Ballin' in 56

With next winter’s 100th anniversary celebration of the oldest basketball tournament in the state sure to shine wide ranging light on a small town with a legacy of hoops as deep as it is long, let’s ignite the argument: what era was the round ball apex for Monroe City? I will start.

The 1955-56 season. The Panthers over at the public were on a decade long magical ride, averaging 28 wins a year. Holy Rosary, on the other extreme, was a losing program DOA. But now the Trojans had a new fire ball of a coach destined to make this a two-team town. And a future Army Brigadier General would that fall racially integrate the Panther locker room.

Like most small towns of the time, the Monroe City, MO of the fall of 1955 was clannish. If you were Protestant, you lived north of the railroad tracks that dissected the one whistle stop town. If you were Catholic, you lived south of the railroad tracks. The only exception being the two streets that ran parallel, one on each side of the tracks. That is where the town’s black population of the day domiciled.

Over at that public “Protestant” high school on the north side, the MC Panthers were coming off a 30-5 basketball season. Over the previous five years those heathens had won an unholy 152 games. Heck, at the rate the local Catholic boys at Holy Rosary were staggering along, there would be a man on the moon before this cadaver of a team ever won 152 games. Something had to be done. How desperate were the Catholics to catch up? They hired a Baptist for their coach.

Coach Ozzie Osbourn’s reputation for his knowledge of the game of basketball immediately set him apart from his predecessors at Holy Rosary. “He was the first real coach we ever had,” recalls 1958 grad Chuck Kendrick. “And we hung on every word he said. Before we would have a dad, or some local who maybe had played in high school, volunteer to coach us and it just wasn’t working. When Ozzie came over, we knew immediately we had something special.”

By that summer of ’55 the public MC bunch had been on quite a run. In the fall of 1946, Coach Morrie Schroeter came to town. He found a community ready for some fun.  Schroeter’s first team recorded a record of 25-10, his second 36-8, falling one game short of the 1948 state tournament. Schroeter’s final two teams in 1951 and 1952 both won 30 games: 31-8 and 31-11 respectfully. The 1951 team fell to University High of Columbia, the eventual state champs, in the semifinals of the regional. Schroeter would stay one more season.

In the fall of 1952, Billy Key moved up from Wellsville and took the helm of the Panthers. His tenure was for four years, and he would compile a record of 106-27.

Key departed not only Monroe City in 1956, but the high school coaching ranks, as well, taking the head coaching position at Harris Stowe College in St. Louis, MO. He would later spend 23 years as the head coach at the University of Missouri-Rolla. In 1988 he was elected to the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame.

Jim Gottman was a star player and a MC 1957 grad. The catholic boys, he is sure, over at Holy Rosary knew well the corporal wrath of a no-nonsense nun’s ruler, but Gottman says the nuns were sandlot wannabe sluggers compared to the Micky Mantle home run stroke of Coach Billy Key. “Coach Key was a disciplinarian,” recalls Gottman, a long-time area farmer. “You did not want to cross him. He had a rod, a stick, he would carry around with him and he didn’t hesitate to use it on your rear end, if he thought he needed to get your attention. I remember one night we were playing Palmyra. At half time he was really upset with how we were playing. He got out the stick and he stung our butts good. And yeah, we did come back and win,” Gottman says with a laugh.

 At MCHS, 1955-56 was a school year of change. Panther teams had always, until 1955, taken the basketball floor in their traditional colors of Black, Gold, and Caucasian.

 From their basketball inception in 1925, when the team went winless in five games, through the 1955 season - the same year Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Birmingham, AL bus and the year after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that racial school segregation was unconstitutional - Monroe City maintained segregated high schools.

 In the fall of 1955 Donald Scott racially integrated the Panther’s hoops team. Scott missed a significant part of the season when he was felled by an appendectomy. He would go on to a military career, retiring as a US Army Brigadier General.  He was later appointed Deputy Librarian of Congress and served as Chief of Staff for Atlanta mayor and civil rights icon Andrew Young.

Holy Rosary had a new gymnasium, opened in time for 1955-56 season, the Father Connolly Gymnasium. The Holy Dome, as the structure would become affectionately known, was ahead of its time. Even the hotshot Panthers over at the public school and their bandbox size “gym on a stage,” looked with envy at the Trojans home court. It would be another decade, until the 1960’s, and the zenith of area rural school consolidation until huge, clean field houses began springing up like Levittown’s to replace northeast Missouri’s many tiny bandbox gyms.

From the day it opened its doors, the Holy Dome was known as a tough road trip. Holy Rosary 1958 grad Chuck Kendrick says the Holy Dome mystique was just hype and nothing more. “We won because we had better players.” Area rivals did not see it that way and often loudly cried, “HOMER”!

Long-time Paris Coyote’s coach Donnie Williams in time just accepted the Trojan’s home court advantage. “You were 10 down when you got off the bus,” he once groused, in only the way the rough around-the-edges, burr haircut Williams could. “Then you go inside and see the crucifix behind each basket and figure with God on their side, there goes another ten points. Now it is 20-0 and we are not even in the locker room, yet. Then when the officials walk in wearing their Knights of Columbus hats, you just figure what the heck, let’s just get back on the bus and go back home.”