An Enduring Transition

In 1946, when Bob Hunskor played his first game of basketball for his hometown Newburg, ND Eagles, World War II had just ended. He went on to play as a collegian at first nearby Bottineau Community College and then at Minot State Teacher’s College. After graduating with a teaching degree, followed by a two-year stint in the military, at 24 years of age he returned to his Canadian-border hometown to help his father farm and to coach the Eagles on the hardwood. Teaching math was a required part of the gig. He stayed for 35 years. He also for the first eight years coached the girls’ basketball team, as well. The school’s enrollment never topped 40 students. Most years the male enrollment hovered around 20.

He is considered a living community treasure. More than just his sheer breadth of experience, first as a record setting high school basketball coach and then as a four-term elected state representative, it’s how Bob Hunskor has earned his exalted community status for so many years that stands out. From surviving the Great Depression and Dust Bowl eras to driving a Model A Ford, hearing the radio reports of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and serving in the military during the Cold War years, Hunskor’s life is full of tales both in an out of high school gymnasiums.

Seventy-five years after first donning the red and blue uniform of a program he would forge in his own relentless ways, Hunskor, now 94, holds a place of honor in the only hometown he has ever known. Even closing in on the century mark in age, he is no relic placed on a community shelf and rolled out only for special occasions. He squeezes in an interview between a game of pinochle at the town senior citizen center and a date in a deer hunting stand. Hunskor deflects any concern for the afternoon’s frigid temperatures with the assurance that the structure is propane heated. He is spry, mentally engaged and ready to share his thoughts on subjects ranging from modern coaches who overcoach to the red wave of 2016, that ended his 16-year tenure as the area’s representative in the North Dakota State House of Representative. He was 86 when he vacated the Bismarck state house and returned to his farmhouse home, five miles from the timeless high school gym named in his honor. The longevity of his community activism is noteworthy, for sure.

“I taught for one more year after I stopped coaching, and it was hard. I missed it but I still went to the games. I will just say it was hard,” he shares with a resigned shake of his head. It was the only time during our nearly one hour talk he dropped his cloak of stoicism.

Doing anything well for over ¾ of a century requires evolution. It requires a willingness to learn, a willingness to adapt and most importantly, it requires being involved for the right reasons. Throughout his career, first as a coach and teacher and then as a politician, Hunskor, year after year, checked all those boxes.

For his entire coaching career, the Newburg Eagles were one of the smallest enrollment schools in the state. With only two enrollment classifications in North Dakota, when the post-season began, Newburg faced opponents with enrollments up to 300 students. “We never had the depth,” Hunskor shares with me on a snowy November afternoon. “We wore down and if we had any foul trouble or injuries, our problem became even worse. We made the Class B sectional finals six times, one game short of the state tournament and then we would get beat. That was for the first 30 years of my career,” says the coach who compiled an overall off the charts record of 700 wins and 160 loses. “Finally, in1984, we broke through. We took second in the state in 1984 and 1985. We won the championship in 1986 and got second in 1989. Our 1986 state championship team had Noth Dakota’s Mr. Basketball, Chris Lamoureux, and we also had a 6’8 boy come through here then and that helped. In 1990 I had a health scare when I developed A-fib, an irregular heartbeat. The doctor, said, ‘you are done coaching.’”

For most of the 21^st century the Newburg schools have co-opped their basketball team with their once hated rival, the Westhope Sioux. “In the day, we were fierce rivals,” the old coach says with no attempt to hide the competitive fire still in his eyes. “We really went after each other. These little towns up here needed basketball. It is what made the community proud. I always knew how important basketball was to this town.”

The prairie of North Dakota is littered with dying towns who have lost their schools to consolidation, cannibalized by a bigger neighboring town. On my yearly visits to the High Plains I drive through many such dying hamlets.  It is sad. I can identify the building that once was the community school. I speculate that the section of the “schoolhouse” that is two stories tall was the gymnasium. I imagine years of basketball games played on frigid January Friday nights when two small prairie towns packed it to the rafters, necessitating the opening of the windows, just to cool the place down. From the banker to the town drunk, everyone was here to witness the drama and the heroics of the local team, a respite for one night a week to the drudgery of life in a lonely prairie town. And I wonder what happened to the trophies, earned by sweat and blood and once displayed with such pride, won on those long-ago cold winter nights? Hunskor saw that no such calamity would ever hit his town. The 1986 state championship trophy is today proudly displayed in the gymnasium hallway trophy case.

Hunskor stressed that he never over-coached, a mistake he feels many modern coaches make. He kept the offense basic, and the Eagles executed it how he wanted them to, often slowing it down effectively when the Eagles didn’t have a lot of shooters. “We had plays, but the plays were just common sense on how to play basketball,” Hunskor said. He stressed the basics and repetition by running through them over and over again. “I wanted my players to think, to figure out things in a game for themselves. I did my work in practice, I wanted the games to be about the players, turn them loose and just let them play.”

In 1992 Hunskor and his family moved to Barstow, CA. “Our two daughters were accomplished violin players. My wife was a talented musician. My two sons played basketball and my two daughters were skilled (violinists). During their summers in high school, they attended Julliard School in New York. They were very good. Both went to school on music scholarships at UCLA. My son was teaching outside of Los Angeles in Barstow. So, we moved to California. I interviewed for only one job. The principal cut me off immediately and said, ‘I see you taught in North Dakota. You are hired.’ Nothing was said about basketball. I don’t know if they even checked my resume. In North Dakota, if you are a teacher, you are a good one. I am proud of being a teacher from North Dakota.”

“In 2000,” Hunskor says, “my wife contracted ALS (Lou Gehrig Disease). We moved to Reno, NV to get her treatment, but of course there is no cure for ALS. She died the next year.” Those who know him will testify to his toughness. “I survived but I needed to reconnect. I was approached about running for the state house.” It wasn't, he says today, the easiest decision to make. But he was restless, rudderless and bored. “At first, I thought the idea was crazy. But why not? I needed something to do with my time. Somehow, I got elected and then re-elected for 16 years. Then the Red Wave (Trumpism) hit in 2016 and Democrats in North Dakota were not electable, anymore,” he says with a no hint of bitterness shrug of his shoulders.

A trademark to how Hunskor lives his life is his openness to always improving and growing. He stresses basketball is a microcosm of life itself. He knows that that motto applies to him, too. “At our first state tournament game in ’84, after having worked so hard for so many years to get there, we came out tight. We threw the ball away. One of our players in the first minute of the game trips over his own feet. We were scared to death. We were down 13-4. I called timeout and before I could say a word, one of our better players, Steve Hall, came straight off the floor to me and said, ‘Coach, don’t say a word. We know we are playing poorly. Just give us a minute. We will settle down.’ So, for a minute I just stared at them and they stared at me. A very strange timeout. But Steve was right. The best thing to say was to say nothing and that told them I had confidence in them more than any words could. We settled down, came back and won the game, the next (semifinal) and took second. I learned a lot that day and I had been coaching for a long time. You are never too old to learn.”

Over the last 75 years coaching has changed. Basketball has changed. Politics has changed. The world has changed. Hunskor’s core life beliefs have not. “There was a time when these little gyms were packed to the rafters,” he reminisces. “The rivalries were intense. Anytime we played Westhope, well watch out, it was always a fight. But then we would all go to the cafeteria and eat pie together. I never considered leaving. Why would I? Here I felt here the kids listened to me.” It was the quintessential mentor rising to the surface in Hunskor: seeking the simple joy of the more subtle rewards of working with boys who were at an age when a coach is most likely to make a difference.

 

 

Legacy Restored

In the fall of 2015, a new coach with a familiar name was hired to restore the Vashon Wolverines basketball program.  Tony Irons, son of iconic Vashon Coach Floyd Irons, picked up his whistle and began the rebuilding job. Oedipus himself never faced a paternal situational relationship ripe with such complexities.

“I have made it a point not only with our players at Vashon but our students as well, that they know about the legacy that my dad developed,” says Tony. “When my dad left Vashon in 2007 it wasn’t on the best of terms. That’s no secret. They pretty much tried to eliminate him from the history of the program. I have made it a point to put up the old pictures, display the old trophies, let people know about the legacy of Vashon basketball that he built.”

After Floyd Irons removal as coach of the Vashon Wolverines, and his subsequent stretch in federal prison for his role in a felony mortgage scheme, two of his former players were given the keys to the program.  First, Anthony Bonner, Irons’ best-known former Vashon player, a superstar at St. Louis University and a long time NBA regular took over the Wolverines in 2006. He resigned mid-season in 2009. DeAndre Davis, a resource police officer at Vashon and a 1992 graduate, sat in the head coaches’ seat through the 2015 season. Neither was able to keep Vashon at the level anywhere close to the lofty perch of the Floyd Irons’ years. During the tenure of both coaches, most seasons the once mighty “V” finished with a very un-Vashon like record of below .500.

It is a twisted and complicated past between the Irons coaches (Floyd and Tony), the Vashon community and St. Louis area basketball. In 2015, the son fully and voluntarily interjected himself into the brew. Floyd was never the type of father to hold his son’s hand. He is the type who will have his son’s back. Dad attends most Vashon practices and games. He sits alone, his entourage from the glory days of long ago, dispersed.

The fact that Tony is the only child of the man who ran with the “fist of Irons”, the Vashon program for so many successful years is certainly grist for the Freudian mill, but don't go too far with it. There is no question of who today leads the “V”. The son is his own man running his own resurrected version of the hoops dynasty his dad started building on Cass Avenue almost 50 years ago.

In the glory years, Floyd had a game face that oozed fury. He stomped, he screamed, he pointed and jumped like an ireful child, his puffed-up face often frozen in a sneering rictus of rage. Tony’s courtside manner is much less demonstrative than his father’ was – mostly stoic to the extreme. If father was Type A, son is Type Z.

Tony has developed his own bench persona. He paces constantly, a combination, depending on game circumstances, of a gentlemanly Dean Smith amble and a Bobby Knight High Noon saunter. His banter with his players and his assistant coaches is steady and focuses on corrections and strategy. He will raise his voice, but seldom to an official. His communication with the men in stripes is always clinical and lacking emotion or insinuation.

Jimmy McKinney was a McDonald’s All-American playing for Floyd at Vashon in the early 2000s. He played over a decade of pro basketball in Europe and then returned to work for Tony at Vashon as an assistant coach. McKinney says the two Irons’ gameday sideline demeanors may be opposite, but what makes both successful is an identical approach to practice. "Discipline drives both. Their obsession with detail is identical,” says McKinney, currently the head coach at suburban Kirkwood High.

Tony’s tongue is as whip sharp as his dads ever was. He was destined from birth to be a basketball coach, a very good one. With a clipboard in his hand, a new practice drill on his fingertip and a barb on his tongue, he says he is today exactly where God intended. Sounding like the lyrics from some 1970s soft rock love song, Tony Irons tells his players, “When you think you have given me all you have, you had better reach down and find me just a little bit more.”

Today, Floyd Irons has been for near a generation removed from his position as head coach of the Vashon Wolverines. With his son Tony now leading the north side power, Floyd Irons is a sort of conscience-in-residence. Dad is a good and willing sounding board.

The senior Irons knows his son is not a template of his dad’s style. “He is more like his mother,” Floyd says, when discussing the difference in temperament. “He has never been one to like to get out of his comfort zone, whereas I was always looking to push the limits. Still, even today, after all the success he has had, he is very low key. Tony keeps his circle pretty tight.”

Floyd Irons has always played an oversized role in the lives of his players:  a disciplinarian, a counselor, a mentor, a hard ass, a kind soul and, above all, a pedagogue. Torrance Miller, a small-time drug dealer and cell mate who taught Irons about the vagaries of the criminal justice system says, "Floyd could teach a dead rat to be deader."

Floyd’s wife and Tony’s mother, Sandra Irons lived shoulder to shoulder with her husband through that frustrating first decade. The wins always came, an average of 22 per year between 1974 to 1982, but never the Big Win. They lived in a fishbowl. Everyone had an opinion. Sandra says her husband agonized over each loss, never fully enjoyed the wins. She suggested that he attempt to develop a better relationship with the press, but he never listened.

In an age of peripatetic, keep-trading-up-for-a-better-job coaches, Irons stayed put. During his over three decades as coach of the Cass Avenue dynasty, Irons says he has seriously entertained only two offers from other schools. In the mid-1980s, Irons traveled to Rhode Island  and interviewed for an assistant coach’s position with the Providence University Friars. He says he knew right away it was not a good fit. “They wanted a guy on the road full time recruiting. I wanted to be on the practice floor coaching.” To say Floyd Irons is not cut out to be an assistant, would be a more than fair assessment, one he was wise enough to make early.

In the mid 1990’s, Irons says he briefly looked into the position at neighboring suburban school University City. “By then, I had moved into administration with the St. Public Schools, and it was a bad time. The bussing, the charter and magnet schools that seemed to be springing up everywhere, the revolving door of superintendents; we literally were watching daily the gutting of the public schools in the city.”

But as with Providnce, when it came time to pull the trigger and separate from the V, Irons could not do it. What Irons has done over the years is to gather around him an extended Vashon family of former players he could not abandon for suburban greenery; colorful and strong men like, Cody, Campbell, Trice, and Collins. Maybe not generating the endowment connections of a De Smet or a Chaminade, but they’re family.

Floyd Irons was 34 years old when he won his first state championship. Today, Tony is 35 years old and has already captured five state titles, three as the head man at Vashon. Dad sometimes worries son’s road has been too smooth, lacking in the character-building disappointments he himself endured for a decade.

“If Tony is missing anything from his resume,” Irons observes, “it is failure.”

The younger Irons, even as a player, knew nothing but success. He finished his high school career at Lutheran North High School as a state champion. His collegiate career at College of the Ozarks closed with him as a member of an NAIA national champion.

Father says son recognizes this. “This was his idea, but I loved it,” Floyd says, “comes right out of my coaching playbook. A couple of years ago Tony had his whole team back from a state championship year. That fall he made them all play soccer. Vashon has never been known for its soccer and most of his players had never played. They won one match the whole fall. I think one loss was like 14-0. He said he wanted them to see how it felt to be on the other side.”

Does the son feel the yoke of family honor to bring back the gloss to his father’s reputation? If he does, he does not show it. Revenge is best served cold. Regardless, once again, with an Irons back at the wheel, the “V” is ready to roll and the north side pride in the iconic Irons’ led Vashon basketball machine has returned with a whole new generation of passionate supporters.

“I am very family oriented,” Tony says. “I am with my mom and dad all the time, visiting at their house, going out to dinner. To be honest, my dad’s probably my best friend. My wife and I hope to be starting a family soon. Covid has kind of pushed everything back. But I’m hoping things soon are going to get back to normal.”

“It’s really been tough on our kids with the pandemic. We’ve got a couple of Division I level seniors this year that really didn’t get to show their stuff this summer in the AAU ball. Basketball is just so important to these kids and to this community. If you do it the right way, basketball can be a positive. My dad did it the right way for 30 years. I like to feel I’m doing it the right way now.”

How will it end? Regardless of how, the son has made the dad proud. “To see him bring back the “V” is truly gratifying,” says Floyd Irons of his son’s mega success.

“I could see myself someday getting into college coaching,” says Tony. “But I’m not actively looking. I think I have a great situation at Vashon. I have a chance to continue a family legacy but also to make my own mark, to have my own impact on these kids. So, if it happens it happens. If not, I’m very happy here.”

Nothing stays the same, even on Cass Ave. Evolution can have a melancholy aspect, of course. Whenever things change—attitudes or the times themselves—there are inevitably those who fade away. But today, hope has poked its head from the hole of irrelevance the Vashon basketball program had become, and the consistent tune of the pied piper played loud and proud for 33 years by Floyd Irons strums again on these north side streets.

A father is a man who expects his son to be as good a man as he meant to be. Within the Iron’s coaching tree, the son is not burdened with the restoration of his father’s legacy but, more fittingly, in 2022 is respectfully establishing his own.

