whizzer” White, a former All-American tailback at Colorado.)

His magic became routine.

White’s story, both ancestrally and athletically, is one tough to comprehend. It feels closer to fable. In a world with limited video, where hitchhiking was a mode of transportation and updates were reserved for church in lieu of social media, myth and truth probably intertwined. White’s feats, his heroics, were the perfect imagination igniters for the time.

Like the day an eighth-grade White hitchhiked about 20 miles to the old Phoenix Union High stadium with just two dimes in his pocket -- one of which would be spent on a chocolate milkshake that he vomited out that afternoon -- to participate in the Greenway Field Day, one of his first organized athletic competitions.

Perhaps the excitement overtook him. Given the options of the events under the boy’s grammar school division, he decided he better just enter all of them. He told his daughter that his Alma School finished third that day. Thing was, White was the only one from Alma.

Stories like that weren’t too uncommon. During the Brigham Young Track Invitational his senior year of high school, which concluded with White’s second consecutive all-around championship, he won seven of the nine events he entered. Among those he topped were the javelin throw and high jump, which was odd considering he had never before participated in either.

“White is a one-man track team capable of winning almost any event he enters,” The Arizona Republic wrote.

Even the story of how White ended up in Mesa is as bizarre as it is chilling.

A ferocious Alabama tornado upended normalcy in October 1925 for White’s father Isham White, who went by his middle name Erdy. It ravaged his house into rubble and threw his 8-year old son, Wilford Woodrow White (White’s older brother), across the floor. As he slid, a nail sliced open Wilford Woodrow’s leg. The wound became infected and, soon after, he died of gangrene.

Seeking a new start, Erdy contacted the missionary who converted the family to Mormonism years prior. The man agreed to let Erdy, his wife Annie Belle and their five kids stay in a family barn near his house in Springerville, a small town in eastern Arizona.

His first time visiting Mesa came in October 1927, in town to attend the dedication of the Mesa Temple, a monstrous rectangular-shaped eggshell white building with a long pool that kind of resembled the Lincoln Memorial. Perhaps it’s beauty was a sign to Erdy, because he soon moved his family within walking distance of it.

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As wire stories of White’s Tennessee practices trickled toward the Pacific, the one spreading the most apprehension that the “Mesa Meteor'' would be a Volunteer was White himself, who added conjecture to a decision most figured was a foregone conclusion.

“They treated me just fine. But I don’t know. It’s pretty far from home,” White said of Tennessee after his visit. “I just can’t make up my mind at all yet.”

White’s father told the press his son was going to make his decision soon after returning to Arizona -- around the middle of June 1947. Instead, White would prolong his cogitation almost three weeks past that.

And, perhaps, the lingering worried the Tennessee coaches. Upon his arrival back to Mesa, White would later say that Neyland sent one of his assistant coaches to camp outside his house, offering him all sorts of luxurious, “including a car,” White said.

Who’s to say if Tennessee was the only institution partaking in such rule-breaking. What is known, however, is that the University of Arizona could have dangled keys to a mansion in front of White and he likely would have slapped them to the ground. His disdain for the Wildcats had been brewing for months.

It started the previous September.

White was in Tucson for the Wildcats’ 67-0 rout of the helpless Bulldogs, infuriated at the lost notion of sportsmanship. He would later say that, even though it was a rivalry game, it rubbed him as arrogant to see UA coach Mike Casteel let his starters run up the score until the final whistle.

“I eliminated UA that night,” White said in Shane Dale’s novel, ‘Territorial: The History of the Duel in the Desert.’

Even before that game, Beall’s experience in Tucson soured White’s trust of the Wildcats.

Arizona recruited Beall, Mesa High’s quarterback, in 1945 with the promise that if he went to Tucson, the school would ensure he not be drafted into the military. He finished his freshman season a budding star at left halfback, showing off his playmaking arm as the Wildcats capped off their undefeated 5-0 season with a shutout of San Diego State. Sometime in the next day, a military recruiter stood at his door and informed the youngster he was headed to the Army in a week.

After boot camp, he was stationed in Washington for a year, returning to Arizona in the spring of 1947 with a hatred for the Wildcats that stayed with him until his death almost seven decades later. When the time came to restart his college career, he enrolled at Arizona State College just months before White’s decision.

