Mr. Herbert

Time, and lots of it, have marched by since I graduated high school. This is a slow time of the year for me, and I have spent several recent early winter afternoons gathering my thoughts and memories about my high school coaches and posting them on my social media. 

I had four coaches at Crystal City, MO High School, from where I graduated in 1975: Coach Arvel Popp, Coach Dick Cook, Coach Rodney Mills; and my first high school coach, Mr. Rolla (Duke) Herbert. I have posted recently about the first three, and now Mr. Herbert. 

I have never called him Coach, always Mr. Herbert. I have no idea why. He taught me a lot about coaching. 

Mr. Herbert did not set out to be a coach. When November basketball tryouts rolled around in 1971, my freshman year, CCHS did not have a freshman coach. After over a decade in the classroom, the school administration talked Mr. Herbert into trying his hand as a basketball coach. It was a fortuitous choice. Mr. Herbert had a long and storied coaching career. Eventually, Mr. Herbert succeeded Coach Popp and became the varsity boys’ basketball coach for the 1976-77 season. 

Mr. Herbert, a 1953 CCHS grad, was a good high school history teacher. I also became a high school history teacher and a basketball coach. To this day I recall fondly the lively but never livid discussions in his class. 

Mr. Herbert was a Republican in the post-Vietnam/Watergate era when being Republican wasn’t considered cool, especially to a classroom of longhaired 15-year-olds, all of us conforming to non-conformity. He was a congenial but rigid advocate of conservative arguments. Mr. Herbert was an adept provocateur but sophisticated enough to appreciate both sides of almost any argument. “You can disagree without being disagreeable,” was the social message his behavior displayed and mentored for us. In Mr. Herbert’s classroom, everyone had a right to their opinion and respect was mutually demanded of us by him. 

For one hour a day I saw him not as a basketball coach, but as a teacher who made me think. When Mr. Herbert was at his lectern in front of our class, he seemed more interested in what Nixon “knew and when he knew it” than the March Madness bracket. He was hard to get off topic. 

I chuckled when in 2000 I received from the outspoken conservative Republican Mr. Herbert a handwritten note: “Almany, you need to get out and support Bill.” CCHS grad Bill Bradley, a staunch liberal, was that election cycle’s front runner for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. I dutifully placed the “Bradley 2000” sticker he sent me on the bumper of my manual stick Ford 150 pickup truck. However, I doubt it swayed many of my Ozark neighbors (who poked fun non-stop at my little truck) to vote for a liberal Democrat. But I was impressed, but not surprised, that Mr. Herbert had placed hometown over party. 

For many years, prior to picking up a coaching clip board, Mr. Herbert was a driving force behind CCHS’s popular and successful debate team.

Over the years after high school graduation, I had sporadic face-to-face contact with Mr. Herbert. But four high school basketball teams I coached played in state tournaments and each subsequent spring I received a congratulatory handwritten note from Mr. Herbert. I still have them. 

Mr. Herbert had a gift for expressing his wonder – both the simple and the complex – for the masterpiece that he saw as the game of basketball. He loved sharing his delight. That impressed me as a 14-year-old playing on his team. Even in my adolescent brain, I sensed the man knows what he is talking about. His hip young connection to us was perfect to plant in me the seed for a lifelong passion for figuring out the intricacies of the game, but more important, positively leading young people. 

Mr. Herbert had an instinctive feel for basketball. All good coaches do. During his career he developed the reputation amongst his peers as a good manager of the ebb and flow of a game. He was good at game strategy. A late five-point Hornet lead in the pre-shot clock days Mr. Herbert coached was the equivalent of a ten-point lead in other hands. His teams ran a tightly disciplined offense, making opponents play defense longer than they were used to. 

During the 1981-82 season Crystal City lost by 33 points in a Christmas tournament to Brentwood. Both teams would be in the same March district tournament field at Brentwood, so a post-season rematch was likely. Brentwood would go through the entire regular season as the state's top ranked team. The challenge of beating such a juggernaut on their home court would be steep. 

In 1982 I was a second-year assistant coach at Sullivan, MO High School and had a younger brother playing for Crystal City. I went to every game I could. There was back then, little, if any video VHS tapes to use for scouting. A sort of quid pro quo network developed amongst coaches We played CC rival Herculaneum in districts that year and Mr. Herbert helped us out. I owed him.

I offered to scout Brentwood’s semifinal district game, which was played right before the Hornet’s own semifinal game against Wellston. This would free Mr. Herbert’s full attention for his Hornet's must-win semifinal elimination game at hand. The Hornets beat Wellston by one point on a last second shot and secured their spot opposite Brentwood in the next night’s championship tilt.

I listened the next morning as Mr. Herbert went over his game plan for Brentwood. Turn the table from the git go, use the butt whipping taken just two months prior to attack what he assured his players would be an overconfident foe. Be the aggressor on both ends, explode to the hoop on offense and on defense play with your head up and on swivel, guarding as diligently as deputies escorting dangerous felons. And it would help to shoot like a dead eye Daniel Boone. 