Say this for the still young coach living in a fishbowl darkened by the long shadow of his iconic and controversial father, through nine years and five state titles, he hasn't yet turned into anybody but whom his parents raised him to be – simply he is Tony Irons. And, the 74 year old man who created all these expectations will tell you, that's good enough.

Ballin' in 56

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Isaac Run

“That old stretched-leather feeling makes his whole body go taut, gives his arms wings. It feels like he’s reaching down through the years to touch this tautness.”

John Updike

Why such fascination with talent left fallow, with the greatest that never was? We respect the overachiever but quickly pass to the prodigal, fixated on those who toss away the gift, failure manifesting as legend. Tragedy endears when potential fails to endure, lingering as a restless reminder to our subconscious of what could have been.

John Updike in 1960 wrote a novel destined to become and American Classic, titled Rabbit Run. Updike recorded the unfulfilled life of a 26-year-old former high school basketball star turned reluctant salesman, desperately seeking a role in adult life that would recapture the fleeting fame he briefly knew as a teenage local athletic hero.

Rabbit Run is a dark, brooding and sad story, often boarding on the macabre, but one commonly true in a society that makes a hero of a mere child who can outrun, out jump and out throw the best rival towns can offer. It is a sad story played out time and time again in small towns across the land: the fleeting fame of a school boy star that, at 18 years of age, is slapped with the reality that the final whistle has blown and your best days are now behind you. You become yesterday's hero, booted into adulthood and replaced by a new star of the local high school team. You drift to the bleachers, a few rows higher up each year, until you finally stop going at all because it hurts too much.

To provide him the promised anonymity, I will call him Isaac. "Hey man, I got to live here," he told me. In exchange for his candor, I promised to protect his identity. For that reason, I give the town the fictional name of "Wilson," the school mascot the "Panthers."

Short and of average build, it was hard to see Isaac in the role he had so well played only a few years before; small town football hero. Fulfilling his now adult role as cashier, he gave me my change from a purchase of gas and sunflower seeds I had made at a non- descript convenience store in a sleepy town I was passing through late one fall night. Adulthood had mandated that he trade in his bright red Panther game jersey for a baby blue smock with a button attached to the right breast pocket promising service with a smile. I would never have pegged him as a local legend.    

Had business not been slow on that late evening, perhaps neither he nor I would have had the inclination to progress in our conversation past the normal niceties one exchanges with the locals as a faceless stranger in a nameless town. But being as no other customer or employee was in the store as closing time approached, Isaac with no pressing job responsibilities, asked, "where are you heading?" Not having any impending place to be that evening myself, I had the time to respond in detail. "Cool," he told me, after I explained my wandering travels of the back roads of the nation's Heartland in search of the social meaning of high school football. Isaac, I was to learn, was one of only a handful of African Americans in the town of 5,000. "I used to play football," he told me.            

Accepting an offer to join me for a beer after work, Isaac readily agreed to fill me in on the local high school football fortunes. "I lock the doors in ten minutes," he said. "Take me ten more minutes to clean up and close out." I waited in the car as he finished his duties.

By ten minutes past 10 pm, we were both seated in a cozy corner booth of an establishment on the town square that served as the local pub, turned sports bar. In a building as old as the town itself, pushing a century of use, the watering hole served as a haven for the loafers and the local sports experts, who were often in this town, Isaac told me, one and the same. 

It was pure small-town America, both inviting and boring, but the hot stove chatter, for a high school sports fan such as me, was fun to listen to. The pool table was in use, the one TV above the bar broadcast 24-hour sports news and the waitress who took our order had nicotine breath and called me "Hon."

The local team wasn't doing so good, one of the pool playing patrons told me. Even though early in the season, he blamed it on coaching.  His 8-ball partner disagreed, diagnosing the problem as one of "a bunch of lazy ass seniors. We need Isaac back out there," he said loudly as he threw his right arm around my new friend. Even as a stranger, in the company of a local legend, I felt at ease.        

 Our waitress arrived with our first round of beers. She also was pleased to see Isaac, as were the half dozen other locals bellied up to the well-stocked bar, bottles of beer systematically tilted back at least twice a minute. Isaac, I was to learn in the course of the evening's conversation, had carried the local squad to within "one bad half" of post season play, hollowed turf never before or since traversed by the local team. The defeat of six years prior was still, I could tell, a bitter pill for the local populous to swallow.

"I came here the summer before my senior year," Isaac said as he began to spin his story of gridiron glory. "I grew up in Kansas City (MO) with my mom and stepdad. I never played many sports. I quit football my freshman year. I didn't like the coach. The team was terrible. Everything about playing football there was bad. No equipment, crappy fields. We played our games on Saturday mornings, and nobody came to watch us. Coaches didn't care. Half the time the officials wouldn't even show up. It was a waste of time."

Wasted time, though, for an unsupervised street kid such as Isaac had become, was a problem. "I had way too much freedom. I hit the streets and ran with the wrong crowd. I was on my way to the state penitentiary, for sure. We did dumb stuff. Break out car windows and do $600 of damages to steal a pack of cigarettes we could see on the dash."

Caught stealing by the police twice his sophomore year of high school, he was subsequently twice taken to juvenile court. "I called myself a sophomore because I wasn't old enough yet to drop out, but I had pretty much, by that time, quit going to school. If it was really cold out or I was hungry and wanted a hot breakfast I might go, but I wouldn't stay. No one ever came looking for me. Just one less dead-end ni##** they didn't have to worry about, I guess."

Isaac's second brush with the juvenile court system landed him a thirty day stay in a county youth lock up facility. "They called it a school, but wasn't nothing more than a jail; bad, bad, bad. I was in with two fifteen-year-old dudes that had shot and killed a kid right in the front of my high school in broad daylight. They knew (because of their age) they was only going to be locked up till they turned 21, but man they had the rep now on the street, know what I'm saying? Dudes didn't care. If you weren't strong and wouldn't fight, well come nighttime, they would make a punk out of you. That wasn't going to happen to me. I'd fight, so most were cool with me."

The month-long incarceration was an eye opener for the sixteen-year-old. "Set me straight and it wasn't anything the system did, either. The school in there was a joke, worse than my public high school. But man, I could see myself as a future con, in and out of the system, if I didn't get it together, know what I mean?"

Upon his release, Isaac had a heart-to-heart talk with his mother. "She was only fifteen when I was born. She had been in and out of foster care herself. She was more like a big sister to me. I never gave her the respect one should to their mother, know what I am saying? She never talked about my dad much. I never met him. I heard he was a very good athlete himself in the kid programs but couldn't stay out of trouble when he got to high school, so he never played, just ran the streets and got into the whole gang thing deeper and deeper. The same road I was going down my momma pointed out. I think my dad is in prison now, but I really don't know for sure."

“Hon, you need a refill?" I bought a round for the whole house, including our waitress. Four at the pool table, the four left at the bar, me and Isaac. Eleven beers, $26.75, total.

"My mom had a cousin who had married a white girl from Wilson and moved here with her. I came to live with them after Christmas my junior year. We thought a small town and a fresh start was what I needed. We never even thought about football. It didn't work out (with his first host family), but by then I was pretty well known in town and one of the teachers let me move in with her and her family for my senior year."

It didn't take long for Isaac to show his new hometown that he possessed the one ingredient that had for years been lacking with the Panthers: speed. "I ran track my junior year," said Isaac. "I did it for something to do, to get out of school early and to flirt with the girls, both ours and at the other schools. Only time I really saw many sisters," he said with a laugh.

"It took a while to get me eligible with all the paperwork that had to be done because of my transfer. It was almost the end of the (track) season before I could run in a meet, but I remember I broke the school record in the 200 (meter dash) and that opened some eyes, including mine. To be honest, I don't know how they (local school officials) got me eligible, what with me having basically no grades for about a year and a half, because I was not going to school on a regular basis. But somehow they did and I am glad of it." Glad also would soon be local sports enthusiasts as it took only the first carry of the first football game the following fall for Isaac to find his true athletic calling, running a football.

"I didn't start the first game (of the season)," he recalled. "But I went in the second time we got the ball.”

"The plan was for me and another back to share time as the main running back.” Isaac said. That plan was soon forgotten as Isaac scored a touchdown the first time, he touched the ball. Later, when I talked to the man who was, and still is, the head coach of the Wilson Panthers, he spoke with a sense of awe of how quickly Isaac grabbed onto the role of savior of the local team. "We threw him a pitch out around the right end," the coach told me. "We (coaches) had questioned some the willingness of Isaac to get hit. He never was much of a practice player, but that first time he touched the ball in a live game, we knew we had something special. He was a gamer."

 According to the coach, that first carry has become a part of local lore. "We counted on the film; he got hit 14 times and never did go down. He had two on his back he was carrying when he crossed the goal line. We still show that tape several times a month. He went 70 yards for a touchdown, but I swear he ran 150 yards, back and forth across the field, on that one carry. I still get chills thinking of it."

The town had a new hero, and the recipient of the adulation was more than willing to play the part. "I still can't believe how lucky I was," said Isaac. "None of this was planned. I just wanted a new start where I could get my education and stay out of the penitentiary. And then, wow, I am the star. Overnight. Talk about being in the right place at the right time."

Isaac's rookie game showing was no fluke. He went on to break the school rushing record. More accurately, he demolished the school record by over 500 yards, finishing the season as one of a handful of backs in the state to gain over 2,000 yards rushing.

Just as quickly as it began, it was over. "We lost a couple of games during the year, but we got into the playoffs and were really on a roll, and all of a sudden, the season was over." One bad half in the third round of the playoffs burst the bubble. "We were up two touchdowns at the half," recalled Isaac, "and then everything went wrong. Fumbles, penalties, you name it, if it was bad it happened to us that night."

The locals fell by two touchdowns. "I was just in shock after the game," Isaac reminisced six years afterwards. "I remember after the game, just sitting alone in the locker room not wanting to take off my uniform, not believing it was all over."

For Isaac it was the end of a dream. "I remember how I couldn't wait to go to school each day. Man, would my teachers back in KC been amazed. Me wanting to be in school," he said with a chuckle. "Girls, girls and more girls. I ended up in the back seat of many a white girls’ daddy's ride. Know what I am saying? I was in heaven. You know what is funny; I still see a lot of those same girls today, white girls with money. See em when they come home from college. They wave, but don't really have time for me. But I remember, and I know they do too."

His eye-popping stats had put Isaac on the recruiting radar screen of many smaller colleges. His high school coach tried to keep expectations reasonable. "People around here have such tunnel vision. They see a local star and think he is on his way to the NFL. They don't realize how many good players are out there. In some of the better big (high) school programs, Isaac might have never even made the team. Isaac was a very good small (high) school player and I wish we could have had him all four years. But his size and speed said he should be playing at the D II or D III level (smaller school classifications of the NCAA) in college. But Isaac kept waiting for Nebraska, Texas and Oklahoma to come calling, and that just was not going to happen. But you know what, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that for one magical run of a couple of months, Isaac was 'The Man.' He owned this town. How many people can say that?"

As it turned out, the point of what level he could play on was mute. Isaac's lack of academic achievement came back to bite him. He could not muster the tests scores needed to qualify for an athletic grant in aid. Both his ACT national test scores and his local grade point average were insufficient for him to play at an NCAA school.  Junior college was an option that was explored by Isaac and his coach, but eventually they settled on an NAIA school whose admission standards were not as stringent as what the NCAA held. It was a bad fit from the start. “They promised me the moon but when I got there it was a big let town, everything, the school, the town the coaches; they lied to me."

Isaac was to learn, as Simon and Garfunkel sang in the Boxer - for a pocket full of mumbles such are promises. “Coaches there were crazy,” Isaac shared. “I mean it, they were nuts. Some of the stuff they did in practice was just stupid and dangerous."

Isaac's lackadaisical attitude toward practice, coupled with the higher level of competition on the college level, was a combination that doomed the young man who had not been raised in a football culture, not programmed to accept competition as a challenge to improve, to fight through adversity and show the coaches he had the desire to pay the price to play college football.

"I remember my position coach called me in and told me 'When the going gets tough, the tough get going,'” recalled Isaac, “and that is just what I did, got going right back to Wilson," he recalled with a chuckle.

Returning to the only town where he had ever been told he mattered, even if it was just because of football, Isaac was back in Wilson before the end of September. "I found a few odd jobs to keep me going and I loved going up to the school every afternoon to watch practice. And I just couldn't wait until 7 pm each Friday and game time. People (at the game) knew me and spoke to me with respect."

Torn between leaving the only support system he had ever known, but still wanting to follow his college football dream, Isaac once again tore himself away from Wilson and for the second semester of his freshman year, enrolled in an out of state community college. "I liked it all right. Since it was winter, the football was not as intense yet. We lifted and had off season workouts, but it wasn't hardcore, and I liked my teammates. I was at a school in a small town without many blacks, a lot like I had experienced here and that was cool with me. Tell you the truth, in that environment and being black, I felt kind of special."

The problem with this stop in Isaac's pursuit of a football home was academic. "I just couldn't get the book work done. I tried, I really did, and I didn't do badly, I just didn't do well enough. At the end of the semester, the coach called me in and said that my grades were good enough to stay in school and good enough to be on the team. But since I was from out of state, I had to have a higher-grade point average to keep my scholarship, and I didn't have it. If I was to come back to play in the fall, I would have to pay my own way, and I just didn't have the scratch to do that."

As a two-time loser in the college placement game, Isaac's choices were now limited. He and his high school coach finally found a small NCAA Division III school in the north that could parlay a combination of loans, grants and local scholarships to help Isaac generate the $40,000 plus it was going to cost him to attend this private institution with a great academic reputation.

"It was the chance of a lifetime, I know that now," he says as he looks back with four years of hindsight. "It was an environment that I had never been in before. Money, money and more money. I think I was the only one who didn't have much. Even the other brothers on the team came from families with money. My (black) roommate's parents were both lawyers. But people were cool with me and I was treated well.”

Isaac still has a hard time explaining why he left. "I blew it. I could have stayed. I had a good year, not a star, but a good sophomore year of playing ball. But I just couldn't make myself go back for another year. It just was not the same as in high school. The coaches wanted to win, but not like we wanted to win here. If we lost in college, that year, it was no big deal. By the next day we were over it. Academics were more important (than football). You could miss practice with no penalty, if you needed extra time for a class. That would have never happened here (Wilson). And nobody came to our games. People around school didn't treat me special because I had a good game on Saturday. By Monday, I was just another kid in history class. That whole summer leading up to the next year, back in Wilson, I just couldn't get myself motivated to work out. I keep telling myself, 'tomorrow I will get started.' But I never did. By the first of August, I finally was honest with myself and told people I wasn't coming back. I know I let a lot of people down."

“I guess the best description of my college career would be: First Team Failure.”

Isaac returned to his adopted hometown knowing that, for all practical purposes, his football career was over. "I continued to work out, continued to dream, but deep down inside I knew it was over. And I knew that without football, my life didn't mean much."

The one-time high school star continues to help the local team in a peripheral way. He has considered coaching but knows that without a college degree and a teaching certificate, all he can do is volunteer work with younger players. "I still go to high school practice a couple of times a week. And I help out with the little league program on weekends, but it just isn't the same. All I want to do is play."

"You know what is funny about football? When your school career ends, that's it. You are done. With baseball or basketball, you can still continue to play, slow pitch softball or city league basketball. The outlet is still there. But with football, it is gone in a flash. I was at the top of my game in that regional, and then bam! We get beat and no more. I know I will never play again. I have accepted that, but it still hurts. What I wouldn't give for just one more week of practice.  It doesn't have to be a game. I just want to feel special again. But that isn’t going to happen”.

"The worst time for me is when that first cool front comes in about the end of September, when you need a jacket at night. It just takes me back, back to that fall. It was magic and I know I will never feel so needed, so purposeful again. On Friday game nights, about 6 pm, the lights go on at the stadium. I can stand outside the store, look across town and see the glow. I close my eyes and remember. It is like I am back there, padded up and ready for war, but in control, because my life has meaning again. Everyone in town is there, young and old, -the whole town - at the game, coming to see me perform. It is my time and my world. It is the best feeling and the worst feeling, all at the same time, all wrapped into one."