“It just worked out great,” said Beall’s daughter, Tana Martin, who stayed at the White’s house during her childhood summers. “They (White and Beall) were just such great friends and being from here, why not just continue that friendship and legacy?”

The war also forced Ed Long on an athletic hiatus. But, unlike Beall, he heard no empty promises. Long anticipated the draft card, stalling his college plans after a remarkable basketball career at Globe’s Miami High, which included helping the eastern Arizona town capture a state title in 1941. He enrolled at Phoenix college as a 17-year old in 1944, taking technical classes that automatically bumped him up a rank when he became of-age. He was a Carpenter’s Mate 3rd Class in a Navy platoon that shipped out to Okinawa, Japan.

Years earlier, he dueled with White and Beall’s Mesa Jackrabbits, telling tales of buzzer-beaters he and White nailed against one another.

The trio connected as a result of an odd tradition. Back then, Long said, high school hoops contests were followed by a dance on the gym hardwood. The students would stay as the floor cleared and the players, even the visiting team, would change and mingle around. White, Beall and Long began to chat. Probably about basketball at first. Over time, about everything else.

They stayed friends until White and Beall passed in 2013. In their later years, they ate out every week with their long-married wives -- usually at a local Olive Garden or Applebee’s. They told the same jokes that somehow elicited more chuckles each time and shared stories of the past, like all the times the six of them would pack in White’s car, often a triple-date to see the newest release at a Phoenix theater.

Another story, though, still sticks out to Long, who sounds great at age 93. It’s about that night White and Beall went missing.

As Long tells it, he enrolled at ASC following his Navy exit in 1946 and took a Biology class taught by a professor, J. Leo Mortensen. Mortensen’s brother, Jess, was a world-class athlete at USC in the early ’30s, helping the Trojans capture a national championship in track and a Rose Bowl title on the gridiron.

Before he was named USC’s track coach in 1951, sparking a coaching career that would include 11 national titles, it seems Jess Mortensen was still plugged into both the USC track team and recruiting in his home state of Arizona, helping connect White with the USC track coaches. And, as Long says, he assisted in the efforts for White’s visit to Southern California -- one that may have never become public had White and Beall told their parents where they were headed.

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On a recent Saturday afternoon, Yetter kept her phone outstretched as she walked into an upstairs room of her Mesa home. She explained how the newspaper clippings were cool, that they painted a nice picture of her father, but this was the cherished possession from her father’s athletic career.

Perfectly framed in a glass case was the no. 33 jersey of Whizzer White. As Yetter moves the phone in tighter on the maroon long-sleeved jersey with gold stripes and numbers, she zooms in on the makeshift brown stitching, still visible 70 years after White’s mother last sewed together the tattered fabric.

That was just one of the perks of going to school less than 10 miles from home.

Wilford White committed to Arizona State College on July 10, 1947, sparking a Sun Devil career that would cement him as the school’s first star. He was an All-American, rushed for a then-school record 3,173 yards and later became the first Sun Devil footballer to have his number retired.

More importantly, his 1947-50 stint in maroon and gold is an Arizona State football pinpoint. Pre-White ASU a lousy, second-fiddle program; Post-White ASU a school capable of competing on the national stage and, more importantly, knocking off Arizona.

“It bears out the open reports that the heretofore pint-sized Tempe is being groomed to take a new place in Arizona athletics,” Arizona Daily Star sports editor Abe Chanin wrote of White’s commitment to ASC. “And that place is a notch higher than the University of Arizona.”

Chanin’s fears were confirmed two years later when White ran to the Goodwin Stadium end zone and busted out a “jig” as 15,000 fans chanted “We beat the U.” Behind a stat line of 45 rushes for 145 yards and a pair of touchdowns, White helped secure Tempe’s first win over UA in 11 years.

“It really wasn’t a rivalry for a long time,” said Dale, who wrote a book on the Arizona State, Arizona rivalry. “(The ‘49 win) set the tone for what was going to come. That Arizona State, with the proper athletes, money and backing, could be as competitive on the football field as Arizona.”