It went without saying, to pull off what would be a monster upset, a lot had to break the Hornets’ way. It would. 

Brentwood lived by a smothering full court press that had destroyed the Hornets back in December. If they could figure a way to weather the backcourt defensive pressure with good floor spacing and crisp and aggressive passes and force Brentwood into a half-court game, they might have a chance. 

Mr. Herbert had his team ready. Each time in the first quarter when CCHS broke Brentwood's defensive pressure, the packed side of a gym full of Hornet fans released a collective exhale. As the game progressed into the second half, and remained a close battle, louder excited cheers arose from a growingly confident Hornet faithful. 

The Brentwood crowd seemed initially annoyed at the pesky little Hornets’ refusal to fold. By the start of a one-point separation 4th quarter, a WTF bewilderment of malaise had taken hold of the home crowd. The shifting momentum was cool and head shaking to witness; it is what high school sports are all about.

Brentwood led for the first 31:54 of a 32:00 game but could never break away. The Hornets took a one-point lead with six seconds remaining and watched a last second Brentwood 15-foot baseline shot rim in and out. 

CCHS played practically a perfect game. They did everything the way Mr. Herbert had outlined, beating odds normally reserved for snowballs in hell or comradery in the D.C. Halls of Congress. It was the best example of a basketball team following a game plan I ever saw.

Mr. Herbert’s 1979 Hornets finished second in the state tournament and his 1982 squad third. He later was the head basketball coach at area high schools Herculaneum (where in the early 1960s he had filled the role of high school principal) and St. Pius.

But with Mr. Herbert what I fondly recall was NOT how strategically wise he was, it was how much darn fun it was playing for him. 

I entered CCHS as a freshman who had been educated through 8th grade at the local Catholic school. I knew hardly any of my new classmates. I didn’t play football that first fall. My goal each school morning was to make it unnoticed to the 3 pm dismissal bell. I needed the basketball season to start, but first I had to survive tryouts. I did. 

The only high school basketball team I was not a starter for was Mr. Herbert’s freshman team. I began the year as 6th man, and there I stayed. As the year went on, I played better and Mr. Herbert played me more, but never as a starter. 

We had a good team. If memory serves, we lost only one game. One night, I hit four straight free throws in the final 10 seconds to ice a win. In the post-game locker room in front of the whole team - a group whose acceptance I sought, Mr. Herbert said, “Almany, I don’t care about starters, what I care about are finishers and you are a finisher.” There are a few searing memories we keep locked deep within the storehouse of our souls. For me, this is one. I am sure I blushed, then floated out into the winter night. 

After that night, I would have howled with righteous indignation if Mr. Herbert had ever put me in the starting lineup. His lesson to me and the team was the basics of teamwork: success is a communal type thing, and when you win, everyone can be considered successful, and we move up together. So don’t be selfish, just fill your role. 

That is good coaching. Better teaching. 

Sometime in the early years of the first decade of this century, maybe around 2008, I was running a large summer basketball camp at Seckman High School in Imperial, MO when I felt a hard slap on my back. It was Mr. Herbert. “Almany, what kind of a gold mine have you got going here,” his voice boomed. I had not seen him in years.

Mr. Herbert said he had been talked into coaching his granddaughter’s summer team. A work in progress, he observed, with a smile. His basketball judging talent was still intact, I concluded after watching for five minutes his granddaughter’s group. To be kind, they needed to get a lot better just to be bad. 

Didn’t matter to the man who had once resided on the top of the local coaching mountain, he had a team to make better, and all camp he rode them incessantly. Coaching and teaching skills are found in the ability to push adolescents out of their comfort zone - and convince them they like it. Mr. Herbert still had that skill.

At the time I had taken a self-imposed break from coaching. Mr. Herbert encouraged me to get back into the coaching saddle. I asked him if he had any coaching regrets. Two, he said, “I wish I had started earlier, and I wish I had finished later.” 

I found that week that I could still learn basketball in a short window of time at Mr. Herbert’s elbow. We sat at a cafeteria table one afternoon and talked for at least an hour. I told Mr. Herbert over the years I had ran some of the offensive schemes he taught us. “Remember the Auburn Shuffle,” I asked? 

His eyes lit up. His voice got loud, and the fingers of both hands flew across the tabletop in intricate patterns. To the untrained eye the retired coach seemed to be an overcaffeinated Vegas Pit Boss dealing blackjack without a deck - but he was explaining the Auburn Shuffle, movements as fresh in his 70-year-old mind as they were when he explained them to me decades prior. His intensity made me take note that our roles had come full cycle - the student lectured once again by the teacher. I sat up straight. 

As my wife will attest too, I do not let details encumber me. Details slow me down. I blithely forget names – even of my own grandkids (hey, I got 14). But, the exception, for me, was always basketball. I was obsessed over details. I think I picked that up from Mr. Herbert. 

“Now, Almany, the Auburn Shuffle, you say, you got to believe in it, get your players to believe in it, but you got to teach it right. Remember this, it is the timing of the back cut, Almany, the timing, it must be perfect. Always. Perfect. No screens in the Auburn Shuffle, it slows things down. Don’t forget that Almany, ever. The back cut.” 

