A Town Equal Parts Mark Twain and Bruce Springsteen.

The Crystal City, MO I was raised in was a Mississippi River factory town, equal parts Mark Twain and Bruce Springsteen. 

I graduated from the local high school in 1975 and never went back. Despite an extended national recession leading to the eventual shuttering of the Pittsburg Plate Glass (PPG) factory, the town’s meal ticket for over 100 years, the struggling Crystal City of 1975 clung to the ideals of 1950’s Middle America. 

The local Knights of Columbus Hall is where my dad drank beer with fellow union men who were as stern, focused, and endearingly gruff as he. Many stoically hid in their souls the emotional scars of war. In their black and white world accountability ruled and talk took a back seat to results. It was an ideal time and place for me to play high school football. 

My hometown in my teenage years depicted countless small towns across America that revered their high school football teams. Community economic challenges and social woes were momentarily solved by a timely Friday night fourth quarter touchdown. The success of our football team served as a window into the beliefs and attitudes we were raised by, revealing the true values of our community. 

100 years ago, this upcoming September, the Crystal City Hornets took to the football gridiron for the first time. In 1926, a 24-year-old history teacher at Crystal City High School named Aubrey (A.E.) Powers took it upon himself to organize a football team, because, he said, “our boys need something to do after school.” 

The team’s first-ever game was against De Soto and was played in an open field that today serves as the town’s Little League baseball grounds. The Hornets (a nickname Powers claimed to have randomly drawn from a hat) came out on top 6-0, launching the upstarts to a pleasantly surprising first-year record of 7-1. A nondescript tackle named John Tinsman, moved to fullback by Coach Powers late in the game, had the honor of scoring the first touchdown in Hornet history.

Initially, with De Soto the only local competition available, the Hornets were forced to take on all comers. Roosevelt, Cleveland, St. Louis University High, Normandy, Soldan, Christian Brothers College; a virtual who’s who of the St. Louis area high school football powers of the time filled out the Hornets’ Depression era schedule.

In 1928, in only their third year of existence, the Hornets with a high school enrollment of 103 students, allowed their goal line to be crossed only once, while scoring 152 points in eleven games and logging major victories over St. Louis city powers St. Louis University High, 13-0, and Ritenour High, 37-0. Both schools had enrolments well over 1000 students. So dominant were the Hornets in the win over St. Louis University High, considered at the time the top program in St. Louis, the Junior Bills never came closer to their end zone than the Hornet’s 38-yard line. Crystal City recorded 18 first downs to the visitors’ measly five. The only blemish on the season ledger in ’28 was a 6-0 loss to the St. Louis University Freshman team. 

In 1930, the school installed lights at their river bottom flood plain stadium, becoming the first in the state to play night games. Now, locked into Friday Night Lights, underdog became the Hornets’ mantra and a factory town’s love affair with its feisty little football team had begun. The relationship between players and community was deeply personal. Town folk attended Friday night games in mass, local newspapers profiled players weekly, and pep rallies celebrate their achievements.

Small town, big dreams. My limited research shows that four Hornets played professional football. The journey from Crystal City’s Dr. J.J. Crommerford Stadium to the professional field is a testament to their talent, hard work, and perseverance. All maintained firm adult ties to the place where it all started.

Benny La Presta starred in the backfield for the 1926 and 1927 CCHS teams. He was described in a 1927 St. Louis Post Dispatch story as a “flashy line plunger and broken-field runner. The short but husky Italian is a dependable blocker, and he knows how to back up his line.”  In 1933, after an All-American career at St. Louis University, Mr. La Presta joined the Boston Redskins of the professional National Football League. 

After leaving professional football, the scholarly La Presta returned to Crystal City, worked for the Internal Revenue Service and was a college and high school football referee. In August of 1975, at the age of 66, while exercising in preparation for his upcoming season’s officiating schedule, La Presta suffered a fatal heart attack. 

Nineteen fifty-one CCHS grad Ike Jennings was a two-way lineman at the University of Missouri and for the Green Bay Packers. The charismatic “Big Ike” looked the way a football player in the 1950s was supposed to look and he acted the way a football player in the 1950s was supposed to act. In high school, he was a combination of strength and speed, witnessed by winning the state track title in both the shot put and the 440-yard (400 meter) dash. 

After his brief career with the Packers, Mr. Jennings was for six years an assistant coach, and then the head coach of county rival Herculaneum. He passed away in 2007. 

Randy Cayce, a 1966 CCHS grad, played a leading role on the undefeated 1964 and 1965 Hornet squads. The marquee member of a talented backfield on offense and a ball hawking defender, Mr. Cayce, used a freakish mixture of intelligence, strength, size and speed to dominate opponents. After a collegiate career at Wichita State, Mr. Cayce spent three years as a running back with the Denver Broncos and one year as a teammate with OJ Simpson on the Buffalo Bills roster. In 1973, after a knee injury, he left football behind and settled in the Denver, Colorado, area. Mr. Cayce is the only one of the four who today survives. 

Danny LaRose is arguably the best player to ever pad up for the Hornets. That is quite a statement about a program as storied as CCHS. The 1957 graduate went on to become one of the top linemen in the history of the University of Missouri Tigers. After his 1960 senior year, Mr. LaRose, a two-way end, was named to several All-American teams. He finished in the top ten in that fall’s Heisman Trophy balloting for top player in the nation, the highest finish that season of any lineman. 