Our waitress returned. "It’s getting late guys. Ten minutes to closing time. One last round?" she asked as she cleared from the table our night's work of empties.

The pool game concluded and one of its' four players, an overweight middle aged white gentleman with an ample paunch, approached our table. "Let me tell you something," the intoxicated man slurred, as he reached down to hug Isaac. "You should have seen this boy run that football. That is what is a matter with 'em boys up at that schoolhouse this year. No speed. What we need is another little monkey like Isaac."

Amongst a morose backdrop of no name dead-end drunken nobodies, the greatest running back in local history sadly shook his head side to side in quiet resignation to his fate. After a long-drawn swig to empty the final bottle of beer of the evening, the only 2,000-yard rusher in the history of Wilson High stood and headed for the door. It was closing time.

 

 

THE FALL OF 69

“All these were honored in their generation,
And were the glory of their times.”
Ecclesiasticus   44:7 

Part 1

In 1969 America’s racial dynamics had been turned upside down. No justice, no peace the activists chanted. The Watts riots. Detroit and Newark in flames. Martin Luther King Jr. was dead, murdered in cold blood. The same with Malcolm X and Bobby Kennedy. The Democratic Convention erupted in chaos in Chicago. White America was in denial. In Lexington, Ky., the tenor of the time was on full display when the publisher of the Lexington Herald-Leader, Fred Wachs, refused to print a word about the nation’s urban centers in flames, for fear that local black leaders would get ideas. Did he not know his black readers watched television?

All this social upheaval changed kids, white and black. Drugs, alcohol, and risky sexual behavior became more common and then more acceptable. Youth suicide rates skyrocketed. All the rules had changed for teenagers who had been previously raised as small kids under strict rules of behavior, with low tolerance and much negative reinforcement. Now, the simple disciplined and unbending rules of their youth didn't work anymore.  

1969

They grew up together in the rural northeast Missouri town of Monroe City. In the 1950s and '60s they tormented the same siblings, square danced in PE with the same girls and, most of all, played high school football together. Because there is something about high school football. 

They had Monroe City names that today reflect long time area athletic royalty: Holliday, Robinson, Talton, Pruitt, White and Holland - names that would come to unnerve local opponents and still today resonate with a kind of forerunning cool. They were outriders of a new wave, helping launch the inevitable racial integration of the area.

Anger and exhilaration, fear and fascination, loneliness and brotherhood, all coexisting. In 1969 this small high school’s football players of color found themselves, much like America, somewhere between a cultural Woodstock era crossroads and an existential Civil Rights social crisis.

On a football field you expelled your frustrations. As a product of a Jim Crow upbringing, off the field, you slowly learned to swallow them. All the survivors today, 54 years past, express themselves with the sort of dignified humility common to men raised in small towns. It bestows a milder appreciation for simple comforts than what is bellowed about by those who came of age in large cities.

These nine African Americans males all initially attended the town’s “colored only” Washington School, a product of the Jim Crow segregation era. The local school district did not fully racially integrate until 1965, when the nine were entering sixth, seventh and eighth grades. For the first-time they now sat in school desk’s next to white kids. 

Their experiences on the 1969 Monroe City Panther’s football team would serve as this town’s bridge between Jim Crow and Black Power. Today the seven survivors are 70 to 73 years of age.

Monroe City is a Norman Rockwell burg cut from endless fields of corn and soybeans, a wholesome place to raise a family. Nothing here changes much and long timers will tell you that is ok, that it gives the town a content equilibrium. So isolated, it is a long-standing joke down at the Scoreboard Tavern off Main Street that the bar’s TV does not get a signal for Monday-night football until Thursday.

It's one of many small towns in the rural upper Midwest that are sprung from another era, left over from a time when people did not see a reason to lock their doors at night. Monroe City is the type of place where a leading citizen is usually described as a good Christian and a newcomer is quizzed, in the most respectful way possible, their plans on which of the more than one dozen churches he or she will choose to attend each Sunday morning.  

In 1969 this was a company town, dominated by two die casting factories, both non-union. The people of Monroe City then, had ridden the whole wide spectrum of the post-World War II manufacturing economy—boom times when a man could work double eight hour shifts seven days a week until his strength wained and his body wore out. And times when the economy downturned and it was a struggle to find the most menial of honest work.  In 1969 times were still relatively good, the last vestige of a post war uptick. The 1970’s would not be as kind.

Coach Welker

The gridiron Panthers of that fall of 1969 turned in a sparkling but not spectacular final record of 7 wins and 2 losses. They were led by a 27-year-old second year head coach, Charlie Welker and fortified in part by the following nine; the team’s three black seniors: Jimmy White, Marvin Robinson, and Proctor Smith; the four black junior members of the team: Howard Pruitt, William Talton, Harold Holland, and Ben White; and two talented sophomore Washington alums, Robbie Joe Holliday and Calvin Talton. All earned starting varsity positions, a majority on both offense and defense.

For reasons of geography, but mostly due to limited choice, the black families of northeast Missouri have always been a particularly intra-married bunch. Monroe City High School football games for the black team members were family reunions - merry-go-rounds of back slaps and hugs. Hollands were married to Taltons, who were cousins to many of the Robinsons, who married Hollidays and Whites...and so on. Without a generational knowledge of the communities’ genealogy, it could be as jumbled as the plot line of a Faulkner novel.

In many small towns in the 1960’s, athletics played a key role in successfully racially integrating blacks into the local school. Monroe City High School was no exception. Boys in towns across the nation in 1969 just like Monroe City pined to play high school football. It was a status symbol that transcended race and social status. It was a time in our nation’s history where a young black man’s best path to acceptance was to pull himself up by his jock strap.

This was before he murdered his brother. Before he came home from the Marines, “just messed up.” Before the endless rotations in and out of VA hospitals and the daily meds and the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. Before he became a drug dealer whose erratic behavior made him feared by his own family. And before descending the dark ladder of mental illness. Before all that, Orvile Holliday was a small-town hero - a prized big brother; a handsome, intelligent, and popular football star.  In the fall of 1962, no one in the state of Missouri scored more touchdowns on a high school football field than Monroe City's own Orville Holliday. He even had a cute nickname that still holds today with the hometown that never turned their back on him -Ducky.

Robbie Joe Holliday

If you live you will inevitably die and there are some very bad ways to die. There are some deaths that will haunt the human soul, making you ask, “why, God?” And then about 100 miles past that is how Robbie Joe Holliday died, murdered over a phantom drug deal gone bad by a troubled older brother he idolized. If his brother Orvile had let the police into the house where Robbie Joe lay wounded that winter day in 1978, their sister Bonnie says, he would have lived. “He was shot twice in the back with a .22. As big as Robbie Joe was,” says Bonnie of her by then 250-pound little brother, “a .22 (bullet) was not going to kill him. We were told later he died because he bled out. If they would have gotten to him within a couple of hours, they said he would have lived.”

Robbie Joe Holliday was a man-child on the 1969 Monroe City football team. He was a sophomore 6’4” 230-pound fullback whose sheer power supplied the perfect backfield balance to fellow Washington alum Marvin Robinson’s raw speed - Mr. Outside and Mr. Inside. One night in the fall of 1969 he rushed for incredible 348 yards. Robbie Joe, while only a sophomore, earned both all-conference and all-district post-season accolades.

Howard Pruitt remembers the day Robbie Joe left teammate Calvin Talton curled up in a crumbled ball on the practice field. "We told Calvin, you cannot try and bring Robbie Joe down up high. You can't take him head on are he will just plow you. He is too big, and he is too strong. You have got to hit him low with a shoulder and wrap him up. Calvin tried to take Robbie Joe up high, head on and he paid the price. I give Calvin credit, and I don't know how, but he got up and finished practice."

This is a story of two brothers and the quotidian pressures of growing up “colored” in a small town 1960’s America. Both were local football stars, and like many such adolescent heroes, the tragic plotlines of their story are most sharply defined after the glory days of high school fade.

Often the situation is only apparent, if not never understood, to those hurt so badly they have no more anger to give; people like Carol Holliday, 72 and Bonnie Bauer, 73, sisters of Robbie Joe and Ducky. Bonnie, a college grad now retired after a long career with ATT, says that as a child. Ducky was "extremely perceptive, sensitive and caring." 

The two sisters hung the nickname Ducky on him, “because when he was in junior high,” says Bonnie with a chuckle, “he had a pet duck he named Delbert and one Sunday it got under the church building and was making a ruckus. Momma told him to get it out because it was disrupting the service and he reached down and jerked it up and accidentally snapped its neck. We teased him forever about killing his pet duck, called him at first Duck Killer, then shortened it too just Ducky. Everyone from then on called him Ducky.”

In 1963 when college did not work out and with a Vietnam era draft board lurking, Ducky joined the Marines. He came home from the military with an honorable discharge but in a dishonorable schizophrenic shell of paranoia. It was a time of little understanding, empathy, or treatment for the disease.

Orvile Holiday-1963

He drifted north to Rock Island, IL and immersed himself in the shady drug culture of a dying industrial town that held nothing of any substance to offer him. For a decade he weaved in and out of normalcy. Bonnie says that regular trips to the VA Hospital in St. Louis and new meds gave the family a glimmer of temporary hope, but always, her brother's paranoid behavior would roar back. "It was scary."

For a while Robbie Joe did ok after high school, but eventually life began body-punching him, as well. “Ducky was smart and had a hard edge on him,” says Carol of what separated the brothers coping abilities. “You always thought he could fend for himself. But Robbie Joe, not so much, he was just a big easy-going kid, everybody’s friend.”

Bonnie shares an example of the precocious childlike persona of Robbie Joe. “He had a football game on Halloween one year. And Robbie Joe was not going to play until he got his candy, and he missed the game. They said the coaches were out around town trying to find him. Can you imagine driving around town looking for a 230-pound kid in a Halloween costume? People still love to tell the story. We often joked about if it had been an away game how long the coach would have held the bus while they looked for him. But when he didn’t have high school football anymore, it set Robbie Joe back. People around here no longer made him feel special. It was like he couldn’t play football anymore, so the town was done with him, had no use for him. It confused him.”

The grown-up world reality was the bus was not going to wait for Robbie Joe, anymore. He had no job and he felt like he had no future. By age 20, Robbie Joe Holliday had taken some bad turns. He then made a fatal one, he moved to Rock Island to live with Ducky. Soon he was also a player on the dangerous local drug scene.

Bonnie says Robbie Joe was not ready to be on his own. "What did he know about life? What did he know about the world?" With a big family in MC to look after Robbie Joe, it didn't seem to matter so much then, she recalls. "Later, it mattered." 

Carol Holliday, Bonnie Bauer

Carol, a very engaged 73-year-old who is director of a local Birthright office, says about Robbie Joe, "I know you have to say he screwed up, because he did, but I'd like to see him also described as a good human being, a nice person." Despite that glowing appraisal, she admits, "When he got to Rock Island he got into selling drugs, just like Ducky. Robbie Joe was nine years younger than Ducky and when he was little, he just adored Ducky. Followed him everywhere and always wanted to be just like him. The football star, the hero. The decisions he made were his own, so you can’t blame it on Ducky. What Robbie Joe needed was that slap, that slap of reality that high school was over. He was never going to be a football star again. But nobody Robbie Joe would listen to would give him that slap. We lost two brothers that day.”

January 23, 1978, the day that changed the sisters’ family forever is lost to the fog of time. “We really don’t know much, and we quit long ago asking. And Ducky will not talk about it,” says Carol. “He just will not. He wouldn’t even talk to momma about it. Just says he does not remember and then he just shuts down. We know it was at Ducky’s house where he shot Robbie Joe, and he thought Robbie Joe had stolen drugs and money from him. At momma’s house in Monroe City about six months before Ducky had accused momma of stealing his disability check, that is how messed up by then he had become. We should have seen this coming, but what do you do?”

The day before he shot and killed his brother, Orvile Holliday had held a cousin who was visiting Rock Island from Monroe City at gun point.  For eight hours he refused to allow the cousin to leave until he returned the money and drugs, he accused the young man of stealing. 

When he finally did escape the forced detention, the cousin called Holliday’s oldest brother Mike, also living in Rock Island and told him Ducky also suspected Mike of stealing from him. “He comes over here,” Mike reportedly said, “tell him I will kill him.” And Mike would have, says sister Bonnie. “And Ducky knew he would. He was not going to mess with Mike, no way. But Ducky knew he could control Robbie Joe, he always did what Ducky told him to do. As far as we know, Robbie Joe and him never had a problem. Robbie Joe never was afraid of Ducky. The were both afraid of Mike. Mike was a bad influence on Ducky and Ducky was a bad influence on Robbie Joe.”

Mike Holliday-1956

Police reports told of an all-day siege. “He kept telling Robbie Joe to give back the drugs and the money,” Carol says. “But Robbie Joe had nothing to give back. Robbie Joe was dealing for him, but he would have never stolen from Ducky. He always had followed whatever Ducky said (to do)," repeating her sister's words. "We had all seen over the years Ducky get sicker and sicker, his paranoia worse and worse. We will never know why he finally pulled the trigger. Ducky’s girlfriend was the one who called the police, but we don’t know if Robbie Joe was dead or not by that time.”

For two hours after they arrived at his house, Orvile refused to allow the police in. “In those days in Rock Island,” says Bonnie, “if they knew a black man had shot someone, white or black, they were going to kill the black man, no questions asked. I have always thought that is why Ducky didn’t let them in. He didn’t want to die. By the time he did (allow the police entry) there was a big crowd on the street.” The police said he came out with his hands up. “We are fortunate we didn’t lose two brothers that day.” When arrested, Orvile Holliday reportedly had $8,000 cash on his person, worth in today's economy, $38,000. 

Both sisters say they have forgiven their brother. Orvile today lives in Arizona and has as normal a relationship with the family as possible, considering his status as their brother’s convicted murderer. Carol says he has over the years drifted in and out of the family circle.

“I don’t know if there ever was a trial,” says Bonnie. “I guess there had to be but none of us ever went up there. They put him in a hospital for four years and then let him out on full disability.” 

Carol says that despite the horror inflicted by her older brother he is still her brother. “I believe in forgiveness, and I have forgiven him, and he knows it. He even lived with me for a while.” Upon his release she asked him why but gave no advice. "What was I gonna say?" Carol asks. The family attitude towards their brother, post prison, became, you just come home, and we'll figure it out.

Bonnie bemoans what could have been. “Ducky was a very handsome man. The women loved him. He had a great way about him, people liked him. He was very smart, did well in school. He was a hardworking young man that everyone liked being around, and no matter what he was doing, you just knew, he was going to be successful. He just had it all. But when he came back from the Marines, I don’t know, something screwed him up. He was paranoid and he was angry. He would just lose it, fits of anger. I was afraid of him.”

JR Chisom graduated with Orvile from MCHS in 1963. Chisom said his friend was a great natural athlete. “And he was always just one of the guys,” Chisom says today. “We socialized together a lot, ran around all the way through high school.” 

JR Chisom-1963

After a 30-year dormancy, the Monroe City football program was reinstated in the fall of 1959. Chisom and Orville were freshman that year. “We just played a JV schedule that first year,” remembers Chisom. “I was the lead running back. We went undefeated in six games. I thought I was pretty good. Ducky didn’t play that year. His first year for football was our sophomore year, the first year we played a varsity schedule. We won one game; we beat La Plata the last game of the year. They dropped their program after we beat them,” deadpans Chisom. “Sixty-three years ago, and they haven’t played since. That's how bad we were.”

“In a game at Shelbina that year, I broke away down the sideline for a long run, and I was caught from behind,” Chisom says. “Orvile sprinted over to me, just jumping up and down saying ‘don’t you let that guy catch you, don’t you let that guy catch you.’ If anything held Ducky back, it was he was so talented physically that he didn’t do the little things, like learn his plays,” Chisom says with a laugh. “He just took and ball and ran. He never worried about blocking and couldn’t have told you where the 4 or the 6 holes were. I smarted off back at him and said, ‘I’m not that fast. Why don’t you learn your plays and then you can take my place.' He said, 'OK I will.' He did, and coach moved me to quarterback where I stayed for the rest of my career.”