It was the last time I ever spoke to Mr. Herbert.

Mr. Rolla (Duke) Herbert passed away in 2012 at the age of 76. 

Sooner or later, it gets to be closing time. There's this big, two-ton elephant in the room and nobody wants to talk about it. I pretend like it is not sneaking up. But I know. I live every day as if it were Saturday night.

I am at a point in life where I gratefully acknowledge there were those before me, like Mr. Herbert, who paid for me. It is humbling but also motivating to prepare myself with the hope I can pay for someone else who is yet to come. 

I have never liked funerals. Buy him a drink while he's alive. I wish I would have toasted Mr. Herbert to his face that afternoon in the Seckman High cafeteria. But I didn’t. So, allow me now this belated social media attempt. 

“Hey Bartender, pour it like you don't own it, and friends join with me as we throw one down for Mr. Rolla Herbert and the perfectly timed back cuts of his life."

Arvel Popp: A Man of His Time

Once, as a senior high school basketball player, a teammate and I decided one evening to drive a few miles north up Highway 61 to the Trophy Inn, a Kimmswick, MO bar, and have a couple of after practice cold beers. It was the kind of roadhouse you would expect to find a sign hanging over the urinal that said, "Don't eat the big white mint." Their lax age carding policies were well known to us. 

Sitting at the bar that night were two high school basketball coaches I immediately recognized: Coach Denver Miller of Kirkwood High School and our own Coach Arvel Popp. Like a cat out of a tree, we reversed field, hastily slipping out the same back door we had just entered. Hopefully, unnoticed. The next day, before practice, Coach Popp called my accomplice and myself into his office. “Boys,” he said, “I been drinking at the Trophy Inn for 20 years. Find a new spot.”

For my junior and senior years Coach Popp was my high school varsity basketball coach at Crystal City, MO High School. I graduated in 1975. I never had a buddy-buddy relationship with Coach Popp. Our interactions were from my side, polite and respectful, but I never thought of him as a friend or even a mentor. He was my coach.

We had a pretty good team. Back then each quarter was started with a center court jump ball. One night, we were 10 points behind at halftime to an inferior opponent when Coach Popp inspired us with a locker room two-pronged strategic adjustment: “Let’s get the tip and remember boys we shoot at the other basket this half.” He then went to his office to smoke a cigarette. Several of my teammates moved to the shower room to do the same. Inspired, kind of, we stormed from the locker room and won easily. I never felt that Coach Popp burdened us with over coaching. I decided to become a high school basketball coach. How hard could this gig be? In his career Coach Popp won over 700 games. 

In 1948 and already an established success, Coach Popp was lured away from Dexter, MO High School to take the reins of the Hornets. He stayed for 27 years, building a Hall of Fame career. A Southeast Missouri native of the town of Perryville and a World War II vet, Coach Popp was an enigmatic leader, aloof and disengaged from the community. He ran his teams as an unbending disciplinarian, totally above the grasp and influence of any of the town’s power brokers. Renowned in his younger days as a barroom brawler who seldom came up short with his fists, Coach Popp made and lived by his own rules.

Coach Popp had a scowl that could freeze a basketball player in midair. He was Hornet athletics, serving in the dual roles of Head Varsity Football Coach and Head Varsity Boys’ Basketball Coach. As an afterthought, he was also Athletic Director. 

Coach Popp maintained an omnipotent stance during his reign. The South Pacific combat war veteran was the Lord of the Manor, his players the Serfs. When I made mistakes, Coach Popp used his vitriolic tongue to correct me in front of my teammates. It was his way of toughening me up. I knew that he wanted me to play a little harder and I went out and played a little harder—sometimes.

Today, Coach Popp is remembered in Crystal City with reverence accorded to a patron saint. The high school gym, whose construction he oversaw in the mid 1950’s, is now named The Arval B. Popp Gymnasium. 

On the heels of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court Brown v Topeka Board of Education decision outlawing school racial segregation, in the fall of 1955 Coach Popp’s football team suited up four black players, the first team in the area to do so. He was given his due for a move many credit for a relatively smooth local school desegregation process. In most small rural Missouri communities in the 1950’s and 60’s, the resentment from the school segregationists spilled into the streets. Not in my hometown. 

The Hornet football juggernaut of the day out-trumped even racial prejudice. The town in the vernacular of the day seemed to say, “if those colored boys can help the team put the pigskin in the end zone, then give ‘em a uniform.” Eight years before Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, ten years before Bloody Sunday in Selma and thirteen years before Perry Wallace would integrate Southeast Conference basketball at Vanderbilt, Coach Popp fielded an integrated football team.

How much of this principled stance should go NOT to Coach Popp but instead to a progressive school board dominated by college educated local Pittsburg Plate Glass factory administrators, is open to debate. Furthermore, the Jim Crow era Crystal City Starr black elementary school did not close its doors until 1960. Why wait an additional five years to fully integrate? Elementary students could not help the football team? This slight is still a point of consternation for older community blacks who bristle to this day at mention of the local board’s historical acclaim for racial progressiveness. 