Under coach Ed Doherty, whose four years in Tempe mirrored the tenure of his star halfback, White excelled. Doherty was an innovative offensive mind, the Sean McVay or Lincoln Riley of his time. The young coach baffled his team with foreign terms like cross-blocking and call-blocking. He also created a way to better show off his halfbacks -- Beall and White -- and fullback -- Kentera -- tweaking his Wing-T formation to a Lazy-T and a Straight-T. Or rather, he invented the I-formation without having a clue.

“Wilford was the guy right behind the fullback,” Kentera said of Doherty’s offense. “Ed would come up with plays and center them around Wilford because of Wilford’s ability … We’re lucky he picked us because he had the chance to go wherever he wanted to go.”

Kentera, who later spent 11 years as ASU’s defensive coordinator under Frank Kush, was right. But White chose Arizona State and altered the school’s football future for the better.

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White’s long-awaited decision in July 1947 forced an explanation. Why Arizona State? Why go star at USC or Tennessee or some other school where national championships were possible and fame would come swiftly? Speaking with the local media, he gave three main reasons.

Watching ASC’s spring practices, he was intrigued by Doherty’s offense. The ASC additions of former Mesa Jackrabbits, namely Beall, influenced him. And, finally, White didn’t want to leave the Valley -- a star-athlete “attracted for the first time to Tempe,” The Republic wrote.

“Since I shall continue to live in the Valley of the Sun after graduation,” White said then, “I feel that it would be beneficial to retain my close friendships and perhaps make new contacts among the citizens of the community in which I shall live.”

That he did. His post-ASC football career was short, one highlighted by a two-year, $10,000-a-year spot on the Chicago Bears. He returned to Arizona in 1955 and helped Erdy retire by buying his business, Mesa Merchant Police, for $1,000, running it until his passing in 2013.

And just as Mesa Merchant Police remained a staple of its community as Arizona grew, White did the same as his family expanded -- from five kids of his own to 26 grandchildren to 64 great-grandkids, “and counting,” Yetter adds.

Most simply know him as the father of Danny White, the one who most-famously carried on his father’s football legacy. First at Arizona State as Kush's star quarterback, whose no. 11 would later be retired alongside his father’s no. 33; and later as the Super-Bowl champion gunslinger for the Dallas Cowboys.

Danny White didn’t ask his dad much about his recruitment back in the 40’s. The Tennessee and USC stories were never shared with Danny. But White was never shy about his disdain for the University of Arizona, often mentioning the great pride he took in turning the tides of the rivalry.

And he may have done it twice.

Danny never asked his dad why Kush began recruiting him out of the blue despite a less-than-stellar high school career. Why Kush showed up to his house one Thursday night, quickly wiggling out of a scholarship jam by calling ASU baseball coach Bobby Winkles on the spot and having him offer Danny a baseball scholarship.

“I think he probably called coach Kush up,” Danny White said of his dad.

If that’s the case, it was probably deserved. A chance for the man who elevated Arizona State football to enjoy the fruits of his labor. In the year 2020, in which Arizona State will be without a fall football season for the first time since 1945, White’s effects are still felt around Tempe.

White’s quick legs and dazzling runs spawned passion that afforded the school never-before-seen notoriety and donations. The resources credited with transforming ASU football post-World World War II hiatus can largely be traced back to White, to his 1947 decision.

And later on, when the money was there and his son starred under center, he basked in the excitement he was so intent on bringing to Tempe. It was a point of pride to never miss one of Danny’s games. Despite his dad’s perfect attendance, though, Danny loves to tell the story of the one close call.

The Sun Devils were on the road at BYU in October 1972, a few months before ASU’s Fiesta Bowl championship, when White told his son he was slammed at work, that a trip to Provo wasn’t in the cards. Danny assured him there was no need to apologize. One missed game in 19 years was more than acceptable.

Not to Whizzer. Because when Danny woke up at 6 a.m. that Saturday, there was his dad snoozing on a couch in the hotel lobby. And, in his hurry to knock out a 10-hour drive before sunrise, it seems White repeated a mistake. One that stirred quite the frenzy 25 years prior.

“I go over and wake him up,” Danny recalled, “and he says, ‘Oh, hey. I got all my work done and was able to get up here.

‘“Call your mom and tell her where I am.’”