“Our junior year, we won four games and then our senior year, 1962 we went 7-1-1,” Chisom states. The Panthers only lost that year was to Centralia, a team coached by the legendary Pete Adkins. Adkins would go on to a 43-year career at Jefferson City High School. Adkins retired as the all-time winningest coach in the history of high school football. Palmyra and Monroe in 1962 played to a 0-0 tie. 

According to Chisom, Orvile Holliday led the state of Missouri high school football stats in touchdowns scored for the ’62 season. Chisom, a man who could make a strong claim to the rank of top Monroe City Panther historical expert in a high school sports crazy town, says, “Ducky could well be the best high school football player this town has ever had, and we have had some darn good ones.”

“Orvile and I were the guards on the basketball team,” Chisom says. The 1963 Panthers roundballers also featured the legendary 6’8 Washington alum Joe Talton. “We had a very good team. Also, Orvile was a good track athlete.” Chisom notes the versatility Holliday brought to the athletic fields, courts, and running tracks of the area. “He threw the discus and was the best in the area in that event. He also ran the hurdles and the sprints. There wasn’t anything in athletics he couldn’t do. On top of that, I always like to tell people what a good student he was. Ducky was very smart and worked hard in class, probably harder than he did in sports.” 

Mike Holliday 1957

After their high school graduation, Chisom and Holliday went to school together at Northeast Missouri College in Kirksville. “He was the best freshman on the football team,” says Chisom. “He was running on the varsity second team and was seeing game action, which in those days was unheard of for a freshman. One night, guys were sitting around the dorm talking like they do, and bragging about all the extra stuff they were getting for playing football. Some were getting cash under the table, some money for textbooks, and Orvile wasn’t getting as much. He got mad. The next day he told the coach he was quitting, turned his equipment in and went back to Monroe City. We hadn’t even been in school a month yet.”

Holliday decided to enter the military. “When he joined the Marines, he got hurt,” Chisom remembers. “He was in a training drill, climbing a wall, and he fell about 40 feet and injured his back. That was the beginning of his problems. He got hooked on morphine and other painkillers.”

It was a time when the addiction danger to such opioids was not well known. Holliday was given an honorable unable to perform discharge. He went home and soon spun down the rabbit hole of addiction and mental illness. “It was really tragic,” says Chisom. “And obviously things got bad for him. He should have never gone to Rock Island.”

Orvile’s oldest brother Mike, a 1957 grad of Monroe City High was a member of a 33-1 state basketball team. Mike was also a member of the school’s second graduating class to include black students. In the same school year that police tried to protect black schoolchildren from white mobs in Little Rock, AR, Mike Holliday, thanks to basketball, was the toast of Monroe City. After high school he relocated to Rock Island. It was purported that not a drug deal went through the Quad Cites that Mike did not receive a cut.

Duck Holliday 2023

Chisom gives a whimsical nod to the road not taken. What if his friend had not quit college in a huff. Had not gone to the Marines. Had not hurt his back. Had not gotten addicted to pain killers. Had not gotten involved in drug sales. Robbie Joe would have never been in the mix. 

But we don’t live in an alternate universe. 

Chisom says he just can’t wrap his brain around what his childhood friend did. Says it had to be the illness, because “that is just not him.”

“We still stay in touch,” says Chisom of Orvile. “He will always be my friend. He’s living down in Arizona now and he’s had a couple of strokes, but I think he is still hanging in there pretty well. He does not speak really well anymore but his son will speak on the phone for him. It’s always good to talk to him.”

The Holliday clan was a large one raised with the traditional glue of tough love and unbending discipline. The recipe was heavy on love. “Momma had 14 of us, 13 that lived,” Bonnie says. “I am the middle child of the 13 survivors (of birth). Three older brothers, three older sisters, three younger brothers, and three younger sisters. And me right in the middle. Daddy died when I was 8 years old, leaving momma to raise all those kids. I sometimes think ‘would Ducky have turned out different if daddy would have lived longer, been there for him?’ I really feel both he and Robbie Joe would have been better with daddy around.”

Bonnie and Carol put their memories together to try and document, the best they can, their now 78-year-old brothers’ post-prison life’s timeline: Did he work? “Sometimes, but he had a full disability check.”

Where did he live? “In Arizona now, but all over, with different of us family over the years. He would bounce in and bounce out; we have never turned our back on him. Even lived with momma when he first got out of prison.”

Any kids? “Well let’s see, four, five, maybe six. There was Pat and Renee, wives of his, and who was that one in Kansas? But he never married her, I don’t think.  Has a boy who last we heard was living with him in Arizona. Don’t know who his baby momma was. Five would be a good guess. And Robbie Joe had a daughter. He was with a good-looking white woman over in Illinois. His little girl is now a doctor. That would make Robbie Joe smile.”

In the search for Mayberry moments in the time of Plathville, an afternoon in Monroe City with Carol Holliday and Bonnie Bauer is a needed alternative. But the reality is the event that brings them here is sobering. The melancholy hangs in the air as heavily as hospital disinfectant. Both sisters say the faith they learned from a steadfast mother who endured much in her hard life gives them strength today. One brother is dead, slain by the hand of another - who in a once glorious fall as a teenager led the whole state of Missouri in touchdowns scored. But life goes on. It was a long time ago. 

“Ducky has a disease,” Bonnie says, “and it is a bad one, but I am not going to judge him. And I believe in forgiveness."

Howard Pruitt

Like a Main Street malt shop, school friendships are supposed to be quaint and even inestimable. Nearly from birth these nine products of the Washinton School were tied together like contestants in a three-legged race at the town picnic - depending on each other. They were all raised and still to this day are small-town guys. Life status may have temporarily bobbed some of them away over the years, but like small boats moored together, the changing tides of life have never pulled them too far apart. It was a spirit of togetherness that would seem slightly on the cheesy side if it were not so sincere—and so very effective.

Howard Pruitt says today with noticeable pride that the 1969 Panthers started multiple Washington School alums on defense, sometimes, after several black sophomores earned mid-season promotions to the varsity, as many as nine. They spent the summer of 69 preparing - did enough pushups to power a steam engine. Come fall, they were ready. The Panthers of that year were not particularly big but the nine gave the team speed to burn. Speed never has a bad game. They rarely threw the football, but they were disciplined, conditioned and country strong.  “We came within one game of playing for state. But we couldn’t beat South Shelby to close it out.” Fifty-Four years and a lifetime later, Pruitt says, it still hurts.

Pruitt, who today resides in Columbia, MO, has made keeping the spirit of Washington School alive his life calling. He spends countless hours documenting on a Facebook page devoted to the school's alum's accomplishments. Searching for ghosts is not easy but there's a spiritually uplifting Dickensian touch to all this - what Pruitt is attempting - but there's also a sense of immense pressure he battles. He is 70 years of age and as he says, “we are passing fast.” An old African proverb states that when an old man dies, a library dies with him. “So many stories I have not heard,” Pruitt says with a sad shake of his head, “and they need to not only be heard but recorded. That keeps me up at night.”

In 1969, the high school football team was the social glue that held this small town together. The team’s stellar performance would have paled in comparison without the nine young men raised in its segregated “colored section.” The whites who controlled the town’s power structure knew it. And so did the black families who provided many of '69's Friday night’s heroes. It was a baby step in the right direction. 

Pruitt remembers there was no pampering of him and his Washington mates, football stars non-withstanding. “Back in high school a lot of us Washington guys worked in the summer hayfields for Buck Robinson,” Pruitt says, referring to a well-respected black entrepreneur of the day. “That is how we made our summer money and it had to carry us through the year. Other than washing dishes, there were not many after school jobs at the time for black teenagers. We didn’t lift many weights back in those days and we didn’t have the equipment, even if we wanted to.  But we could haul hay and that kept us in shape. When two a day (practices) started in August we would have two weeks of preseason practices before school started. We would practice twice a day; 8 am and 6 pm. In between, we went to the hayfield. Football practice, for us, was not that bad.”

Pruitt and the other Washington Alum had become classmates with their white teammates in junior high. Before, the white and black kids, other than school, did not mingle. “We played a lot of after school pick-up football,” Pruitt says, “but that was in the neighborhood and with the black and white areas of town segregated by race, we all lived in sections assigned for black homes, so we didn’t associate much with the white kids outside of school. When we started football as seventh graders, that all changed. Now, we were teammates.”

In a world today where kids are playing a sport year-round on parent organized and expensive select teams, Pruitt remembers that in elementary school he and his black classmates would gather each fall day after school on the rocky and rugged Washington School playground and choose up sides for a spirited game of tackle football. It required a trip home first and a quick change. Putting holes in your school clothes was grounds for an old fashion “go out in that back yard and cut your own switch” whipping. They’d pool allowances and buy the cheapest football on the rack at the downtown Ben Franklin. Soon the cheaply made sphere would lose its shape, rounding and splitting. But it was nothing a little carpenter’s tape could not mend. Full tackle was the game- a few ground rules but no pads, no adult supervision and for sure, no roughing penalties. “I tackled Robbie Joe Holliday once,” Pruitt recalls, “and his knee busted my head behind my ear. For years, I had a lump for a reminder that Robbie Joe left me with.”

Finally starting organized practice, when they got on to the field with the white kids, made it more than a game. It was the only option a black kid in the 1960’s Monroe City had to forge a nod of social acceptance, to gain a degree of equality, if only on the football field.

"In elementary school we were assigned to Washington School and had to walk past the white Holy Rosary Catholic elementary school,” Pruitt states. “Some of them would taunt us with slurs and insults. There were a group of brothers who were the leaders and one of them was my age. We were outnumbered so we just kept walking. When we got to high school, we were now all on the same team (Holy Rosary closed its high school in 1965). The first day of high school football practice, we were teammates. That first day we ran the ‘Hamburger’ drill, and I made sure I was opposite him. We got things straight really quick."

The Hamburger drill is legendary amongst any male who played high school football in the 1950s, 1960 or 1970s. Sometimes also called the "Oklahoma" drill, it was simple and brutal. Two blocking dummies for a ball carrier to run between, 15 feet or so apart, one blocker one tackler. The battle was up front between the blocker and the tackler. No rules. Man on Man. Nowhere to hide. It was as macho as it got and often coaches would use it on the first day of the pre-season to measure toughness and shame those lacking it. 

"I wouldn't say after that day that all was forgotten," Pruitt remembers, "but we now knew we were teammates and eventually we became friends."

 

The '69 team was led by senior two-time first team all-state running back Marvin Robinson, senior captain lineman Rodney O’Bryan, junior quarterback Tom Watson, and all-district and all-district sophomore running back Robbie Joe Holliday.

Other returning starters included JV Saffarran, a senior end, junior guard Howard Pruitt, senior tackle Charlie King and junior Harold Holland at the slot back position. New starters to the lineup included Jim Marler and Proctor Smith with Lee Anderson and Gene Whiteman supplying depth. Other returning letter winners were Ben White and Parker Kendrick. The team roster included 53 players led by the 11 returning letterman. 

The Monroe City Panthers opened the season on September 12, 1969, with an away game at Mark Twain. The season opener was billed as a battle between two of the better teams in the Clarence Cannon Conference, and their performance that evening did not disappoint. The Panthers could not contain Mark Twain star running back Bill Lankford. The junior rolled up 207 net yards. The Tiger workhorse also scored two touchdowns, kicked two extra points and ran for another two-point conversion.

The Panther offensive generated 342 yards, enough to win 99% of 1969 era high school football games. Two costly mistakes doomed Monroe City's chances: an early bad snap from center on a punt attempt, which gave Mark Twain the ball first and goal on the 7-yard line and a fumble late in the game by the Panthers as they drove into the Mark Twain red zone for what would have been the winning touchdown. In his post-game remarks, Coach Welker bemoaned the fact that his defense was going to have to improve, or it would be a long season. The offense is there, he observed, and he promised a hard upcoming week of tackling practice.

After the bad punt snap gave Mark Twain a 7-0 lead, quarterback Tom Watson, in his first varsity start, hit senior end JV Saffarrans with a 35-yard touchdown pass. The extra point kick failed, and Mark Twain held a 7-6 lead.

Mark Twain then took advantage of another Panther mistake. After recovering a fumble, they drove in four running plays 42 yards into the Panthers endzone.  Lankford added a two-point conversion, and the Tigers took a 15 to 6 lead with 10 minutes left in the first half.

On the first play from scrimmage following the ensuing kickoff, Monroe City immediately responded with a 66-yard touchdown halfback pass for Marvin Robinson to Calvin Talton. The pass was intended for Ben White, but it bounced off his shoulder pads and fortuitously into the arms of Talton, who sprinted all the way to paydirt. Robertson added the conversion run to pull the visitors to within one point, 15 to 14.

The first half ended after Monroe City drove to the Mark Twain, 7-yard line, but lost the ball on downs.

The home team received the second half kickoff and methodically drove 69 yards to score. The Mark Twin ground assault ate up most of the third quarter clock. Welker mentioned after the game that the long clock time consuming drive was critical as the red-hot Panther offense was grounded on the sideline. Lankford kicked the extra point and Mark Twain held a 22 to 14 advantage.

The Panthers roared back with an impressive 70-yard drive of their own. Holliday gained 16 yards with a run, followed by his backfield mate Robinson’s own 15-yard scamper.  A completed pass from Watson to Saffannas netted 27 yards. Robinson then took the ball the last yard in for the touchdown. He also ran in the conversion and what was called post-game by one media source the best recent game in the area, was deadlocked at 22 points each.

The fourth quarter started with another long Tiger drive. Lankford’s 40-yard TD run proved to be the game’s deciding score. The Mark Twain star carried on all six of the drive’s plays. He was stopped short of the goal line on the extra point attempt and the Panthers now trailed, 28 to 22.

The Panthers took the kickoff and immediately and inexorably drove to the Mark Twain 40-yard line. But a sack and a penalty derailed them into a fourth and 15, a do or die play. With four minutes left in the game Robinson was dropped for a 6 yards loss and Mark Twain took over on downs. The Panthers hopelessly watched as they ran out the clock.

Tom Watson

Robinson gained 74 yards on 12 carries. He scored on one touchdown pass and ran for another. He carried in a pair of two-point conversions. He also intercepted a pass. Robbie Joe Holliday gained 66 yards on 16 carries and Harold Holland gained another 45. Ben White picked up 21 yards on the ground. Howard Pruit had eight tackles and one assist. Statistically, the Panthers won every battle except the final score.

MC had 206 yards rushing and 136 yards passing.  The two teams combined to only punt three times. Monroe City was penalized for 30 yards. The home-field officiating crew was kind to Mark Twain as they were flagged for no penalties.

The second week of the season saw the Panthers open the home portion of their schedule against longtime rival Palmyra. A big crowd was expected at Lankford field with season tickets going for six dollars for an adult and $2.50 for students. The pass would admit the bearer to all home varsity, B team and freshman games. Individual game admission for the 1969 season was $1.25 for adults and $.50 for students attending varsity games. B team or a freshman game would require admission of $.50 by adults and $.25 for students.

A big crowd, estimated at 1000, once again saw a high scoring and exciting game. Palmyra vs. Monroe City, a years in the making blood rivalry, always carries an extra charge of adrenaline. In 1969, both teams had legitimate conference title hopes that made the early season showdown results even more impacting. A loss this night and an 0-2 start would have sunk MC’s season almost before it began.

Rodney O'Bryan

Palmyra jumped to a quick 12-0 lead on two gift wrapped TDs fueled by MC mistakes. Their first touchdown was from an interception return, the second a short drive that followed a fumble. Palmyra failed to convert on both extra point opportunities and that would eventually decide the game’s outcome. Junior quarterback Tom Watson had an outstanding evening. He quickly overcame his early interception by completing five of seven passes for 110 yards. He also tossed two successful conversion passes and that would prove to be the vital points in the Panther's win.

Monroe City's first score was highlighted by a 40-yard pass from Watson to Robinson. The play took the ball to the Palmyra 18-yard line and three plays later Robinson went into the end zone from 10 yards out. The extra point pass was successful, and the Palmyra lead was cut to 12 to 8.