Many of my black athletic classmates never played basketball for Coach Popp. Ironically, one of our biggest rivals, the local catholic high school, St. Pius, had for over a decade been fueled by black basketball players who had attended the Crystal City public schools through 8th grade, before (perhaps for a fairer shake) moving for high school across town to the private school. 

As a white 1920’s product of the state’s bootheel, an area near Mississippi, Coach Popp would have had little exposure growing up to racial tolerance. For the first half of his life, Coach Popp lived under state laws that mandated racial segregation; everything from education, to housing, to public restrooms. Interracial intimate relations were not only against the law, but in extreme cases led to lynchings, one in Missouri as late as 1933. The legacies of racial discrimination are deeply ingrained in Missouri.

Coach Popp was like all of us, a product of his times. Is it in this retrospective context how the racial culture Coach Popp built and oversaw as the leader of CCHS athletics for almost three decades be judged?

In the mid-18th century, Thomas Jefferson impregnated his 14-year-old slave. In his time, the future President and founder of the University of Virgina was viewed as a national treasure. We still to this day name monuments after him. His face adorns Mount Rushmore. Crystal City is in Jefferson County. But his type of pedophiliac Epstein-like behavior today would draw universal scorn and likely lead to Jefferson’s imprisonment. 

If America can judge Jefferson’s life as a total body of work, tempered by the ethics of his time, can I do the same for Coach Popp? He was no neo-fascistic racist. But there were some post-World War II coaches, cut from the same social cloth era as Coach Popp, who bucked the racial stereotyping of the times. North Carolina’s Dean Smith was one - brave coaches who used their influential voices to make often-unpopular statements for racial social justice. However, Coach Popp was not one. 

If my black classmates had been on the basketball team, I may not have played much. My black classmate the late Elroy “Jaw Man” Bequette, a local playground basketball legend, never played a minute of high school basketball for Coach Popp. Jaw Man eventually played four years of college basketball at the JUCO and NCAA Division I level. At CCHS in 1975, that is just the way it was. 

Perhaps, Coach Popp hung on too long. According to players from his early Hornet years, he was a sharp-tongued disciplinarian and notorious perfectionist. But hard-nosed old school coaches like him, by 1975, were out of their element, did not relate to a youth culture weaned on the chaos of Vietnam, the Civil Right movement and Watergate. Questioning authority we viewed as our birthright. 

Today, my hometown is a bedroom community of daily rush hour commuters. But Crystal City was in 1975 still a multi-generational blue-collar factory town built around a melting pot of racial diversity – and Coach Popp’s Hornets were the social glue that bound all facets cohesively together. To our parents he was the coach who had turned the boys of their class into men. And he did not suffer slackers gladly. But, by 1975 he was on his last legs. To us, Coach Popp was an alien who had descended in a pod from outer space. He laughed at the wrong places. He was irascible, cantankerous, immovable ol' Coach Popp. 

We had a younger hip Assistant Coach in Mr. Rolla Herbert. With his long hair and mastery of current jargon, he became our sounding board. It was more than just an age disparity. Mr. Herbert had a background of closeness to his players I doubt he ever lost, a trait Coach Popp, at any age, I doubt ever had. Once on an away game bus ride, Coach Popp joked that with Coach Herbert around, it allowed him as head coach to be the evil coach. 

After the 1976 season, Coach Popp retired. For several years after his retirement, he served CCHS in a new role as a substitute teacher. I found that to be out of character for the Coach Popp I had known. My younger brothers were in school then, and they found him engaging and lighthearted. He even let his hair grow over his ears.

Coach Popp passed away on January 25, 1996, at the age of 81. 

So, who was Arvel Popp? As the years have passed, my memories of Coach Popp have become more nuanced, the discordance bouncing around in my head for the last 50 years. He was a man of his time, but it was not a good time. I do respect what he did professionally. He will always be, and justifiably so, a legend in my hometown.

No One Makes It Alone

I didn’t really enjoy high school. I didn’t do a lot of loud stuff, make a lot of scenes. I don’t have any true horror stories, I didn’t really get bullied, I had numerous friends, and I got passable grades… I just didn’t like it. One exception for me - playing football and basketball in my senior year. By then, I was good enough, I guess, that for the first time in my life, I felt noticed. I floated through my senior year.

Crystal City, MO Hornet athletics in 1975, the year I graduated from the local high school, was the lifeblood of the townsfolk. On basketball home game nights, it was always a full house in the school gymnasium, a utilitarian structure that also served at varied times as, concert hall, graduation stage, prom venue, banquet hall, and, on occasion, funeral parlor. Winning coaches could be a dominant personage in that sort of place, legends in the making to a grateful and proud factory town.

From 1980 until 2024, with a couple of short breaks, I coached high school and college athletic teams, the first four years as an assistant, the other years as a head coach. My wife does not buy it, but today in 2025, I am done. Probably.

