The Third Poster

We have all done it – halfway through telling a joke, you forget the punch line. An awkward pause fills the room as you stutter, trying to recover but not sure how to. That is what attempting to put this memory on paper feels like. The past is stirring within me, and I have a framework in my head of what I want to say, but cognitive dissonance is the message my brain bounces back.

Call this one The Third Poster.

Until I graduated in May 1975, every day of my four years of attendance at Crystal City, MO High School, when I entered and departed the boys’ varsity locker room, I passed by two 4x8 foot glossy posters, one each of 1956 Hornet grad Danny Larose and 1961 CCHS grad Bill Bradley. The life-size images covered two panes of the three glass windows surrounding Coach Arvel Popp’s office.

LaRose was an All-American at the University of Missouri and an All-Pro National Football League player. Bradley was a Princeton University All-American, captain of the 1964 US Olympic basketball team and an All-Pro National Basketball Association performer. Both are the types of Favorite Son that would make any small-town button busting proud. Both athletes were white.

LaRose and Bradley were great role models for me. They put our small town on the map. Both stayed connected to their roots, always willing to help local civic causes. Their public persona reinforced the value of civic pride and neighborly responsibility. Both became my cultural touchstone; their warmth and morality defined to the world who we were.

One windowpane in Coach’s office remained unadorned, in search of one more life size image of a hometown hero. Coach Popp would tease our freshman PE class with the cryptic challenge, “I have only got room for one more.”

So, why in 1975 did Coach Popp still have room for one more? Where was Randy Cayce’s poster? Perhaps a question that unlocks a Crystal City box of infamy sent by the gods to Pandora?

I seek an answer by going to the source.

Randy Cayce was a standout African American running back and defensive back for the 1963 to 1965 Hornets. In his three varsity seasons, the Hornets only lost one game. In May of 1965 Cayce helped lead CCHS to the large school state baseball championship with a win over St. Louis Southwest in a game played at the original Busch Stadium on North Grand Boulevard. He set a state championship game record that day, that still stands sixty years later, with four stolen bases. In track Cayce was a 10.1 100-yard dash sprinter.

Cayce recalls in a January 2025 interview I did with him that his dad encouraged him to pursue a post-high school career in professional baseball. But his heart was on the gridiron. “The University of Missouri was my first choice, always my dream,” he states.

In December 1965 Cayce was honored as a selectee to the St. Louis Post Dispatch Football All-Metro first team. There were 22 players named to the first team. Cayce is one of six black athletes. In 2025 the version of this all-star group lists 30 members. Utility and Specialist positions have been added. Twenty-five of the 30 honorees in 2025 are black. In 1965 the University of Missouri football team picture depicts 11 black faces. The 2025 roster shows 78 faces of color. In Randy Cayce’s 1965, racial quotas ruled the day. In 12 years of playing football on the high school, college and professional levels, Randy Cayce was never coached by a black man - head coach or assistant. Every football authority figure he ever knew was white.

Crystal City Coach Arval Popp, between the years of 1950 and 1970 sent at least a dozen of his Hornets to play for the state’s flagship university in Columbia. Bill Schmidt was a 1965 Hornet teammate of Cayce’s. A two-way star for the Hornets from 1967 to 1969 Schmidt was a defensive mainstay for three of Dan Devine’s most decorated University of Missouri teams. In the Festus game, his high school senior year, Schmidt suffered a horrific injury, a broken back that left him in a brace for four months. Most college suitors lost interest in securing Schmidt’s future football services. Not Mizzou. Coach Popp’s reputation as a straight shooter convinced the home state university to take a chance on a player many now considered damaged goods. Then Mizzou Assistant Coach Al Onofrio said during Schmidt’s junior season, “Coach Popp recommended him and Coach Popp’s word has always been good enough for us.”

Meanwhile, Coach Popp’s most decorated 1965 player, Randy Cayce, enrolled not at the in-state prestigious national power University of Missouri of his dreams, but in a backwater Colorado junior college.

Playing college football first at Mesa Junior College in Grand Junction, Colorado and then Wichita State University in Kansas; Cayce completed his eligibility at WSU one year prior to the October 1970 plane crash that wiped out a majority of the Wichita State Shocker football team. “The coaches at WSU wanted me to redshirt and I said, no, I wanted to get to the NFL (National Football League), or I would have still been playing at WSU in 1970, and on that plane,” Cayce states about a fateful decision that saved his life.