Palmyra responded with a score of their own, but once again failed on the extra point conversion. Monroe City trailed 18 to 8. With its season hanging by a thread, an 0-2 start would have been disastrous, Monroe City put together a 75-yard scoring drive. Watson completed passes to Jim White and Saffannas. Robinson and Holliday pounded out some tough yards on the ground. Robinson scored on an inside reverse from 15 yards out. Holliday ran the conversion into the end zone and with 26 ticks left on the first half clock, the Palmyra lead stood at 18 to 16.

Monroe City took the second half kickoff and drove 70 yards to score a go-ahead TD. The home team used a combination of passes and running to reach paydirt. Holliday scored from 1 yard out. The conversion failed but the Panthers had their first lead of the evening, 22 to 18. 

MC would log a decisive score in the closing seconds of the third quarter. After a short Palmyra punt gave the Black and Gold the ball on the visitors 34-yard line, they stuck to the ground and scored after four running plays. Ben White went over from 7 yards out for the touchdown. The conversion pass was good and the Panthers stretched the lead to 30 to 18.

Monroe City got the ball back and was driving for what looked like a decisive touchdown when they lost a fumble deep in Palmyra territory.  Palmyra used the gift and quickly brought Monroe City fans to the edges of their seats. They completed several long passes for a touchdown and with 3 1/2 minutes left the visitors had cut the Monroe City lead down to one possession, 30 to 24.

The Palmyra defense rose to the occasion and forced Monroe City to punt. With 51 seconds remaining, the visitors went to the air. Calvin Talton intercepted a pass that should have insured a MC victory. But inexplicably, Monroe City did not run out the clock by taking a knee but ran a play and fumbled with 13 seconds left. The turnover gave Palmyra one more shot at a game tying touchdown and a chance to win with the extra point conversion. Two long passes were incomplete and despite making more mistakes than a high school boy on his first date, the Panthers had their hard earned first win of the year, a heart stopping 30-24 triumph. Each team recorded four touchdowns, but MC converted 3 of 4 two point after touchdown conversions. The visitors whiffed on all four of their tries. 

Monroe City had 330 yards of total offense. Holliday was the leading ground gainer with 90 yards on 18 attempts. Robinson gained 54 yards on 10 carries. Robinson completed a 36-yard pass and also lead the Panthers on defense with nine tackles.

The schedule did not get easier as a powerful Centralia team was on deck. The Panthers had lost to Centralia for 10 straight years, dating back to 1959 when the school had reinstated the sport of football. Centralia had since the mid 1950s dominated the area gridiorns.  

Robbie Joe Holliday and Marvin Robinson were once again dominant on the ground. The two had become the Dynamic Duo the area. The speedy 185-pound Robinson’s end runs were the perfect complement to the 235-pound Holliday’s punishing straight up the gut running style. Holliday, against Centralia, gained 160 yards on 29 carries. Robinson logged 158 yards on 18 rushing attempts. Coach Welker‘s defense for the first time stiffened and showed the mettle that had been predicted but not yet seen, holding a potent Centralia offense to only 134 yards rushing. But nearly half of those yards came on the game's first play from scrimmage.

With only 24 seconds gone in the first quarter Monroe City was shocked by 65-yard Centralia touchdown scamper. The conversion failed, but Monroe City had dug themselves a quick 6-0 hole. A slow start out of the blocks was becoming a trend and Coach Welker was not happy as he gathered on the sidelines his kickoff return team.

Taking the kick, Monroe City drove to the Centralia 20-yard line but turned the ball over on downs. On their second possession, the Panthers embarked on a 75-yard scoring drive. Holiday carried the ball eight times and Robinson five, the latter scoring on a 5-yard carry. The extra point failed, and the halftime score was knotted at 6 to 6.

MC received the second half kickoff, and it took just four plays for the Panthers to score. Holliday circled the left end for a 27-yard touchdown. The extra point again failed but Monroe City had its first lead of the evening 12 to 6. 

The final score came with only 47 seconds remaining in the game. Robinson capped the seven-play drive with a 23-yard sprint around the right end. It was a determined and hard running effort. On the play, Robinson was hit twice, but kept his balance by using his right hand to get back upright, spun off at least three other white jersey would be tacklers and high stepped into the endzone for 6 points. Local media reported it was one of the more exciting runs in the history of Monroe City football. His effort iced a very satisfying win. 

The Panthers were held to a season low three touchdowns but did gain 323 yards. All the yards came on the ground as Monroe City had 0 yards passing.

The Panthers completely shut down Centralia in the second half. The visitors never crossed midfield, got no closer to the endzone than their own 37-yard line. Rodney O’Bryan led the defense with 9 assisted and four unassisted tackles. Robinson totaled four unassisted and three assisted ones. Jim White tallied five tackles, one assisted. Coach Welker also gave post-game praise to Holiday and Howard Pruit for their efforts on the defensive side of the ball.

Standing at 2-1, Monroe City had survived a brutally strong early season front-loaded schedule.

PART 2

In 1969 Charlie Welker was the head football and boys track and field coach at Monroe City. He was a native of Jackson, Missouri and a 1961 graduate of the local high school. He attended nearby Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau, on a track scholarship, graduating in 1965. Welker then stayed for two years in his hometown as a junior high football coach. In the spring of 1967, he was interviewed for the vacant head track coach and assistant football coaching positions at Monroe City and was hired. 

In the summer of 1968, Welker was elevated to the head football coaching position. He would over the next decade earn wide area respect as a multiple year state champion track and field coach. 

But, right, wrong, or indifferent, in Monroe City the flagship program of the day was the football team. One former player says Welker was not a fiery motivator.  Another does not recall him as a savvy strategist. They relate his strength was he cared, and he was patient. Both remember hearing barber shop grumbles that the coach was not tough enough and cared more about track than the football team. The young coach’s career at Monroe City never would be easy, but one former player thought he made it look that way. “He was always calm.”

Welker's football teams practiced the basics. He kept things simple, former players recall. Complexity is the enemy of execution. He wanted to limit mistakes. His Panthers ran the football often, threw it seldom. 

The 69' team had a beast of an offensive backfield combo. Led by a speedster, Marvin Robinson, who ran where the holes were; and a bruiser, Robbie Joe Holliday, who made his own holes. Blood and thunder. Either way, opponents better bring help. 

“I will be the first to admit,” Welker answers to an inquiry as to why he left his position as football coach at such a young age (34), “track was my background and I loved coaching it.”

Welker resigned from his employment with Monroe City High School in the late-1970s. He decided to leave the teaching profession but to remain in Monroe City. He and his wife, Cora Sue, opened a business, CW‘s Trophies and Awards. The business supplied sporting and athletic awards to local youth organizations, adult recreation leagues and to many schools in northeast Missouri. The enterprise flourished. In 2017, at 75 years of age, he sold out and went into semi-retirement. The business continues, in its original location, to thrive.

Welker today is 82 years old and continues to reside in Monroe City. He remains healthy and active.  A fall of 2023 interview was conducted while the former coach was driving to Colorado to elk hunt. He has over the last 40 years served as the head field events referee at the Missouri State high school track meet, a gig he says he intends to continue.

He and his wife, a well-liked, effective and now retired business education teacher for the Monroe City school district, have two adult children. Both kids live today in the Kansas City area. With four grandkids that are now high school and college age, Welker says he and his wife of nearly 60 years stay busy attending as many of the grandkid’s activities as time and distance will allow for.  

“I was 26 years old when I came to Monroe City,” Welker shares. “It was a great community for a young head coach, like me.” Welker confirms that the nine Washington alumni on his 1969 team were the backbone of a successful season.  

Welker was not the prototypical small town high school coach of 1969; not a crew cut, tough-love, no-water-breaks tyrant who ruled by fear. None of his players recall any trace of such leather helmet era coaching persona. He said he made only one off the field demand of his athletes. “If you were going to play football for us in the late 60s and 70s, you were going to run track. We were very talented. We won the state track championship in 1975 and again in 1976. We had sped to burn. The same boys also gave us some pretty good football seasons, as well.”

Howard Pruitt 2023

“We had a good team that year (1969) and those nine were not only great athletes,” says Welker, “but they came from very good families. I always knew I could count on them. As I think back now about those young men, words like solid and stable, come to mind.”

The retired coach says that the players of 1969, like all his football teams at Monroe City, were hardworking and unselfish. “This town raises good kids. It was never a problem to get them to work as a team.” Such culture, he observed, created team members who never got excited about personal acclaim but who were congenital winners, whose hard work transferred unobtrusively to championships. “The 69 team, with Marvin (Robinson) and Rodney (O’Bryan) as leaders, was a good bunch.”

Welker said he has kept in contact with his former players and has specific memories of many of the Washington alums. “Howard Pruit was just a very quiet young man that just did his job. Howard had a great personality for a lineman. He didn’t look for, and he didn’t seek attention, but he was a leader, and the other kids would follow his example and he always set a very good example.”

Pruit, also, remembers his former coach with superlatives and fond recall. “Coach Welker was a supportive person to play for. I remember he was young, and I think, in a lot of ways that helped him relate to us, especially our black players.”

Welker, as a collegiate track athlete immersed in a diverse environment himself, says he never really thought about developing skills to get along with his young black chargers, it just to him came naturally. 

“That was a different time,” says Welker of 1969. The coach notes that the civil rights movement which had evolved into a national phenomenon, dominated the daily national news. But the coach says he can recall no issues on the ‘69 team that were race generated. “I really don’t remember any discipline problems on that team,” he says, “either with the white kids, the black kids, or how they interacted with each other.”

Calvin Talton said that if it wasn’t for Welker going the extra mile, he would’ve never played football. “I lettered as a freshman,” Talton, a sophomore contributor in 1969, remembers today. “And that was quite an accomplishment back then, but I almost didn’t get to play. I needed a job to help support our family. My dad made that very clear. Coach Welker tracked me down when school started and he said, ‘we need you out there,’ but I explained my situation to him, that I had to have a job to help the family. He arranged for me a job every day after football practice. For one and a half hours, every school day, I would clean classrooms in the high school building. That way I could help the family and still be able to play football.”

Calvin Talton

Dean Hayes is a 1972 graduate of Monroe City High School. He ran track for Coach Welker, but he was much too small to ever consider playing football, he says. “Plus, we lived out on the farm,” he recalls, “and August was the big harvest month. We wouldn’t have had time to go to football practice, even if I wanted to play.”

Since 1978, Hayes has taught at the small northwestern Missouri high school of Hardin Central. The 69-year educator is now in his 45th year at the 80-student high school. Hays says he took the lessons he learned from Welker and became himself a very successful track and field coach. “I’m still teaching three hours a day,” he shares, “all of the advanced math courses we offer.” He retired in 2015 from coaching after his boys’ track team claimed the small school state title. Today he stays active in track and field by serving as a judge at the state track meet and as a track and field rules interpreter for the state activities association. He is also a long-time office holder in the Missouri Track and Cross-Country Coaches Association. 

Monroe City was known for its unique track, that due to space limitations, did not cover the standard quarter mile (400 meters). It sported a primitive white crushed rock surface. “I don’t know that anybody ever knew for sure,” Hays says, “why it was the size it was. Depending on who you talked to, it was 320 meters or 345 yards. Or something like that." Trying to find and mark with chalk relay zones on it was a nightmare.

“Coach Welker was big on running intervals,” Hays recalls of a training system when broken down to its simplest form means to run fast and recover. An athlete will run a challenging pace for short distances and then take a break before doing it all over again. It can be a rollercoaster, leaving the runner gasping for air like a fish out of water. “Coach Welker would just run us to death,” Hays says. “We ran very long and hard workouts. And while most coaches like 200s for speed and 400s for endurance, with our track, we ran just 300s over and over.”

Hays says Welker’s workouts were hellish, but effective and why change a proven formula. “I’ve kept that strategy all the way through my coaching career. We didn’t run 400s in practice, we ran 300s. I don’t know why it worked, but it just seemed like it was very effective.”

Hays remembers every year Welker would read the entire track team his version of the Riot Act. It was a way to establish a moral ethos as a plank in his program’s platform. The coach had their ears, his players calibrated like seismographs to the sound of his voice. Once a year, he would browbeat his charges as some fishwife would her drunken slob of a spouse.  

“Coach had our attention," Hays says. "He would take us down into what we called the freshman locker room. It was of a size to hold comfortably about 20 kids. He put the whole track team, about 80, down there, jammed us in on top of each other, and he would lay into us. I remember one year it was about smoking. Another year was about misbehaving in class. I think it was his way of letting us know he was more than just a coach and we were more (to him) than just athletes. He was a teacher, and we were his students. And I still to this day remember what he had to say.”

High school sports are a continuum, just as any truly valuable life experience is. You hope the good outweighs the bad. The motives of past coaches, when we reflect honestly, lie somewhere on this continuum between caring and self-serving. William Talton has both kind words and a heartwarming memory of Coach Welker, pegging his former high school football and track coach on the caring side of the scale.  

“Track was my thing and I believe it was my junior year," Talton reminisces, "at the conference track meet in Louisiana. I got tripped in a prelim but got up and finished to qualify for the finals.  You could really tear up a knee on an old cinder track, and I did. They had to carry me off. Coach Welker dug out the cinders and gave me a good rub down. He wrapped my knee tight and told me that they needed me and my points in the low hurdles' finals race, if we were to win the championship. I don’t know what it was, but he rubbed something out of a jar that took all the sting out. It was very hot. I really questioned what I could do but my leg felt great after he got done with it and I ended up not only winning the race and getting the 10 points we needed, but I set a conference record for the low hurdles. As I crossed the finish line - I was a little guy back then, maybe weighed 140 pounds - Coach met me at the finish line after I won and I remember he picked me straight up, lift me up over his head and said, ‘you are a champion.’ "

At that instant, Talton says, he felt the empowerment to move mountains. "That’s one of the best memories of my life. Most of us just need someone to believe in us. If ever I was on top of the world it was that moment.”

 

In 1969, gridiron facilities, to be kind, were lacking. In 1976 the football field at Monroe City High School was given the name Lankford Field, in honor of retiring long time Superintendent of schools, Galen Lankford. In 1959, Lankford was the force behind reinstating the sport of football at MCHS, after a 30 plus year hiatus. Although the field naming gesture was a sincere show of appreciation to a favorite son, the field itself was always a red headed stepchild. In 1969 it was simply known as the “football field.”

The facility was primitive, at best. After the first rainy night game, grass was at best suspected. The track that lapped the gridiron, due to the narrow width of the plot of land that held the field, cut through the corner of each endzone, four slices of the back side of consisting of a banked surface of white pea gravel, all in the field of play. The press box had seating for three, four if they were friends. Last game’s cigarette butts littered the plank floor. A huge wooden shutter hung above an open window absent of any glass. On windy nights, the whole structure swayed perilously above the fans seated below. 

Washington School

He was the kind of man who make small towns soar. It was a time when jobs for blacks in Monroe City were low paying. Henderson Produce Company was the largest employer of black Monroe Citians. In 1950, the company paid its black workers 17 cents an hour. He had given three years of his life to help whip the Nazis. He would not settle now. So, he struck out on his own. 

Buck Robinson, Sr. was a well-respected longtime businessman in the Monroe City area. Born in 1920 and raised with the suffocating shackles of Missouri segregation, his life's resume is amazing. As an adult he served on numerous civic organizations, including the county draft board during the Vietnam war. He was more than personable and cooperative; he was mature, levelheaded and bright.

Robinson enjoyed a simple life - work from can see to can't see, sleep at night and ball games when time allowed. He was raised when Sunday was a day of rest, and the front porch was where families would relax and visit. Sunday church attendance was a given. At a young age he was, "turning sod behind a team of four horses." 

After graduating from a segregated high school in Glasgow, Missouri in 1938, Robinson tried out for the Kansas City Monarchs, at the time the dominant baseball team in the old Negro leagues. After one day of practice, he was placed on the team roster. For a teenager, it was a monumental accomplishment. He was now teammates with such legends of Blackball and future Hall of Famer’s as Jackie Robinson, Satchel, Paige, Josh Gibson, and Buck O’Neil. 