My approach evolved over the years to praise them when they hit the standard but never lower the standard. When you take care of your athletes, help them grow, the winning will take care of itself. Saying no, not yes, was hard initially for me to master. It took a few years. It is very easy to say yes. But when you say no you build a culture of accountability, you literally get to the soul of your athletes.

Coaches Rodney Mills and Dick Cook were my high school football coaches. In unique and divergent ways, both got to my soul. My personal coaching ethos became, “remember how fun it was to play and imagine you are coaching 1975 you.” I wanted to do for my athletes what those two did for me.

Coach Mills, a 1955 Hornet grad, began coaching at CCHS in 1962. He stayed until he retired in 1986. He told me once he was, “too ornery, too cussed independent,” for any other school to take a chance on him, so he stayed. By day, Coach Mills taught the complexities of the structure of the English language to an often-unmotivated captive audience of 15-year-old sophomores. After school, he corrected the errors of would-be football lineman with a combination of inspirational practice field quotes and the surgically precise placement of the pointed end of a size 12 Wilson coaching shoe up the butt of the player in need of direction.

Coach Mills told me at halftime in the first high school football game of my career, a JV game, that if I shanked just one more punt, “I am going to raise more hell than the alligators did when the pond went dry.” Not my fault, I pleaded. The up-back blocking for me backed into me.

Coach Mills immediately waved me off. You can make excuses, or you can get the job done, but you can’t do both, was his brutal message. Coach Mills, I finally figured out, would recount the disasters to demonstrate his fidelity. He had seen me at the outset at my worst, and he hammered home to me my inadequacy. Now our relationship had nowhere to go but up - you are a horrible punter, but you are “my” horrible punter. I learned a valuable lesson from Coach Mills - never try to con a con man.

Every Quixote needs his windmill. For Coach Mills it was the hated cross town rival Festus Tigers. Just the mention of the name would send CCHS’s version of the Renaissance Man twirling around in a gale. Coach Mills gathered us seniors together before a Monday practice and said, "Friday night you will play Festus. For the rest of your lives, you will carry with you YOUR senior year Festus game." It was that big of a deal.

One of our seniors attended the first half of the school day at the Vocational Tech School at Jefferson College in Hillsboro. All the county public high schools bussed students there. From a Festus football player and VoTech classmate of one of our teammates, Coach Mills learned that the Tigers, who were suffering a down year while we were rolling, had a desperate plan for Friday night. The hapless Tigers were spending the week installing the archaic Single Wing offensive formation. They were going to catch us unprepared. This unorthodox strategy would be the equivalent of pulling the 1970’s Wishbone offense from the football mothballs in 2025. Crazy. But maybe just crazy enough to work?

Coach Mills had our defense locked in on how to defend the Single Wing. There were many reasons why teams no longer ran this offense, and Coach Mills knew them all. When Festus huddled up for their first offensive play from scrimmage, Coach Mills had the defense chanting, “Single Wing, Single Wing.” The surprise factor was gone before the first snap. For the master of “One Upmanship,” it was Coach Mills at his best. Our defense owned the night, shutting out Festus in their Homecoming game 28-0. We had earned, at least for that evening, Main Street cruising bragging rights.

His practice field rants were often hyperbolic, but their substance was real. Nobody crossed Coach Mills. Impious and blasphemous, he relished throwing snowballs at top hats. When the teams I coached went on the road for a big rivalry game, I taught my guys to be confident, aggressive and obnoxious, just like Coach Mills had taught us.

Somehow, his varied and disparate approaches would find a confluence and Coach Mills was well liked and successful in both the classroom and on the football field. To this day, sneaking up on 90 years of age, he remains unbroken, irreverent and as he told me a few years back, “loudly humble.”

Coach Dick Cook graduated from CCHS in 1956. He then played football and ran track at the University of Missouri. Coach Cook was the calming voice of the Captain Cook/General Mills dynamic duo, displaying always patience and reason. The two coaches' personalities were a good mix.

As a coach, I started our practice every day by blowing my whistle with: gimme three lines, gimme three lines. One day I decided to be cute, I came out and said gimme two lines and everybody looked at me like I just asked them to cure cancer. Practice was a disaster. A lot of coaching is what you choose not to do, not to see. Coach Cook was adept at not allowing distractions to disrupt the day’s plan. I figured as a coach I was wrong 80% of the time, but it would take too much time to go back and make “me right.” I learned from Coach Cook to not complicate things; check your coaching ego at the practice field gate and just keep moving forward. And when you get lucky, roll with it.

Coach Mills shared a good story with me. Randy Cayce was a star running back on the undefeated Hornet football team of 1965. He later played for the Denver Broncos and the Buffalo Bills, as a teammate to O.J. Simpson. “We are playing up at Fox. Coach Cook calls for Randy to sweep to the right. Of course, wherever Randy went, so did the 11 on the other side. Well, Randy sees he is boxed in, comes to a complete stop, I mean a complete stop with both feet; he looks around and then takes off around the left end and outruns the whole Fox team for a touchdown. Nobody laid a hand on him. I saddled up to Coach Cook on the sideline and said, ‘Nice call Coach, just how you drew it up.”'