Cayce spent three years as a running back with the Denver Broncos and one year as a teammate with OJ Simpson (“everyone wants to know about OJ,” Cayce says with a laugh) on the Buffalo Bills roster. In 1973, after a knee injury, he left football behind and settled in the Denver, Colorado, area. Cayce is now retired from a long career with the Denver Fire Department. He spends his days with his realtor wife doting over his four grown children and 14 grandchildren.

“For an old guy of 78,” he shares on a bitterly cold January 2025 day from his Denver, CO home, “I am doing very well.”

In 1965 heavyweight boxing champ Cassius Clay converted to the Muslem religion and became Muhammad Ali. His brashness did not play well in Middle America. “I am America. I am the part you won’t recognize. But get used to me—black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own. Get used to me.”

The Black Power Movement was exploding across America and in 1965 it scared the hell out of racially integrated small towns like Crystal City. Due to the failure of non-violence to create concrete change in the lives of black people, the movement emphasized the need for black people to have political power, including more black elected officials and to address the poor economic conditions of blacks and thus the need for better-paid employment.

I asked Mr. Cayce about his Crystal City youthful experience in the volatile years of desegregation. He responds with mixed emotions. He says there are negatives that many local whites did not see, or maybe, choose today not to remember. Even as a star football player in a football crazy town, Cayce was not immune to the intolerance that seethed below the surface of small town 1960s America, left to wonder as to the level of sincerity of the postgame back slaps heaped upon him by smitten white fans.

Cayce had attended the “colored” Star Elementary School. In the fall of 1962, he entered CCHS and for the first time sat in a desk next to white students. “It was a hard time,” Cayce says today, recalling the trauma-induced anxiety of a young teenage boy moving up to a just-integrated high school.

Cayce agrees that the power positions in the community were manned by progressive minds, and that expedited school integration, but the hateful sting was still felt. “The racists were still there. Most of the ones (students) who gave the black kids a hard time were not from Crystal City. Back in those days we had kids from all the way up north, as far as Arnold (20 miles from Crystal City). Those were the ones, from the rural areas, that gave us the most trouble. The local kids knew us, we played baseball together in the summers since we were little. But others made our lives miserable. It was over 60 years ago, but I still remember the hurt.”

Cayce continues, “My first day at Crystal City High School, as we pulled up on the bus, we see a sign that says N**g**s go home. We (black students) could not walk around the hallways unless we went in a group, or we would get jumped. Once, a KKK cross was burnt at the school. The seniors when asked, ‘What is your favorite high school memory,’ one of my classmates wrote for her it was when the cross was burnt.”

Athletics helped, Cayce recalls. “When we went to practice, that all changed. My teammates were great; I can’t emphasize that enough. When I go back home, I always look forward to lunch with guys like Steve Laumonder, Danny Picarella, Don McGraw, lifelong friends. And Coach (Dick) Cook and his wife were like second parents to me, (as) fine a people as I have ever known. You see, that is why sports are so important. My teammates knew me as a person, respected me as a teammate.”

His evaluation of long time Hornet Hall of Fame Head Football Coach Arvel Popp is more nuanced, a disapprobation of bitterness still felt, reflected in the tone of Cayce’s 78-year-old voice. “Blacks in Crystal had been playing for Popp for five or six years when I came in. From guys before me, it was well known in the black community that he did not like black kids. It was the things he would say and the way he talked down to us. He was (gruff) with the white kids, but it was just different. It was more than he just didn’t relate to us, not like Coach Cook, Coach (Rodney) Mills or Coach (Bill) Young did - we knew they would treat us fair(ly). But more that Popp wanted nothing to do with us. I have come to accept that it is just the way he was raised (in 1920’s all white rural Perryville, MO), and he never rose above it. I never felt he was a fair to his black players.”

In 2022 Randy Cayce was inducted into the Crystal City High School Hall of Fame. He says the high honor ignited an inner search of his soul. “I had to settle a lot of things in my head. Why did it take so long? Is this a recognition of unequal treatment of not only myself but all the black kids that went through with me? By accepting, am I represented for all of us? Or by accepting, am I just letting all the inequalities of the past to be swept under the rug? In the end, I accepted the honor for what it was and I was proud to accept it. It says I am a respected alum, and I am grateful for it. But it did bring back to the surface some bad memories. That I will not deny.”