Playing in the Negro Leagues was the athletic equivalent of joining Peter Pan's lost boys. The league's outposts were scattered hither and yon. To white America the Negro Leagues were no more than a sidebar. But for a black baseball player in 1938, it was the life of play at the highest level. Friends say he spoke little of his baseball career. 

In 1942 Buck Robinson was drafted into the United States Army to fight in the second world war. He served in the 1st Army 258 Signal Construction Company, raising to the rank of master sergeant. He and his good friend, and brother in-law, Cliff Sharp, left Hannibal by bus for Jefferson Barracks and basic training. Sharp recalls that Robinson had "no fear of heights," and would shimmy up to the top of a 70-foot flagpole each morning to hoist the American flag over the south St. Louis, MO base. 

He and Sharp were after Basic Training sent to Canada for further schooling. They took a train to Dawson Creek, British Columbia. They were trained as electrical lineman. The troops lived in tents and connected 500 miles of Canadian telephone lines stretching from Dawson Creek to Edmonton, Alberta. The two were in Canada for a year.

Liberty High-1973

While in Canada, Robinson represented the United States Army in international track meets. He set what was at the time the US Army record for the 100-yard dash in 9.6 seconds and the 220-yard dash in 22.1 seconds. He also ran the anchor leg for the US Army’s champion 4 x 100-yard relay team.

When they returned to the states, the two were ordered to Boston, MA where they set sail for an eight-day trip across the Atlantic that Sharp said, “would kill the devil.” After a layover in England, where they lived in foxholes, they finally reached the fighting in Germany. After 30 months overseas, the two were mustered out and a return to the quiet life of Monroe City. There were 250 black soldiers in their unit, led by all white officers. 

After his honorable discharge, in 1945, Robinson joined the federal civil service commission. He was sent to the Hannibal, MO area to help build Mark Twain State Park. When the project was completed, he settled in the Monroe City area, going to work for Henderson. He would later start several successful businesses. 

Howard Pruitt as a high school student worked on Buck Robinson's summer hay crew. "He was always busy," Pruitt recalls, "hauling trash, hauling hay, plowing gardens, working baseball games and plowing snow." Robinson drove a school bus for 25 years until the mandatory state retirement age of 70 forced him to turn in his keys. He served as a long-time area baseball umpire, well into his 70s, and was inducted into the Hannibal Recreation and Parks Hall of Fame. 

Robinson passed on some good DNA. His youngest son Marvin was a two time all state running back who led the 1969 Monroe City Panthers. His daughter Sylvia, MCHS class of 1966 grad, was the first Washington School alum to attend and graduate from the University of Missouri. His oldest son, Kenneth, MCHS class of 1965, was a high school football player. Kenneth was the first Washington Alum to serve on the MCHS student council and yearbook staff. He played four years of college football for William Jewell College in Liberty, MO, earning his bachelor's degree in education. He was a member of the Cardinals football squads that were conference champs in 1965, 1966, 1967 and 1968. Also known as Little Buck, after graduation he stayed in the metro Kansas City, MO area, settling in the suburb of Liberty where he became the first black teacher and coach at the local high school. After retirement, he was elected to the Liberty Public Schools board of education. 

Buck Robinson

Those who knew, both white and black, say anything Buck wanted to be, he could've been. He was the most congenial man you'd ever meet; old-timers remember.  Some applaud to this day the measured response of the town's black leaders during the years of the contentious civil rights movement, with a desire to defuse any racial tensions.  "We got along good," those whites still around like to point out. Just by being himself- honest, hardworking, accountable - men like Buck Robinson made it more difficult for whites of the era to generalize negatively. But he had a fire about him, too. You didn't cross Buck Robinson because he was afraid of nothing.

Harold “Buck” Robinson passed away in 1998 at the age of 78. His was a life well lived. 

The white power structure of Monroe City in 1969 didn't invent the town's segregated practices, but they did choose not to alter them. 

Blacks in Monroe City in 1969 were housed like passive invaders, nothing was ever built for them, not one house. It was a land of hand-me-downs. But the body needs a heart and fortunately the blacks of MC had Washington School. Howard Pruitt says it is the reason he refuses to let the spirit and memory of the school fade, why he heads the school's alumni association. 

Blacks resided in four segregated housing sections near the railroad tracks that ran east and west the length of the town. 

The East End Black Community boarded the high school football field. The Winter Street Black Community, sometimes called Baptist Row, bordered the Catholic cemetery and an old slaughterhouse. The Hill Black Community on South Locust Street was home to Washington School and the Second Baptist Church at the corner of South Locust and Mill Street. The Katie Black Community was located along Front Street and north of the railroad tracks. The Winter Street community on Sundays went to the Holy Church located on Winter Street. The East End, The Hill and The Katie communities mostly went to the Second Baptist Church.

Pruitt recalls that the domiciles of the blacks were stark but livable. “Most segregated areas had no indoor facilities – used outhouses. Houses were not the best, but most had water to the kitchens and most burned wood and coal or both for heat and used bottle gas for cooking. I believe we had to go the Post Office for our mail. I can’t remember if other areas (white) of town got daily mail delivery or not.”

The 1950 US Census noted that all the homes occupied by blacks on Winter Street were, “dilapidated and without any tap water supply.” The Census also noted that several homes had no flooring or windows. One house was constructed with scrape kindling and “lined with cardboard and not fix to live in.” There were similar comments on houses in the Hill Street and South Locust Street areas around Washington School.

Segregation was the unwritten rule of the era. “Growing up during this period and in segregation meant you stayed in your section of town, and we only left for school and church,” Pruitt states. “I remember there were two taverns with rooms in the back for black people. The movie theatre, black people had to use the balcony. There was a café that only served black people at the back door and their black employees had to use the (restroom) facilities at the gas stations next door.”

Pruitt’s childhood was dominated by extended family. He says that was true of most MC black families at the time. “My great grandparents lived up the street, two great aunts and uncles down the street and another great uncle and aunt lived across the railroad tracks. There were no parks in the black sections, and all our streets were gravel.”

Washington School not only provided education for the black kids in town, but social and recreational options. And indoor plumbing. “The best park and playground for us, that we were allowed to use, was at Washington School,” Pruitt says. “Another great thing about Washington School was the indoor restrooms. On cold days, we loved that option. We only went up town on a few occasions. I do not recall playing or socializing with white kids. The only professional and educated people we encountered were our teachers at Washington School and the minster at Second Baptist Church.”

According to the 1950 US Census, most of the city’s black citizens worked at Henderson Produce as chicken pluckers and pickers. Other found work as maids, farm workers and general laborers.

Pruitt attended Washington School from 1958 to 1965, some of the most turbulent years in the nation’s history. “We saw the president of hope for most black people, John F. Kennedy, assassinated. I will never forget our teacher at Washington, Mr. William T. Smith with tears in his eyes telling us of the assassination. I was 10 years old. It seemed like the breath just left everyone in the room with stunned faces. We witnessed the ugliness of the southern state’s governments organized resistance to the civil rights movement, where we saw black people being beaten, bitten by dogs and fire hosed because they wanted the same rights as whites. We saw black students being protected by the national guard and federal agents to attend school. And at home, it was not acceptable for whites and blacks to associate as equals." Football was the exception.

It was a time when America’s Civil Rights Movement was barreling unimpeded down an increasingly violent and confrontational path, transitioning from the conciliatory civil disobedience strategy under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King to the violent rage that represented a younger generation of Black Power militants such as Malcom X, who had no hesitation to spill blood in the streets. In the fall of 1969 the winds of social change, years in the making, now fanned the flames of the riotous racial fires of Watts, Harlem and Detroit. America was a bemused society seemingly hellbent on a racial apocalypse and a cultural suicide. 

The Monroe City of 1969, like most of small towns of the day, was a segregated community, both in terms of housing and social institutions. The church and the school were two possible channels for social interaction. But, as in many small towns and true in Monroe City, the most racially segregated hour of the week was 11 am on Sunday morning. That left the schools.  

Most of the Monroe City black students from this era were raised by conservative parents who had lived their entire lives under Jim Crow conforming social norms of small-town compliance. Militancy was not going to go over well with the adults of Monroe City, either black or white, of the time. 

Harold Holland, a junior running back in 1969, says his dad was never a man to mention prejudice. "He believed in America," Holland says. "'If you live in America', he'd say, 'you will get opportunities like everybody else.' He never told me what I couldn't do."

Marvin Batsell is a 1973 grad of MCHS. He attended Washington school through the fourth grade. “My dad was one of a few black businessmen in Monroe at that time,” he says on a Facebook post. “He also owned and operated the only black tavern in town, all the way until 1973, the taverns were segregated. Dad along with my Uncle Buck Robinson and Uncle Clarence Robbins had trash businesses in addition to working regular jobs at Henderson Produce CO, which was the town’s major (black) employer at the time.” 

“Some of the things we experienced and went through are hard to explain to someone who has never faced that,” states Batsell. “My dad and mom’s tavern on East Summer Street during my childhood, were segregated. All the businesses uptown had entrances in the back for us compared to being able to go in the front doors. But we made it through those times and here we stand today. Even after it closed and we went to the white school, we still identified ourselves with Washington. Still do. Washington was not just a black school in a black neighborhood, it's a part of the entire community, a part of our past as well as an indicator of our future.”

The Afro hair style became the symbol of the youthful expression of black pride. For the hip black man of the era an Afro the size of a lampshade, often with a multi-pronged black pick stuck in it like a pitchfork, was a requirement. It scared adults.  

“It was strange back in the day with an afro,” Washington and Monroe City High School alum Carolyn Robinson Whitlock shared on the Washinton Alumni Facebook page. “My dad thought wearing an Afro was militant so every day before I left for school, I wore a wig. Then after school I would put the wig back on to go home. I did this for a year until he finally came around. My mom knew but she didn't tell. The things you can remember.”

It was a time in Monroe City when desegregation, while no longer the law of the land, was still an entitlement to some, a social norm that would not fade easily. For others it was a burden to be endured. 

For white America there was a moral calculus of sorts, in 1969, to watching small town integrated football. Whites of the day who called themselves racial progressives claimed the races striving together in a common huddle working for a common goal gave results that came out close to even. Jim Crow dies at the 50-yard line. It became a civic badge of honor. “No racism here, we treat our coloreds good.” Honest reflection today tells us much different.

Nine young men of color starting on the 1969 Panther football squad didn't exactly spray-paint the alabaster landscape of the town's power structure. There were no black teachers or coaches at Monroe City High School, would not be for another 40 plus years. In the Monroe City of 1969, Brown v Board be damned, the shrill voices of segregation were far from muted. 

Week four of the season proved to be an easier matchup for the Panthers. They traveled to Paris and in Coach Welker ‘s words, coasted to a 26-6 win.  In the annual battle for Monroe County gridiron superiority the rival Coyotes were no match for Monroe City, physically overmatched. The visitors scored twice early and again in the second quarter. MC held a commanding 20-0 halftime lead.

Welker described his team’s effort as listless and mistake prone. He said, “we only played when we had to.” He expressed a concern and emphasized after the game that they do not get in the habit of playing to the level of a competition. The game was sloppy as Monroe City was penalized for 105 yards, all in the first half.

The Panthers jumped to the lead after recovering the first of five Paris fumbles. It took just four plays for MC to go 45 yards. Tom Watson threw a 32-yard pass to Jim White for the score. The extra point kick attempt failed. The Panthers scored again two minutes later, taking advantage of another Paris fumble. After the turnover, Holliday went 53 yards for the score. The extra point kick again failed. Just six minutes into the game Monroe City lead 12-0.  

To start the second quarter Paris was held on downs and Monroe took over on their own 35-yard line. On the first play of the drive, Marvin Robinson sprinted 65 yards untouched up the middle of the field for a score. A two-point conversion pass was completed, and Monroe City had a 20-0 halftime lead.

A Monroe City facemask penalty to start the second half assisted Paris as the Coyotes got on the board on a 31-yard TD run. The extra point attempt failed, and Monroe City lead 20 to 6. The Panthers, came out of their halftime slumber, took the kickoff and drove down the field with workman like precision.  Robbie Joe Holliday covered the last 4 yards for the touchdown. The extra point kick was blocked, and the visitors led 26-6. Coach Welker used reserves to play most of the fourth quarter. 

Monroe City completed four of 12 passes. Holliday again led the rushing attack with 114 yards on 10 carries and Robinson chipped in 97. Holland had 22 yards on five carries. Rodney O’Bryan and Robinson lead the defense with ten tackles each. Calvin Talton had nine and Howard Pruit picked up six.

On Friday evening, October 17, 1969, Debbie Hagar was crowned Monroe City homecoming queen. The Panthers thrilled the alums by dominating an outmanned squad from Bowling Green for decisive 37 to 8 win. By six minutes into the contest Monroe City had already scored three touchdowns. They took advantage of two Bowling Green fumbles, and a pass interception.

Marvin Robinson scored the first touchdown on a 30-yard run. A 5-yard pass from Watson to Saffarrans accounted for the second TD. The third Panthers score came after Robinson had several long runs into Bowling Green territory, and then threw a halfback pass to Saffarrans for the senior end’s second score of the first quarter, this time a 12-yard touchdown toss. Robbie Joe Holliday put the two-point conversion across the goal line. Jim White later caught a pass for another score and the Panthers went up 29-0 in the second quarter.

The skies opened right before halftime and a deluge of rain and lightning hit the field. Local media reported that lightning struck very close to the field, but in 1969, games were not stopped due to lightning, regardless of its nearness, and play continued. In the second half Coach Welker cleared the bench and the Panthers ran the score up to 37-0 by the end of quarter number 3. Bowling Green would put a meaningless touchdown on the board late in the game and the Panthers had rain soaked 37-8 homecoming victory.

Another high-octane offensive affair occurred in week six. The game was a spectator’s joy, with scoring, big plays, and excitement galore. The local paper called it the best played game in the history of the MC program. The Panthers outlasted conference rival Louisiana, 36 to 22. They were now third in the conference standings behind the team that had defeated them in the opener Mark Twain and state power South Shelby. Those two had already played, resulting in a 0-0 tie. MC would face the Cardinals in the last game of the season.

Monroe took the opening kickoff against the Bulldogs and once again used a halfback pass from Marvin Robinson to Saffarrans who was 10 yards behind the nearest defender. He sprinted untouched for a 65-yard touchdown. With Robinson’s well-established and widely known ability to run the football, the halfback pass had become a very deceptive and successful option in the Monroe City offensive playbook.

Louisiana responded by taking the ensuing kickoff and driving for a TD of its own, reaching paydirt with a nine-yard run. Louisiana converted the extra point and halfway through the first quarter held an 8-6 lead. Monroe City then fumbled the ball on their next drive and it took Louisiana only five players to drive 60 yards for a score. The two-point conversion was successful and Louisiana had a 16-6 lead.

JV Saffarrans

Coach Welker complemented his team after the game for their poise and determination by not panicking due to the early Louisiana onslaught. Robinson and Holliday once again formed a two headed monster in the backfield as they drove down the field, alternating runs and setting up Robinson to take the ball the last 7 yards for the score. The conversion this time was successful, and the Panthers had cut the lead to 16 to 14. Following a Louisiana punt, one of only two for the night, Monroe City drove 82 yards in 6 plays to take a 22-16 lead. MC scored when Robinson caught the football at midfield and was immediately hit hard by several Louisiana players. He kept his balance, spun free and was hit a third time, once again in a bone jarring fashion. He somehow still stayed upright, stiff armed another Bulldog would be tackler and sprinted the last 70 yards untouched into the end zone.  

On the next series after Robinson’s scintillating TD run, Watson picked off a Louisiana pass, one of three interceptions he had on the evening, and the Panthers were back in business. Robinson ran 37 yards to the Bulldog 8-yard line.  Holliday took it to the 2-yard stripe and Robinson finished off the last couple of yards. Robinson also converted the extra point, and Monroe City had its biggest lead of the evening, a 30-16 advantage. The Panthers had scored 24 unanswered points.