In basketball, team chemistry follows the shot chart. Everyone wants to shoot the basketball. You've got to have your best shooter shoot more, but the others must shoot enough. The ability to create and maintain that balance amongst a group of testosterone fed teenage boys takes skill. The task when overseeing a football team, I would assume, is similar. There is only so much room in the next day’s headlines. I was never an indispensable cog on any team, in high school or college, but more than any other coach I played for, Coach Cook made me feel valued.

The cerebral Coach Cook would successfully wear many coaching hats in his long tenure at CCHS and over the years has filled a plethora of civic leadership roles as a respected public servant in support of his beloved hometown. Coach Cook, who won six consecutive state championships between 1984 and 1989 coaching the Hornet’s girls’ track teams, ascended to his current community god like status by sticking to a philosophy that emphasizes the practical and the unpretentious. Win or lose, turn the page.

Coach Cook was instrumental in helping me get a college football scholarship. I lasted one semester. I came home and got a job washing dishes. I dreaded the thought of letting Coach know I was a failure, that I had wasted his efforts. After Christmas break I made my way to the elementary school where he taught PE. In his usual disarming way, Coach spoke for a half hour with me. His message was: "Do what you want with your life; it's all up to you." Most importantly, he offered to again help me. I did not squander my second chance.

Times have changed. I came through at a good time. Coaching high school athletes in the 1970’s was still both manly and honorable. They were unique men, instilling a post-war type of football discipline on its last legs - weed out the weak during summer camp and then "dressout" those left standing. But those coaches were the Last Cowboys. They represented a time that has vanished (maybe for good reason - three-hour mid-day August practices with no water breaks) from high school athletics and from this nation. But good coaches can still teach life lessons that transcend the scoreboard - keep your composure amid chaos, form a plan when all seems lost and find the guts to carry it out.

You manage things; you lead people. Rodney Mills and Dick Cook were mentors to me - authority figures who allowed me to see the hope inside myself. I have tried over the years to pay it forward.  Nobody makes it alone. And we are all mentors to people even when we don't know it.

Boarder Wars

Those in the Twin City's still on the sunny side of 50 don't have the context to appreciate how important and bitter the Crystal City Hornets vs. Festus Tiger annual football game was. It was the single most important event on the area calendar. The last game between the two was contested 36 years ago.

Fifty falls ago, Coach Rodney Mills, a 1955 Hornet grad himself, gathered us seniors together before the Monday practice and said, "Friday night you will play Festus. For the rest of your lives, you will carry with you YOUR senior year Festus game." It was that important. At their Homecoming, we shut them out 28-0.

The two “Twin Cities,” separated only by a single street; played each other 45 times between 1946 and 1989, twice in 1947, the second game on Thanksgiving Day. The rivalry was intense. Older fans, for example, still debate the legality of the “sleeper play” CCHS pulled off in the 1949 game. The Hornets dominated the early years, the Tigers the later.

From 1963 to 1967, CC pitched five straight defensive shutouts over Festus. Go back seven years, 1961 to 1967, and the totally outmanned Tigers crossed the Crystal City goal line only once; scoring a grand total of only six points, an average of less than one point per game. The Hornets won all seven.

In 1989, the annual border war was discontinued by mutual agreement. The Tigers won the last ten played. As Festus’ enrollment grew and landlocked CCHS’s dropped, the game became no longer competitive. The final tally stands as a draw, 21-21-3, perhaps, a perfect ending to the greatest sports rivalry this community will ever know.

Tom Pendergast, the Farm and Uncle Joe Murphy

Tom Pendergast was the most famous crime boss in the history of the state of Missouri. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Pendergast]

He controlled every yard of concrete that was poured in the state between 1910 and 1940. His concrete business was a front during prohibition and Pendergast also controlled most of the state's illegal liquor. He was also the man who brought Harry Truman to power.

My uncle Joe Murphy and his road grading construction company in the first 30 years of the 20th century was massive. They won and completed most of the large contracts in the state at a time when roads couldn’t be paved fast enough. I know they paved Kings Highway all the way to Potosi, large parts of Grand Avenue in St. Louis and many other major and minor thoroughfares not only in Missouri, but throughout the nation. They were very wealthy. 

Uncle Joe Murphy was quite the gambler. Our family farm south of Festus where we grew up was inherited from Joe and my Aunt Annie. Aunt Annie was the sister of my paternal grandfather, Robert Almany who died in 1933 at a very young age, when my dad was two years old.

Family lore always said that Joe Murphy won the farm in a poker game. I don’t know if that’s true, but I heard from many old timers growing up that the most high stakes poker games in the state were played in this little Log house, pictured here , on the Murphy farm. Interesting, after its gambling days the log house became the house where I lived the first four years of my life. When I lived there, it had no electricity and no running water. It has fallen into obvious disarray.

Uncle Joe and Tom Pendergast became fast friends. They not only shared the demand for the concrete they both needed in the road construction business, but they both had an affinity for high stakes poker.  Dad insisted that Pendergast was a regular at the log house poker games. The games would sometimes run three straight days. Family bragging also likes to note that several times a young Harry Truman tagged along with Pendergast. Truman was well known as president for his love of a good poker game. I don’t know if Harry Truman playing poker on the farm is true or not, but it makes a good story, so what the heck. But I do know Pendergast was a regular.

