“I took over the role two years after Tony Galvin, who was an outstanding secretary. He was a very good operator and Barry Freeman was the secretary in 1968.
“I was very proud to be given the responsibility of club secretary in 1969, one person I remember described it as the ‘most important job in town, behind the mayor’.
“As secretary you were treated like royalty,” Mr Green said.
Kevin Woolnough was the treasurer of the club in 1969 and then secretary of the club in 1970, when Green was assistant secretary — and also a selector.
Just how important a role the job of football club secretary was to the community was echoed through the significant involvement of Echuca’s population in the club.
Green came to the club at the same time as ex-Hawthorn champion Graham Arthur, who was the coach of the 1970 premiership team.
He had been secretary at Moama in 1968, another premiership year, and was encouraged to step into club administration after suffering several injuries while playing.
Graham Arthur took over from 1967 premiership coach John Knox, he and Mr Green forming a great partnership — and freindship — almost immediately.
Arthur, who died last year, was godfather to Mr Green’s daughter, Kimberley.
It was Green who organised Olympian and former Victorian Governor John Landy, who died in February this year at 91 years of age, to attend a welcome function for Arthur.
“I wrote to him, David Parkin, Jack Dyer, Lou Richards and some others to attend the welcome function. It was the first public function John Landy had been to in some time, they couldn’t even get him on World of Sport,” Mr Green said.
Rod Casey, another of the famed World of Sport team, compared the evening, all the stars attending at no cost to the Echuca club in honour of “Mort’’ Arthur.
It was also Green, and Arthur, who pooled their resources to bring players like Russell Douglas and Ralph Todd (both premireship players) — and several others — to the club.
When asked by the coach what Echuca needed in order to be successful he was quick to respond, saying “let’s do this with locals’’.
“I said to Graham ‘we don’t want ex-radius players, we want locals’. He and I then went about recruiting a lot of great players from the area,” Green said.
In their travels they came across an Echuca South player named Graeme Landy, who they saw for a 10-minute period as a 15-year-old, when he came onto the ground in the last quarter as the 19th man.
He went on to play 174 games for Richmond and Geelong between 1975-88.
Mr Green, Arthur and Jim Clark, a selector, formed a fearsome recruiting trio.
Players and officials from the 1960s and 1970s attended an event at Echuca Hotel on Friday night, then watched the Echuca and Mansfield game before conducting an interesting exercise at the Saturday evening dinner — when the question was posed What if 1967 played against 1970?
These were the two teams, 1967 in bold:
B: Bernie Oliver/Ray Murphy, Alan Brown/Pete M Ryan, Shane O’Brien (played in both 1967/70)
H-B: Terry Stockton/Russell Douglas, Bob Vagg/Mal Crawford, Bryan O’Neill (played in both 1967/70, on a wing in 1970)/John Toll;
C: Arthur Wickham (played in both 1967/70), Bernie Phyland (played in both 1967/70), Barry Everitt/Bryan O’Neill;
H-F: Alan Pleitner/Ralph Todd, Ross Growcott/Julian Vise, Noel Haldin/David Fox;
F: Ken Colvin/Roger Teasdale, John Bethune/Bob Vagg (played in both 1967/70, in 1970 at full forward), Brian Bennett/Rick Armstrong;
R: John Barry/Peter J Ryan, Ambrose Christian/Phillip Nolan, Greg Hardy/Brian Bennett (played in both 1967/70, in 1967 in a forward pocket);
INT: Dick Burrows and Noel Smith/ Laurie Phillips and Bernie Oliver (played in both 1967/70, in 1967 as a bak pocket);
Emerg: Tom Oliver/Greg Cheong; and
Coaches: John Knox/Graham Arthur.
Not to be left out of the conversation, Noel “Kicker’’ Wallace, who has been involved at the club since the 1960s — and is still an active member — said he considered the 1970 team the best he had ever seen play.
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