Monroe City then used another Watson interception to set up a 48-yard drive that took the ball all the way to the 1-foot line. But Louisiana stiffened and MC was stopped on downs. The Bulldogs then drove the 99 plus yards length of the field to score and cut the MC lead to 30-22.

The final 12 minutes of the game opened with the Panthers still clinging to a narrow one score lead, but disaster nearly struck. Holliday fumbled and the Bulldogs recovered at the Monroe 43-yard line. After a quick first down Louisiana appeared to score a possible tying touchdown on a 32-yard run, but a clipping penalty was called, and the score was nullified. On the next play, Jim White recovered a fumble, a play that would turn out to be decisive.

But the Bulldogs had one more chance as again Monroe City laid the ball on the turf and the visitors recovered. After the miscue, Watson provided a knockout punch with his third interception of the game, a satisfying exclamation point to a hard-fought win.

Robinson gained 97 yards on 11 carries. Holiday had 49 on 12 attempts. Louisiana dominated in first downs with 18 compared to Monroe City ‘s 10. The Bulldogs also out gained the Panthers 328 yards to 289. Monroe City fumbled six times and lost three. In addition to his great game of running the football, Robinson also was a star on defense with 14 tackles and two pass interceptions.

Early in the season the team's defense had been a disappointment. By midseason the ship had been righted. O'Bryan and Pruitt anchored a gambling, scrambling line. Coach Welker had turned his front defenders loose, shooting gaps and playing an increasingly aggressive style.  The team's defensive backs, led by Robinson and Watson, had become a game changing force. They could slam the door on the opposition's running game and could be counted on to intercept enough passes to blunt any effective aerial attack. The defense had proved in the Louisiana win that they could take a punch, bend but not break. 

Now firing on all cylinders on both sides of the line of scrimmage, the Panthers had won five games in a row and would soon be state ranked. As the leaves began to turn, they were a cohesive and confident crew, cocked and loaded for an all-out backstretch sprint to the season's finish line. 

He knew young that if he was not careful, he would live his whole life in the town where he was born because he was afraid try anything else, afraid to see how far he could go. He vowed in 1969 as a high school sophomore that would not happen. For him, tomorrow was already here. To tap his unmined talents and bring them to the surface, he needed mentors who cared.

William Talton is a thinker and a performer. He’s candid about the role he played on the 1969 football team. “I was a sophomore,” he says today from his home in Atlanta Georgia. “To be honest, football wasn’t my thing. Track and field was.”

He speaks in what can best be described as an exhausting voice: it grates and grinds, predicts, challenges; it arbitrates. Sometimes, it seems, he verbally turns on his cruise control. Talton is one of those opinionated people who live life conforming to a standard of right behavior, and he relishes expressing his opinions. This trait runs in the family, he says.

William Talton

Talton would earn a track scholarship to Northeast Missouri Teachers College in Kirksville, Missouri, known today as Truman State. After three years he would transfer to Central Missouri State in Warrenburg and earn his bachelor's degree. 

Football aside, what Talton recalls most about his 1969-1970 sophomore school year at MCHS was not any athletic achievements, but two individual staff members that set him on an academic path that transformed his life.

“We had a new art teacher that year,” recalls Talton, “and I am embarrassed to say that right now her name evades me. But she lived over in a Hannibal and as I recall, came from a family that had money, so I don’t think she stayed in teaching long. But I was lucky to have her my three years (of high school). She was just so encouraging to me. And I was a student who had not gotten much academic encouragement since leaving Washington. Every day she would come around and look at my work. She was critical when she needed to be, but she had a way of doing it that inspired me. She really got me interested in art, and she was very uplifting, in her assessment of my abilities.”

Talton pinpoints another MCHS faculty member from over fifty years ago who showed him his potential. “Also, my sophomore year going in to meet with my counselor, Mr. Lonnie James. He made it clear to me that he thought I had college potential. He went over my classes with me, and he showed me what I need to take over the next couple of years to be prepared for college. He said now was when I had to start the plan and I had to start getting serious about my education, don’t wait until it was too late. It really hit home with me. A lot of times our kids, especially our black kids, are not encouraged to take an academic path. No one in my family had ever attended college, forget graduated, but Mr. James told me I could do it and I never forgot that support and I still appreciate it to this day.”

Talton has always fancied himself as the Renaissance Man type. “In high school I was in all the music groups, vocal and instrumental. I was also in the school plays. I have always liked to challenge myself with my creative talents. The saxophone was my main instrument, but I also played percussion, when it was needed. And I had my art. I have done well free lancing with my artwork. I have made works for many affluent clients around the country.”

“I have had an interesting life,” he says. “I have so many people to thank, going all the way back to Monroe City with Mr. James taking the time to groom me when I was young, telling me what I needed to do and encouraging me to do it."

After three years at the University in Kirksville, Talton transferred to Central Missouri State University, where he became the first in his family to earn a diploma. His bachelor’s degree was in graphic arts. “What do I do now,” he says he remembers thinking?

“My grandmother had told me back when I started high school that she wanted to live long enough to see me graduate college. She told me there were none of her grandkids who had a diploma, and I was her last and best hope. She was there at my graduation from Central Missouri State. I remember in the parking lot there in Warrenburg, after the ceremony her and I got into an argument. She wanted me to move back to Monroe City. ‘And I said do what? Cook in a restaurant? Pluck turkey’s over at the slaughter plant? Clean public rest rooms?’ There was just nothing in Monroe City at that time for a young black man with a college degree. I got a job in Kansas City with Macy’s Department Stores working in their graphic arts department. I eventually was transferred to Washington DC where I married. In 1996, I was ready for a change, and I moved to Atlanta, and I’ve been here ever since.”

"Growing up my family called me Bill. I have always preferred to be addressed as William. When I got to the public school in 5th grade the white kids started calling me ‘Willie,’ and it stuck. In the yearbook, I am called Willie.” 

Raising his voice, he went on: "I never seriously considered ever moving back to Monroe City. I didn’t want to be Willie. I wanted to be William.”

Leaving Monroe City made Mr. William Talton. He isn't inclined to look back.

Part 3

"It is perhaps the manifestation of football that for so many of its old warriors it serves as a journey through a past that can never truly be chased down, only sought - the pieces always too small to fit old memories."

Proctor Smith

Proctor Smith passed away in 2007 at the age of 56 years. His death was due to blood clots in his lungs and came as a total shock to the close-knit Monroe City community. Smith was renowned in the only town he ever called home for his size, strength, and his easy-going demeanor. He graduated from Monroe City in May 1970 as a lineman who earned post season conference honors and the school's stellar track and field program's record holder in the shotput. 

His son, Proctor Smith JR, today, lives in Rochester, New York. The 40-year-old remembers all the fun times he had as a kid with his dad, especially attending Monroe City high school football games. “My dad was the biggest fan you’d ever see,” says his namesake and only offspring. “He never talked about himself playing the sport in high school, he never talked much about himself at all. But I heard from lots of people that he was a very good player. For long as I can remember, he took me to the (high school football) games with him.”

Proctor was always the biggest kid in his class, over 300 pounds by his senior year of high school, but it took Harold Holland talking to Proctor's parents to convince them to let their son give the sport a try. Holland remembers, with a laugh, that the massive Smith's parents were afraid he would get hurt. 

As an adult, Smith worked for years at the local Roby Lumberyard. A gentle giant, he always sported a big smile. "He really enjoyed work,” he son states. “My dad enjoyed seeing people. He was just always a very happy man, and he was very content living in Monroe City. You could look all day long and you will never find anyone that has a bad memory of my dad. He was everyone’s friend.”

As often happens with reflection on mundane times spent with departed loved ones, the familiar becomes poignant. “I miss the little things that were between us, like just saying good morning to him,” says his son. “He died way too young, and I miss him every day.” 

Marvin Robinson was the team’s star. No question about it. One teammate recalls him as the squad’s “steering wheel,” a high correlation between dazzle and talent. And he had leadership skills. He was the 1969-70 Monroe City High School student body president. His list of senior accomplishment in the 1969-70 yearbook directory is longer than the Great Depression. 

Marvin Robinson

Marvin, teammates remember, had it all: the physical skills of a superb athlete, a fearless dare devil’s temperament, and the convincing personality of an award-winning salesman. A little bit cocky, maybe, but he could back it up. He had speed, an abundance of quickness, good hands and remarkable jumping ability. Many of his old teammates will swear today that he was even better cracking heads on defense than he was when running away from would be tacklers on offense.

He wasn’t the fastest Washington alum to ever tote the football for the Monroe City Panthers. The nod the locals say goes to Ronnie Washinton. Marvin wasn’t the hardest to tackle, either. No one in their right mind took on his 235-pound teammate Robbie Joe Holliday above the waist. The most explosive at hitting a hole was Robbie Joe’s older brother Orvile "Ducky" Holliday. Still, for all that Marvin Robinson was not, what he was, argumentatively, when each part is consummately added to the whole, is the best overall athlete Washington School ever sent the Panthers way. 

Marvin Robinson was a star on the high school basketball court, as well. As a senior he led the Panthers to a 26-4 mark that saw the team advance all the way to the state quarterfinals. He was sought out of college by the Cincinatti Reds baseball team. And he had the DNA of a champion in him. His dad, Buck Robinson had played baseball in the old Negro Leagues with the legendary Kansas City Monarchs and during WWII established several military track and field sprinting records. 

But football was Marvin's game. He was as natural a football player as natural could ever come packaged. He had the graceful stride of the effortless sprinter turned running back. Natural. He had good and reliable hands, perfect for the out of the backfield pass receiver. Natural. He was named all-state, he was no fluke.  His teammates remember that when he carried the ball, he slashed and juked like no other in the area, for three seasons dominating the local gridiron with the majesty of a King.

Today, Robinson is hard to track down. He blows off several requests for interviews. Leave a message, a friend in town suggested, but be forewarned, you are more likely to get a call back from the Amish. Then a third attempt secures a conversation in which Robinson is most gracious with his thoughts and generous with his time.

Today, when pressed Robinson is vague about what he had done over the years of his adult life. What he does share is cryptic at best, but to an outsider, non-sequential. 

Today he lives, he says quietly, on what is left of the family’s Monroe City farming homestead. His financial philosophy is a simple one, learned from his dad - don't spend what you don't have and save what you do. He likens his return to his childhood roots to a unintentional brush with Zen Buddhism - one can find it interesting, but of no significant meaning. He, and the rest of us, he says, would do well to embrace the now. To revel in the past is to snipe at the present. Robinson prides himself on looking forward, not backwards. 

There is no revisionist nor cavalier cast to his remembrances, more a 'it is what it is,' flippant nod. “You ask me to speak on something 54 years ago. I am a strong believer that the past is just that, the past! I seek to believe that today is the present and tomorrow is the future. I've always been the one who looks forward with the vision God has given me.”

For years he was way ahead of the curve, but the years and the curve have finally caught up with him. When he came home to Monroe City, after many years away, all those touchdowns really didn't matter. However, on this day at least, he was willing to reminisce. 

He values his 1969 Monroe City football experience. “I am thankful and grateful to have played with those members as teammates, coaches, managers. That experience led the way into my journey through life has taken me, taken me in many different directions. I know that my records were made to be broken and I am happy that I have provided a target for so many great kids now coming behind me.”

69-70 Yearbook

Robinson fondly recalls a 2011 conversation he had with the iconic former Superintendent of Schools, Galen Lankford. The man who had led the Monroe City Schools during Robinson's high school days was now nearly 100 years old and in a nursing home, when Robinson stopped by for an impromptu meeting. It was a surreal exchange that day, but Robinson found the affirmation he sought from a man he respected.

“We enjoyed our time together that day and a had few laughs as to who had the better stats,” amongst a long list of past Panther greats whose names Robinson floated by a man who had years before served as his mentor. “He said to me, ‘Marvin, you have taken your athletics talents as far as it would go, and you have experienced life in many ways. Marvin, you took the sport to another level. You have traveled farther down that road to success.’”

“Marvin was a very talented kid,” his high school coach Charlie Welker summarizes on the abilities of his star running back. “He was also a very good basketball player. We didn’t have baseball in the high school, but I know he was a star on the area summer teams, even playing against men when he was still in high school, and I remember he had some professional interest in baseball after he graduated from college.”

Welker says to this day he does not understand why Robinson’s gridiron talents did not carry him farther than Kirksville, MO. “I don’t know that he ever knew how great his potential was. He did well at Northeast Missouri, but I really felt like he could have played at a higher level. From talking with the coaches up there, they thought he had professional football abilities. We lost track of each other over that period and I’m not sure what really happened with his career not going farther than it did. But no doubt, he was a very talented young man. He could really run with the football.”

Tom Watson was the 69' team's quarterback. "You see, a lot of us small town guys lived (vicariously) through a kid with the talent Marvin had," recalls Watson. "We were all pulling for a guy like Marvin, hoping he would make it. Not too many come through a small town like this and do. I can remember breaking the huddle and coming to the line of scrimmage, glancing back and seeing Marvin and Robbie Joe (Holliday) lined up behind me and thinking, wow, 'how many small-town teams have two guys like this!' And with Robbie Joe I would usually (discreetly) point the direction he needed to go for the play I had called," Watson says with a laugh.

Robbie Joe Homecoming 69

Perhaps Marvin Robinson fell victim to an era of racial quotas in big time college football. In 1969, the University of Missouri had only nine football scholarship black athletes. Black players at elite college football programs in 1969 did not ride the bench. If you were one of the few black faces in a major college program team picture, in those days, you were a star. Otherwise, you matriculated down the gridiron totem pole to Division II smaller schools like Northeast Missouri State. At the school in Kirksville, Robinson logged a great career as a running back and a kick returner. After graduation and despite not having played baseball since high school summer's, he was offered a tryout and then a contract by the Cincinnati Reds.

In 1974, Robinson was drafted by the Chicago Fire of the upstart World Football League. The league attempted to break in on the monopoly the National Football League held, by signing marquee named players to huge no cut contracts. Larry Csonka, Jim Kick and Paul Warfield, three of the biggest names on the Miami Dolphins undefeated 1972 Super Bowl champs, for example, signed record contracts with the WFL's Memphis franchise. They never played a down in the WFL. The league lasted only one and a half seasons, folding mid schedule in 1974. Robinson was chosen in round 30 of the league's initial 1973 draft and was cut in training camp.

"Through all the frustrations in my life I've realized it could have been worse,” summarizes Robinson. “I have a lot more than most people. I've been fortunate and blessed."

Ben White

Fifty-three years after the last whistle blew on his career as a player on the Monroe City football field, Ben White is still contributing to the program. He has for many years ran the scoreboard clock at home football games. “They just won’t let me retire,” he says, with a chuckle.

White says it was crushing when Coach Welker called him into his office on September 26, 1970, and told the now senior he could no longer play for the Panthers. He had that day turned 20 years of age and was now by state high school activities association rules, ineligible. White says he knew there could be a problem, but he held hope in an appeal the school was filing on his behalf. The plea was turned down. He was too old to play.

"I lived, at the time, to play football," he says. Suddenly, what was closest to White in life, was ripped from him, left now searching for a purpose that wasn't there.

“It was tough, but I still stuck with the team,” he says. “They had first made me a manager, and then I moved up into the press box (during games) with an assistant coach and helped scout and also spot.”

White was a junior in 1969 and a backup running back on offense and starting safety on defense. “I played behind Marvin and Robbie Joe, on offense” he recalls. “Marvin was a very hard-nosed and talented running back. He was hard to bring down and that was if you could catch him. Robbie Joe was just, even as a sophomore, a giant on the playing field. He would much rather have run over you than he would have run around you. It was no disgrace to back up those two.”

After high school, White went to work in the local diecasting factories. He worked off and on for both the Diemakers and the Diecasting operations in Monroe City. By 2009, both were closed, victims to a slumping world economy.

Forced into early retirement, White has stayed active in the community supporting both his church and the local school district. He has grown over the years into a well-respected town elder.

Today, White is quick to pound the town sprit drum for his Panthers and quick to boast that his hometown has self-proclaimed itself, 'Title Town.' “I learned in high school from our coaches that you always put the team first. If you win or lose, you do it as a team.” 