Uncle Joe employed a large number of black laborers. They did all of the road grading back then by mule. They had huge road graders that took a large team of mules to pull. I’ve seen pictures or the entire hillside of the barn on the Murphy Farm south of Festus covered with mules. Uncle Joe would winter his black employees at the farm and then in the spring send them and his mule teams out by rail around the country.

Dad loved to tell this story and I’ve heard it from others as well so I think it is true. There was a member of local law enforcement who did not take kindly to so many blacks spending the winter on the farm. Dad always called him out by name but I won’t do that. It’s a well-known local name.  The local cop let Uncle Joe know that he would tolerate the blacks staying on the farm, but they needed to stay out of town, and the cop would need two dollars a head per month for security for each black wintering on the Murphy farm.

Uncle Joe called his friend Pendergast who then sent down a couple of his Goons. Dad said they were both about 6 foot five inches tall and dressed like they had just stepped off an Untouchables movie set. They asked Uncle Joe if he could take them to town and point out this constable as they would like to try to reason with him.

Uncle Joe took them to town and they found the local policeman on Main Street at a gas station with a bunch of his friends. It’s exactly what Pendergast’s boys wanted.

They both got out of the car, each grabbed the local policeman by an arm and lifted him up 3 feet off of the ground. One reached into the local cop’s pocket and pulled out a little Derringer pistol that he was known to carry. The other said, "if you ever try to shake down Joe Murphy again, we will be back and we will stick this toy pop gun straight up your ass.”

Dad said the two goons set the cop down, put his pistol back in his pocket, straighten his jacket for him and patted him on the head. Half the town saw it. Uncle Joe never got harassed again about his black workers staying on the farm.

Mrs. Gruber

Crystal City High School in the 1960’s and 1970’s employed a star-studded faculty. Coaches Rodney Mills, Dick Cook and Rolla Herbert were glib, hip – all well-liked and successful. Men like Mr. Don Housett and Mr. Elmer Smith, by their mere presence in the building wielded control and demanded respect. I liked Mrs. LeFlore and her art classes. And Mr. Wills was the best teacher I ever had. I am not sure who would be second, but they are a distant second.

Business teacher Mrs. Pauline Gruber would have never made the era’s CCHS faculty list of “Cool Kids.” She was not an extrovert in any sense, and, with all the panache of a cloistered nun, her colleagues were generally far more colorful than she. To be honest, I could have seen her in my grandma’s quilting circle, grinning through a weekly dose of fabric fusion fellowship.

But in Mrs. Gruber’s own way she was special. It has taken some time, like 50 years, for me to give Mrs. Gruber her due, but today she is my gold standard for teaching with dignity and unadulterated care.

The first semester of my junior year Mrs. Guber taught me high school Bookkeeping. It didn’t take long for us to come to the agreement that we needed to find for me a new second semester warm seat to occupy, in another class. But before my short-lived accounting career could come to an inglorious end, we first had to get me north of the first semester passing line.

For the last two weeks of the semester, each day at the start of lunch hour I would dutifully report to Mrs. Gruber’s room. After a few days, I secretly began to look forward to the tutorial sessions. In between bites of her brown bag bologna and cheese on white bread (the menu never varied) she drilled me relentlessly on Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Cash Flow and Balance Sheets; sanding down the bumps until, finally, the path between my failing grade and 60%, while not as smooth as glass, was reachable. By the end I am proud to say, I could at least balance a check book. I just assumed I was the worst student Mrs. Gruber ever taught, but she pulled me through. She cared about me, she really did. And I strove to please her. Strange how that dynamic relationship works, isn’t it?

Several years after I graduated, I walked into Dr. Hagen’s dental waiting room, and there sat Mrs. Gruber. I remember I was a little taken back that she had a life outside of her classroom. I had no knowledge of her personal life. I don’t think any of us did. I enjoyed that afternoon visiting with her. I never saw her again.

I found an online obituary for Mrs. Gruber. It was brief. It was also short and predictably bland. She taught at CCHS from 1961 until the mid 1980's. Mrs. Gruber passed away in Horn Lake, Mississippi in 2012 at the age of 89. She was born in Cardwell, MO, where she was buried. She was raised in Senatobia, MS, where after high school she became a hairstylist. When World War II broke out Mrs. Gruber joined the Navy and was stationed in San Diego, CA. After the war, she used the GI Bill to earn her teaching degree. Her first husband passed away in 1953. Her second husband in1987. She spent her retirement years living in Mississippi near her son and his family.

Remember: Mrs. Gruber was a teacher. That may sound elementary, but it's not. Such simplicity is boring to some, but for those who watch closely, there's a purity that's almost surreal. Why did she leave such an impression on me?  A fine God-given mind, for one thing. She had the disposition and inclinations of a teacher, the ability to motivate the most unlikely (myself) to rush to her classroom when the lunch bell rang, because "I couldn't wait."