Having been taught by a proud father to never be bitter, Cayce’s views today of his years at CCHS are shaped with a more philosophical bent than when he was younger, tempered by the years, which he says, brings perspective.

“There was racism, for sure, in Crystal City in the ‘60s,” Cayce shares. “How could there not be, considering the times? I mean, this was several years before Dr. King was murdered; we still had a long way to go. But you treat people well and most will treat you well. Our Dad taught us that and I have tried to follow. At his funeral, Dad had friends from both races tell me how respected and a fair man he was. There are good people and there are bad people everywhere. Athletics brought out the good people of Crystal City. I have always been proud to be from Crystal City,” Cayce says.

I am a history teacher by trade. The history textbooks I taught from were rewritten during my career about once every ten years. We conveniently sidestep our historical struggles, the facts changed to make things easier to fit the favored narrative of the day. We do it without thinking.

We invent memories. If we tell ourselves something happens often enough, we start to believe it, and then we start to remember it as fact. But if we forget how things used to be, we also bury how we used to see them. And that from the perspective of an historian is concerning.

It is not peculiar to want to sanitize one’s past, I guess.

It is paramount, Cayce says to ask how he felt then, as opposed to telling him how he should feel now. “Two people can live through the exact same experiences and come out with totally different (perspectives). All I ask is that you realize what was not a big deal for you, maybe it was for me. Once, in a junior college game in St. George, UT, I broke away for an 80-yard touchdown run. The whole way down the sideline the fans in the bleachers are screaming N**g*r at me. Crazy. If you have not lived through that, you cannot understand how it makes you feel. Don’t tell me it was a long time ago, to just forget it.”

I refuse to rewrite my history - censor it, or edit it, to suit my current view. I am too old. I can only live with what's left.

But, if I have a voice in this hypothetical debate, then Randy Cayce’s poster gets that symbolic open third pane on Coach Popp’s office window.

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.

Highway 83

Photograph your obsessions, and I like images of competition. I spent a quirky year and a half on the American High Plains photographing every high school football field, 72 in total, found on US Highway 83, stretching through North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. Along the way I drank a lot of free beer. 

US 83 is a mostly two-lane road passing through a series of small rural burgs, all resembling the last one; a clutter of shops and markets that have somehow found a 21st century Walmart proof niche of survival. The pace is slowed by a diabolical stop-light system that funnels traffic in intermittent jerks, but a blessing when seeking a local watering hole, the best always found on the town square. My barroom conversations became a major source of the only book I ever published that a respectful number of literates actually bought. 

Driving Highway 83 from the Canadian border to the Mexican border is as unvaried as a drive across Kansas – only north and south and four times as long. Like my love of faded old polaroids, if I try to rationalize it, the magic disappears. So, I do not - I just accept that is how I am. I made sure Shawna knew of my Highway 83 problem before she agreed to marry me.

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A Fleeting Moment in a Floating World: a picture looking for a story.

A fleeting moment in a floating world, a picture looking for a story. 

I don’t tolerate inactivity well. I am busy with our business from January through August, but by December I get very stodgy. I drink too much coffee, read and re-read old books and wait for the year to end. Shawna, this time of the year, runs lots of errands. 

To add purpose to my daily routine (and maybe to make myself somewhat tolerable) several months ago I began sorting through the storage boxes in my basement. I found lots of old photos in need of a story. Even the most mundane ones can suck you back into a moment.

Photographs are a lot like favorite hit songs from our youth. Everyone has a song that got them through a bad breakup (Separate Ways) or made you feel like you wanted to go out and raise hell with your friends on a weekend (The Boys are Back). Those songs still feel like that to me.

Our lives are a continual state of vanishment and when snippets of life have vanished there is no mechanism on earth which can make them come back again - unless someone took a snapshot. Then the memory becomes tangible. 

A photograph never grows old. Through all the months and years, we will change, but a photograph remains forever the same - a return ticket to a moment recaptured. Not every photo I sort through in my basement is epic. To be honest, few are - but the memories are.