He says that lesson has helped him in life, to be a team player. It is a refreshing angle of thought. Hall of Fames are too often barnacled with athletes who were able to hang up an impressive number of personal achievements which, on the face of the record, meant little whatsoever to the losing teams they played for. Better to play the understudy for a Broadway play than the shinning lead for an afterthought production, is how White sees it.

“Oh, this is my home,” White says today, of Monroe City. “And it always will be. I am blessed that my health still allows me to stay very active in both my church, and in supporting the community youth, especially through the athletic programs.”

High school athletics will give us ample occasions when the outcome is secondary to the moment, when the contest itself is more revealing than the result. White says that is why he still runs the home game scoreboard at nearly 70 years of age. "Winning counts, but so does being part of a team, and by (extension) part of this town. Some years we will win a lot of games, some years not so many. But running out on to the field and representing us, Monroe City Black and Gold, that is why I still do this. It is what is important about living in a small town."

Harold Holland

Harold Holland was a junior on the 1969 team. He also remembers being, “the fastest guy in the Clarence Cannon Conference. Ask any of them. They will not lie. Nobody could beat me in the 100 and the 220, or the 440, as well. I won all three at the (conference) meet.”  Holland came from good sprinting stock. His older brother Robert had as a freshman also swept the same three sprint races at the Clarence Cannon Conference meet.

Holland claims to at one time have held the school record in all the sprints, a speed trifecta. Several of his old teammates today confirm his memory is accurate. Holland says nobody could catch him on the football field once he was a stride ahead. When his swagger is challenged, he admits, ok, maybe Olympic sprinters John Carlos and John Smith from the 1968 black glove medal stand salute, could have, but neither would be found in the defensive backfield of any Monroe City 1969 opponent, he accurately points out. “They should have given me the ball more,” he says today, with a bit of bitterness and a bit of “what could have been” in his voice.

Like the age issues faced by his teammate Ben Smith, Holland did not complete his Panther playing career. “I turned 20 during my senior season,” Holland says. “I got held back a couple of grades over at Washington School. Looking back now, I wish that hadn’t happened. I just needed to be pushed a little bit harder, not held back. I am still resentful over that.”

Holland to this day feels his talents went untapped and lost. “I enjoyed football,” he remembers. “But I think kind of like it was in the classroom, I didn’t get pushed as hard as I needed to be. I was fast but I also had some good guys playing in front of me, Marvin and Robbie Joe and I didn’t get to run with the ball much. When I did nobody could catch me. I heard later that there were colleges that were interested in me, but nobody ever told me (of the interest) and the college coaches were never put in contact with me. That, also, still to this day bothers me as I wonder what I could’ve done.”

Turning 20 and no longer allowed to play sports, Holland dropped out of school and soon had the Vietnam era local draft board knocking at his door. “I was drafted,” he says, “and my (initial) orders were to Vietnam." He feared while his buddies were attending the prom, he would be hunkered down in some southeast Asia rice paddy. "That was not a good time to be going to Vietnam. Three days later, and I have no idea why, my orders were changed, and I was sent to Germany. Looking back, for whatever reason, I was blessed.”

The military proved to be a good fit. Holland said he needed and learned to like the discipline the Army provided. Holland stayed in the military for 22 years. He mustered out in the mid-1990s with a military pension and settled in the Kansas City, MO area where he still resides today. 

Calvin Talton

“I went to work as a security guard and I finally retired for good in 2010,” he says. “I really don’t have much connection anymore in Monroe City.” Holland was a member of a large and talented athletic family, a third child of 10. “My siblings have either passed away or moved away. Nothing back there in Monroe City (today) for me.”

Calvin Talton was a sophomore on the 1969 football team. Today he resides on a farm several miles outside of Monroe City.

Talton says he was your typical kid, never in trouble but also never thinking much about the future. “I just took it day to day,” he says. “I had a good childhood. I enjoyed my friends and really liked school. Not so much books and studying, but sports and hanging out. The social part, I guess. I was in no hurry to grow up.”

He clearly recalls his mother laying down a post graduate gauntlet of demand. It was 1972 and she announced it was time to grow up. “I graduated high school on May 22 and laid around until June 8, just hanging out and drinking beer with my buddies. I remember the morning of June 8, my mom walked in my room and said, ‘you’re either going in the Army or you are getting a job.’ That day I got on with the Burlington Northern Railroad. Later they were bought by Santa Fe, and I stayed until I took a medical retirement in 2003.”

Up until the past year Talton supplemented his pension by helping on area farms. “For the last year I’ve had some health problems,” he says, “and I really haven’t been doing a whole lot. I spent five weeks in the hospital in Columbia and just got out recently. It was a long five weeks. I feel like I’m getting my strength back every day. I hope to soon be back to doing something useful.”

Talton observes how the world has changed. “Often I have to stop and remember how old I am,” he says. “Wow. Where have the years gone. That football season (1969) was over 50 years ago. It is amazing how many details I remember. When I was in the hospital recently, I had a whole lot of time to think, to reflect on my life. I loved being part of the team and how people around school and in town would stop you and ask about the team or tell you that you had played a good game. I have had some good things happen in my life and that experience is one of the best. I am glad I lived it.”

Talton recalls how close he was with his teammates, especially his Washington School friends. “We were really a very cohesive group,” he says today. “We knew each other, and we supported each other. We would even fight like brothers fight, but we always had each other ‘s back. It was such a diverse group amongst us so far as our personalities were concerned. Marvin was very confident. Howard was very quiet. But they were all good people and even after all these years, I still stay in contact with most of them and we’re still there for each other.”

James White, older brother of Ben White, is a man who does not like change. “I was born in Monroe City, went through Washington school until we moved over to the public school,” he says. “I graduated and spent the next five years working in the diecasting factory there in Monroe City. I never have liked change. I moved away from Monroe City, but never very far. I have stayed connected and still have many friends and family over there. It is still my hometown and I go back often.”

After his stint at the local diecasting factory, White decided to move to Quincy Illinois for a better job. It would prove to be the only move of his life. “And I am too old to move again.” He’s lived in the river town, 40 miles from Monroe City, since 1975. Now retired, he and his wife are taking life easy. He has two sons that both live in the St. Louis area and two granddaughters.

James White

“Monroe City was a great hometown,” he says today. “A great place to grow up. We had good teachers, we had good coaches, and we had a good school. I’ve always felt very fortunate.”

White was a three-sport athlete. He was a starting offensive and defensive end on the gridiron, a stalwart on a 26-4 basketball team that made it to the state Class M quarterfinals and a relay runner on four consecutive track and field conference champions. 

Athlete specialization, a nationwide issue today, can be deadly in a small high school where numbers are critical. But not in White’s years as a Panther. “We played all sports. When one ended, we turned in our equipment and checked out our gear for the next sport. Our coaches encouraged us to stay out for whatever sport was in season. That way we stayed out of trouble. I am glad our coaches were like that. I have heard of coaches who try to keep players only playing their sport. I don’t like that and feel fortunate our coaches were not like that. You know, when you are in high school your coach has a lot of influence over you. I would have missed a lot if I had had selfish coaches who only cared about their sport. Our coaches were not like that.”

White remembers Coach Welker as a good coach. “At the end of each season,” he recalls, “Coach would have us, the team, over to his house for dinner. He was very easy-going, most of the time. But when he got mad, you knew it.”

“I thought about playing in college,” White says today, “but I had a bad knee, and once my senior year was done, I’d had enough.”

“My best friend as a kid and all the way through school was Robbie Joe Holiday. He was just a good friend. We were always together. I don’t think I ever saw Robbie Joe mad about anything, except once. Harold (Holland) was a fighter when we were growing up. He liked to pick on Robbie Joe who was younger. In junior high Robbie Joe grew about 6 inches in one year. One day I guess he just had enough, and he just popped Harold a good one. I don’t think Harold ever picked on him again.”  

Talton laments the demise of his once best friend. “Robbie Joe stayed around for a couple of years after high school, but he was drifting, changing, you could just see it. He moved to Rock Island, and things did not go well from there. It’s unfortunate, because we were so inseparable when we were young, but we really did lose track of each other once he moved up to Rock Island.”

Week 7 saw the Panthers travel to North Shelby for what was anticipated as a breather game. Monroe City would be going for their 6th straight win and the Panthers were now ranked fourth in the class AA statewide poll of the fall. Football interest in town was reaching a fevered pitch.

Monroe City scored on the third play of the game and never looked back. Marvin Robinson sprinted 37 yards around the right end for the touchdown. The two-point conversion was good, and Monroe City lead 8-0.

The home-field Raiders gave up a fumble on their second play from scrimmage as a Robbie Holliday hit dislodged the ball. Melvin Robinson scooped up the pigskin from his safety position and sprinted down the right-side line for his second 37-yard scoring play, one on offense and one on defense, both in the game’s first four plays from scrimmage. Quarterback Watson hit Jim White with the conversion pass, and MC led, under three minutes into the game, 16-0.

North Shelby received the ensuing kickoff, but on the third play of their second drive of the game, again turned the ball over. Robinson intercepted a pass and motored down the right sideline where he was tackled on the opposition’s 12-yard line. Holliday, on the first play from scrimmage then bulled his way into the end zone, and after the conversion had failed, the Panthers were up a the end of the first quarter, 22-0. They had run only three offensive plays from scrimmage. 

One tally in the second quarter raised the halftime score to 28-0 and earned the first teamers a restful second half. North Shelby did not score until the last play of the game and Monroe City’s backups played well and secured what the Black and Gold needed, a non-dramatic, injury free 44-6 win.

On Halloween, the Panthers would play their last home game of the season. Coach Welker stressed throughout the week’s practices to not look past the overmatched opponent, Knox County. He feared a trap game if his team had their focus on the upcoming showdown with South Shelby. He in his pregame talk told his seniors they needed to go out in style. Obviously, they listened. The home team breezed to an easy 40-6 win. The Panthers now stood 7-1 on the year, 6-1 in the Clarence Cannon Conference.

Homecoming 69

Knox County had no answer for the powerful sophomore locomotive Robbie Joe Holliday. The 235-pound fullback had a monster game gaining 341 rushing yards. Holliday thrilled the home crowd with three touchdowns. On the game’s third play from scrimmage, Holliday rambled 49 yards to put MC on the board. His running mate Robinson then scored from 11 yards out to give his team a quick 14-0 lead. A Watson touchdown pass midway through the second quarter staked the home team to 22-0 halftime lead.

Monroe City opened the second half with a Robinson 2-yard touchdown run. The conversion was good, and the score ballooned to 30-0. Coach Walker substituted liberally in the last quarter of the game. Holliday capped his big night with two fourth quarter touchdown runs of 54 and 80 yards. Knox County scored in the game’s final seconds and Monroe City had a dominating win. The Panthers picked up a season high 490 yards on offense.

The winner takes all season defining showdown with South Shelby was finally at hand. The victor would earn one of the four slots in the state class AA playoffs.  The battle shaped up as a classic - a cross-county rivalry brawl between two outstanding teams who prided themselves on tough, physical play, each in a position to gain greatly from a victory.  But it was not. 

After the game Coach Welker went into coachspeak- "it wasn't our night. The best team won." He called the Panthers Highway 36 rival a smooth-running machine. They scored on an AWOL Monroe City defense, early, easy and often. The first three times the Cardinals had the ball they stuck it in the end zone on runs of 40, 30 and 5 yards. The Panthers produced only one first down in the first quarter. After only 12 minutes of the much-hyped showdown, Monroe City had dug themselves into a deep 22-0 hole.

South Shelby scored again to open the second quarter and with a 28-0 lead, the drama was over early.  Or was it? Monroe City finally sprung to life the last 8 minutes of the first half, scoring two touchdowns and keeping the Cardinals out of the end zone. Having cut the lead to 28-16, Coach Welker said after the game that he thought at halftime his team still had life in it. The Cardinals quickly snubbed out any such possibilities, dominating the third quarter with three touchdowns and led entering the final stanza, 50-16. 

For good measure South Shelby kicked a field goal in the fourth quarter and Robinson scored a meaningless Panther touchdown in the last minute of the game to bring the final score to 53-24. The game was a mismatch. The South Shelby Cardinals dominated from the opening kickoff to the final whistle. The only bright spot statistically for MC was sophomore Holliday who ran for 142 yards on 25 carries. South Shelby was a powerhouse who would be knocked off by Malden in a mid-November state semifinal game. The following year they would win the state title. The previous fall, in 1968, they had drubbed the Panthers 53 to 12. 

Following the season, the state sportswriters voted Robinson and Holliday to the All-District team. Robinson was named first team All-State. 

Robinson 1969 season statistics, on both sides of the ball, were ghoulish. The multi-talented player did everything for the Panthers but drive the team bus. For the season on defense the 180-pound Robinson logged 68 unassisted tackles, was party to 56 assisted tackles. He notched 7 pass interceptions and recovered two opponents’ fumbles. On offense he was even more dominant rushing for 771 yards on 87 carries for an average of 8.8 yards per attempt. He completed four of six passes for 178 yards and three touchdowns. Robinson hauled in 8 passes for 248 yards and generated 1881 yards of total offense. The senior found the endzone 15 times for 90 points. He returned 19 punts for 312 yards and 14 kickoffs for 372 yards.

The Panthers were an offensive juggernaut, never held to less than three touchdowns in a game. The ’69 team strung together seven straight wins in the middle of the schedule, all bookended around two losses, 28-22 to Mark Twain to open the season and a year ending 53-24 setback to powerful South Shelby. 

It was a solid, if not spectacular season. The 1969 Panthers were no one's choice for a homecoming game pushover and produced a workman like seven-win season. But as Hillary Clinton can attest to, winning the Big One is what matters, what will be remembered most. 

We are growing old. Everything changes, nothing changes. Despite the increasing space time will put between the past and now, the past is never far away. Sure, life should be about moving on. But still, it is sad how little we learn from the past, how often the issues that divide us in 2023 are indistinguishable from 1969. 

There were nine back in 1969.  A couple were outstanding players, and all contributed to the success of a good high school football team. Two died young. All have maintained ties, albeit some limited, to their hometown, to each other and to their former coach.

Of the seven survivors, three still live in Monroe City. Only one has never left. Two others live in Missouri, another in nearby Quincy, IL and one out of state in Georgia. The nine of them have a total of sixteen children and numerous grandchildren. Five, in the last two years have had major surgeries. One has debilitating diabetes. One served and retired from the military. Four have earned college degrees. They all have memories, mostly fond, about that season, their hometown, and the teammates they still hold close.

Let’s not over-hype this. If the 1969 Monroe City football team had not played nine black Washinton School alum – a fact that all agree helped greased the grooves for the town’s integration - would Monroe City High School today have a black principal (as they do)? Certainly, yes. Humanity is by nature progressive, always seeking a better way, a higher ground. In due time, it was coming - just as mankind would have taken flight without the Wright brothers and teenagers would have rocked around the clock without Bill Haley. 

In the same year that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to spearhead the nonviolent struggle against segregation; Jim White, Marvin Robinson, and Proctor Smith entered the first grade at the segregated Washington School. Thus began a journey of involuntary foot soldiers on the cusp of a revolution that would lead to the downfall of an evil social policy.

For these nine, some found their talents were no match for life’s frailties. Some have lived harder lives than others. One today willingly admits to spending too much youthful time hanging with the wrong crowd. All say the ebb and flow of systemic racism and how they dealt with it has guided and shaped their adult lives, making them the men they are today. None competed beyond high school at an athletic level higher than collegiate Division II. A few have football stats to fall back on, the majority, just stories.

But for all seven survivors, the memories have lingered for over a half century; memories of a youthful fall season of high school football when nothing seemed impossible—when a small town saw them as big men, a winning team, and brothers - white and black. This is not a "soul in conflict, men racked by doubt" kind of story. The survivors, to a one, know who they are. So, let the rest of the world spin back to the future, they will always have the Fall of 69. And yes, for the record, these nine all those years ago did help to change for the better their little slice of the world.