Mrs. Gruber would have been the last to seek the spotlight. I am sure she never worked the room; more likely she would fade to a quiet corner. But just once, while we still can show appreciation, let’s call her from the shadows of forgotten ambiguity, and ask her to take a bow.

Little League Revisited

 

This photo could not be more evocative. A group of scrubbed clean white boys and their smiling ear to ear black teammates, along with two coaches pose with a trophy proclaiming them kid baseball champions of some corner of a 12-year old’s universe. It is sometime in the 1960’s, I would guess, and the boys are from the blue-collar factory towns of Crystal City and Festus, MO. They live lives dominated by a huge glass factory, not far from their Field of Dreams, that throbbed and clanged night and day. But they don’t care about any of that grown-up stuff. They pose proud and happy, not realizing this is a snapshot in time they should forever treasure. This is as good as life gets.

According to their website, the Crystal City and Festus, Missouri neighbors in 1939 chartered the Twin City Baseball Little League. It has operated at full strength ever since. By the early 1950’s ’s the league had racially integrated. Local historians today note that co-op helped pave a mostly smooth late-1950’s integration of the local schools. In fact, the national Little League organization had always taken a progressive stand on race, especially when compared with the slow pace of integration of major league baseball. In the 1950’s, four Little League World Series champions were integrated teams from New Jersey and Connecticut. In 1955 white teams in South Carolina refused to take the field to play an all-black team of 12-year-olds from Charleston, so the national organization in Williamsport, PA ruled that state's championship vacant and invited the black Charleston team to the World Series in Williamsport as honorary, though nonplaying, South Carolina champs.

Today, Youth Baseball has been revolutionized by select travel teams, preying on parents’ vicarious desire to secure college scholarships and high-paying major league careers for their offspring. A group called U.S. Specialty Sports Association ranks the nation’s top 30 four-year-old and under teams – as in preschoolers.

Travel team tryouts are held in the fall and 11-month seasons dominate and often overwhelm a young player’s schedule (and life).The neighborhood pickup games of the past are as gone as the summer mosquito spray truck. Over the last 50 years we have organized the lifeblood out of youth baseball. Heavy on the mechanics and too light on the fun. Fun requires a summer afternoon in the backyard while dad is at work. Remember Indian Ball? Hot Box? Burnout? Too many recreational leagues today just check off the boxes of “equal opportunity.” We stick kids in the outfield in T-ball leagues, where nobody hits them a ball for an hour, and wonder why they end up on skateboards. I give the Twin City Little League its kudos, since 1939 every child in the Twin City Little League gets a uniform, and every child gets to play. It is a throwback inclusive philosophy, found not often enough today.

From the ages of 10 to 12 I played in the Twin City Little League, for the Indians. It is my favorite childhood memory. We played two games a week through the months of June and July. Our uniforms were gray flannel with blue pin stripes and my number was 6, same as Stan Musial.

In our league the coach was a father who arrived at games straight from work, often still wearing his work attire, and he probably knew more about slide rules or union bylaws than about the double cutoff or a suicide squeeze. My team, the Indians, were an exception. My Coach was Poogie Skaggs. As far as I can recall, he was the only non-father coach in the league. Poogie was perhaps in his mid-30’s. By day, he was a meat cutter at the local IGA. While most teams would shuffle in a new coach each year (as the coaches’ son would age out of the league) Poogie was a fixture with the Indians. Year after year. And the Indians were the New York Yankees of the 1960’s Twin City Little League. When you were selected in the 10-year-old draft, you wanted it to be by the Indians.

Poogie did the little things that made a 10-year-old feel special. Every year he would buy each player a blue long-sleeved shirt to wear under our jersey, just like what we saw on the Saturday afternoon Major League TV Game of the Week. No other team in our league had them. Poogie hammered into us the importance of the pregame infield warmup routine. We drilled and perfected it every practice. With the opposition watching from their dugout, we would sprint from our dugout to our warmup position with enthusiasm and snap. Everybody “chattered” No wasted motion, synchronized execution that left our opponents slack jawed with envy. Poogie and his ever-present fungo bat put us through the warmup. We sent the message, "we are here to win." We finished with a fungo pop up to the catcher who then fired the ball to the starting pitcher standing in the door of our dugout. "Game on," was the message. I was the catcher. Poogie is the only human I have ever encountered who could stand on home plate and hit a baseball straight up in the air.

Poogie was a task master, but he was fun to play for. If I made a mistake, most often I knew it and Poogie never said a word, certainly never yelled at me. If I needed correction or instruction, it was given in a firm manner. I always wanted his approval. For years, Poogie was on the chain gang for the Crystal City Hornet home football games. Even as a high school senior, if I made a good play on the football field, I always glanced Poogie's way and he would acknowledge me with a wave. I always shook his hand after the game.

I coached high school and college athletes for 43 years. When I retrace my path the image of every coach over the past nearly 60 years who passed along their wisdom to me, hand-to-hand, like a bucket on the way to a fire, appears. Poogie is the first.