Krapils Owner Remembers Scoring 1st Touchdown In EP Mustangs History

EVERGREEN PARK, IL - Evergreen Park Community High School’s varsity football team is on fire, scoring 13 touchdowns over their first two games of the season: a pair of road wins over Manteno and Carver Military Academy.

The Mustangs’ football program dates back decades, even longer than the high school building that has anchored the corner of 99th and Kedzie since 1955. Stellar teams have helped define the program in the nearly seven decades since the fall of 1954, when the Mustang freshman squad defeated Bremen High School, 6-0, in the first game ever played in Evergreen Park football history.

“It was an exciting game,” remembers Ron Muersch, who scored the first touchdown in the program’s now 68-year history.

“I’ve caught a lot of passes in my football career, but that one sure was one of my biggest thrills,” Muersch said.

Muersch remembers the touchdown - a 60-yard strike from quarterback Jim Baker - vividly. According to a newspaper report on the game, it came on a fourth down when Baker elected to go for it rather than punt in an otherwise scoreless Saturday morning game.

The freshman Mustangs went undefeated, 6-0, in 1954 as the school building on the east side of Kedzie was being built. EPCHS students that first year attended school at the Immanuel Lutheran Church on 98th and Campbell.

“We did have a marked football field, though,” Muersch remembers of the home games that were played in an open field on the west side of Kedzie that’s now the site of a BMO Harris Bank.

Muersch was among the first football players in Evergreen Park history to compete on the varsity level for his sophomore through senior years.

Had he been a better student, he said, he may have been recruited by the legendary college football coach Ara Parseghian, who visited Evergreen Park that year to scout the likes of Baker and Dave Keyser when he was head coach for Northwestern University. Parseghian later achieved even greater fame when he became a national champion head coach for Notre Dame.

Instead, Muersch became a family man shortly after his 1958 Evergreen Park Community High School graduation. He met his wife, Rita, at the Evergreen Dance near 94th and Kedzie while still in high school, he said.

“It started drizzling, and two girls wanted a ride there in my 1950 Ford,” Muersch said. “One of them was Rita.”

The Muersches were married for 62 years, until Rita’s death in 2020, and have five children, 16 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.

Ron Muersch spent much of his professional career as a police officer and detective for the Worth Police Department. After retiring from the force in 1996, he bought the popular Krapils Steakhouse on 111th Street in Worth. Krapils has been owned by the Muersches ever since.

“It’s a family-run restaurant and we love it,” he said.