The photo attached here is from a high school basketball game. I can tell from the background that the gymnasium is that of Festus, MO High School. The players are Phil Tessereau of Crystal City on the left and Alvin Riney of St. Pius. I can deduct from the picture the contest is played on a neutral floor hosting the Festus Tournament, a four-team neighbor rivalry packed event played, back then, on the last Thursday and Saturday of January. The other two schools entered were Herculaneum and the host team, Festus. All four high schools were within a five-mile radius of each other, making the tournament a must see for area fans. The Festus Tournament died years ago. 

Although I can find no documentation – a game story or a box score - in the Sunday January 27, 1974, edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I base my source for this blog entry on my memory. I was a junior that night playing for Crystal City, which would set the date as 1974. Phil was a year older than me. I recall we played St. Pius in the championship game and we won. In the 1974 CCHS yearbook we pose for our official team picture with the championship trophy displayed. 

The stylish confidence of both Phil and Alvin jumps out. Both ooze with the quality every 1970’s teenage boy strove for - the cool factor. Alvin with the perfectly symmetric Afro hair style, Phil with the long curls covering his ears and cascading over the collar. Both are young Alpha Males, pairing on the town’s main stage both their youthful charisma and athletic skills. If only life would remain so clearly scoreboard defined. 

In a millisecond the game will return to a blur of action, the picture now rudimentary. The ball and the players ricochet off each other, the passion of the contest driving the packed gym to a pitch of frenzy, destined for a winner and a loser.

It is good for the imagination that the conclusion of this momentary standoff has been lost to time. I am sure neither player can today recall this specific possession. Understandable. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of just such one-on-one duels between players in the evening’s 32 minutes of fevered action. So, let’s let reality reside in the eye of the beholder. I give Phil the liberty to recall a developing old-fashioned three-point play, Alvin the decisive delivery of an upcoming “in your face” rejecting swat. 

I one recent afternoon stopped and relished this simple black and white photo from over 50 years ago. The distinct and sweeping power in this monochromatic image triggers that same rush of exhilaration that defined me in 1974. 

High School, in general, and basketball, in particular, are both full of trash-talk and posturing - false attempts to impress peers and foes alike- a phony teenage pretense we all used at times to prop up our self-esteem. But at a time like this, all are stripped away in a “winner take all” moment, one shot at forever. Some who have never been there will say you will not remember who won the game. I say no way - I sure remember. And I bet Phil and Alvin do as well. 

In 1974 I was Phil’s teammate, and I knew Alvin from around town. Over the years, I have sporadically crossed life’s path with both. The onslaught of the new century’s social media helped. 

Phil started off his adult life as a full-time high school coach then relocated back home and moved into private business – but he stayed involved in the sport. Phil coached numerous area youth teams and was a part-time assistant at local schools. Several years ago, he took on, as a head coach, the much-needed rebuilding job of the Crystal City Hornets. Eventually his efforts produced a district championship season. For a “Once a Hornet, Always a Hornet” like me, still relishing the memories of the glory days, it was cool to see a teammate bring back to our alma mater some needed old school toughness.

I have interacted with Alvin a few times over the years at my summer basketball camps. He, mirroring Phil’s adult path, has served as a part time assistant coach for several area high school programs, both boys and girls. He was, in our few camp interactions, engaging and warm. It was apparent to me he was well liked by his players and effective through his passion for the sport. He still had that cool factor. Over the years, from media accounts I read, I know Alvin as a long time both vocal and respected community activist. 

Alan Ginsberg wrote the poignancy of any photograph comes from a "visual memory clue of a fleeting moment in a floating world." The transitoriness is what creates the sense of memory. Then life moves on. 

Both Phil and Alvin would move on from this still shot and beyond this school kids’ game of basketball to become the successful adults they are today. Over the last half century both have created ripples of positive change, payback to the hometown that educated them. 

Society invests a lot of resources in education. The main goal should always be to produce tomorrow’s leaders. Athletics play a role. I have built my life’s work on that premise. We claim to teach leadership, and leadership is not about being the best, it is about making those following you better. One team in this picture did not win. One did. But the young men on both benefited. 

But forget all that heavy stuff. Take a winter afternoon to find an old forgotten picture stored in your basement and just soak it in, capturing the sentiment and emotion. The good ones tell a story maybe only you know, a scene that defines certain times in your life. Then bounce up the stairs and share. 

Mery Christmas 2025.

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.

Heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson once said, everyone has a great plan, “until I punch him in the mouth.” 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."