A first round NFL draft choice of the Detroit Lions, Mr. LaRose played offensive tackle for four NFL teams over a seven-year career. Danny LaRose retired from a second career, selling medical equipment; and lived the good life with his wife in a riverside log cabin in upstate Michigan until his passing in 2019 at the age of 80. 

“Coach (Arvel) Popp knew I was on my own a lot and he looked out for me,” Mr. LaRose said in a 2016 interview I did with him. “Coach was a hard-nosed old school type of guy. He is one of the most honest people I've ever met. Sometimes he would be too honest, and it could hurt your feelings. But that honesty was what a kid like me needed to hear. His son, Jerry, was my age and Coach was hard on the poor guy, use to make him box me in the gym and I was a lot bigger, but I better not let up, either, or coach would have been all over me. But Coach also had a soft side he tried hard to hide. He knew I needed some special looking after and he saw I got it.”

“For me, growing up in Crystal City, sports were everything,” Mr. LaRose recalled. “My mom died when I was 13 and my older sister was in nursing school, so it was just me and my dad at home. Every other week he worked the evening shift over at PPG, so for a week I would not see him, at all. I was always up at school playing sports for something to do. Once, I was home cooking some Spaghetti O’s and I forgot it was Friday night and we had a game and the bus pulls up to my house and Coach Popp is yelling at me to get my big dumb butt on the bus.”

“Sports in high school kept me in school, no doubt,” Mr. LaRose says. “I just had so much fun in high school. In 1957, Richard Byas and I were a two-man track team, and we won the state track meet. Richard won both sprints and a hurdles race and I won the Shot and Discus. Fifty points between us and it was good enough to win. Richard was so fast, unbelievably fast. 

“He (Byas) was one of seven brothers. I think he was the youngest, and he attended until his senior year the black only school, that did not have football, so none of the black kids had ever played football. My senior year (the courts) let the black kids come to school with us and he (Richard Byas) came out for the team.”

“His mom came to a game one night. It was the first time she had 

watched any of her sons play football. Richard scores four touchdowns in that game and his mom makes him quit football. Said she never realized it was so rough. Can you believe that? But man, was he fast, fast as anyone I played with in pro ball. Only one who could slow him down, I guess, was his mom.”

Danny LaRose was an established star player at the University of Missouri in 1958 when St. Louis Vashon High School graduate Norris Stevenson became the first Black student-athlete to earn a football scholarship to the state’s flagship university.  Years later, upon his induction to the Missouri Athletic Hall of Fame, Mr. Stevenson gave a newspaper interview to the St. Louis Post Dispatch in which he recalled the positive role Danny LaRose played in Stevenson’s trailblazing but sometimes rocky path as a Mizzou Tiger. 

“When I first came to (Missouri) Danny LaRose was a team leader and (he) went out of his way to make me feel welcome,” a grateful Norris Stevenson remembered. 

Racism was a constant companion for Mr. Stevenson in his years at Mizzou. Mr. LaRose quickly became friends with his new black teammate. Norris Stevenson recalled that Mr. LaRose made it clear that any redneck who wanted to harass his black friend was welcome to try - after they first went through him. There were no takers. With many football players from the Old South on the Tiger roster and on a campus heavily decorated with the Confederate Flag and a “Dixie going to do it again” mentality, without the symbolic message the respected Danny LaRose’s actions sent to the rest of the squad, Mr. Stevenson felt his road to acceptance, or at least tolerance, would have been much steeper. “It says a lot about Danny’s character,” said Mr. Stevenson. “It wasn’t a popular stance he took with many on the team at the time.”

From their football inception in 1926, the Hornets were winners. It was the town’s team, fortified with a cradle-to-grave interest in football. The factory railroad tracks that adjoined the north/south field on the east provided a great sightline and a free view of home games. Stories are told of Friday evening second shift factory workers being given “extended lunch breaks” to walk the short distance up the tracks from the factory to cheer on their team. 

When a Hornet back sprinted away from the helpless opposition, flying down the far sideline on the way to another touchdown, he was lustily cheered on by a rowdy group of hard hats - a searing image of a blue-collar town’s defiant pride.

Tradition spawned a win ethic as pervasive as the cold November night winds that whipped through the packed stadium, the town throwing its collective support around the team like a cozy blanket. In a now long-ago time, the close-knit community of Crystal City was from a slower, warmer era, a place where a good neighbor meant something, not exactly Mayberry, but close, and high school football was the social glue that bound it all together.

I had just turned 18 years old when I left my hometown. I felt nothing in the way of nostalgia or sentimentality. I longed for new horizons to explore and new people to meet. I vowed that I would never come back. Today it seems I spend a lot of time writing about the town I could not wait to leave. And I catch myself when I return saying, "I am going home."

My Hornet football experience of over half a century ago is a part of my story, and I'm proud of that. Tradition is nothing but ancestral peer pressure. All the original guys are now gone, so someone must tend to the tradition. As a hometown we should recognize that we all have some responsibility to keep the memory alive. It is an honorable position to be in. Everyone dies famous in a small town.