The Game of Change

“From our side of things, the college basketball standpoint, this game is equivalent to the march on Washington, or to Little Rock. How powerful is that?”

Shaka Smart

This is a nice little story about defying  tyranny, of good triumphing over the iniquity of evil; with a small slice of pathos to arouse one’s sense of fair play, served up by the most unlikely of heroes – a segregation busting tobacco chewing self-professed Mississippi Redneck with the apt nickname of Old Magnolia Mouth.

Finally, the Game

The world of modern major college athletics, especially the cash cows of every major collegiate athletic department - football and men’s basketball – are today all about big business and big money. To deny so is just refusing to face reality. The term student-athlete on most NCAA Division 1 campuses is an oxymoron.

However, even against such a callous backdrop of cynicism, through the NCAA’s thick layer of cash, will ever so often pop through a reminder of how powerful for the good of humanity athletics can be, defying cultural gridlock by unifying diverse groups on the level playing fields of athletic competition.

Before Madness took control of March, the NCAA basketball tournament was just a nice cozy little post season get together to honor teams who had completed good conference seasons. No national TV, no insane fanatic adulation by the masses, no million dollar payouts to universities and coaches, no coach losing his job for failure to garner an invitation to “the big dance;” just a nice little tournament. Back in 1963 the National Invitational Tournament held at Madison Square Garden - today reserved for those losers not invited to the NCAA post season party – was held by many in higher esteem than the NCAA’s event.

Close from tip to buzzer

Mississippi State’s University’s outstanding men’s basketball teams of 1959, 1961 and 1962, nationally ranked and Southeast Conference Champions of each year, victorious over the legendary Adolph Rupp coached Kentucky Wildcats, had turned down invitations to the NCAA tournament and thus the chance to compete for a national title, giving the NCAA selection committee a blow off that seems hard to believe by today’s standards. The reason: the state of Mississippi, at that time, did not allow its student athletes to participate against racially integrated teams. The segregationist state leaders considered allowing whites and blacks to compete against each other in a basketball contest morally corrupt.

Rupp, ironically a known segregationist himself, had with the blessing of the state of Kentucky, no problem waltzing his second place team in through the back door and into the NCAA dance as the Southeast Conference representative - a replacement on the bracket for the balking Mississippi State Bulldogs.

In the Deep South of the early 1960’s, the gauntlet of racism had been dropped and the line of discrimination clearly drawn; segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. To take a stance less conservative was viewed as political suicide for a southern politician. Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, an avowed segregationist, was too astute of a politician not to hang his hat with the popular racist views of the time. It would be 1967 before the Southeast Conference had it first black basketball player and 1968 before any league school gave a football scholarship to a black athlete.

 Kentucky's Adolph Rupp

However, by 1963, even in the most entrenched bastion of segregation – Mississippi - the winds of racial inclusion were beginning to blow. They would soon reach full mast. The previous fall, in 1962, black student James Meredith enrolled at the University of Mississippi, albeit with the help of the US Army and the state national guard, integrating Mississippi’s flag ship and previously all white university, located in Oxford, 90 miles south of the Mississippi State campus in Starkville. Less than a month after the completion of the 1963 NCAA basketball national tournament, Martin Luther King Jr. would write his famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," an essay that became an anthem for the civil rights movement.

Then along came Babe “Old Magnolia Mouth” McCarthy to set the athletic world of Jim Crow segregation on its ear.

Babe McCarthy, with his so-called "honey-dew Mississippi drawl,” had carved out a niche for his basketball Mississippi State Bulldogs in a state that had previously given faint notice to the sport, relegating round ball to a mere winter diversion in the eyes of the state’s fanatical football fans. Three times previous, in four years, Babe and his team had been left on the sidelines seething when denied their due by the segregation laws of the state, forced to watch his personal nemesis, Adolph Rupp and his runner up Wildcats seize the playoff spot his Bulldogs had rightly won on the court. McCarthy vowed to his team it would not happen again in 1963. “Win your way onto to the bracket again and this time I will take care of getting you there,” was his pre-season promise to his tall and talented cagers.

Race mixing 

McCarthy had always been the happy go lucky type, the guy who could come into a small southern farm town as a stranger and within weeks have a seat of honor around the wood stove down at the local feed store. Born in 1923, raised in the depths of
the Great Depression in one of the poorest states’ in the Union, Babe had the gift of gab, dripping with rural Mississippi charm. But, dismissing him as just another good ole boy looking for an easy job in the shade would be a gross under calculation of the slick McCarthy’s grit and ambition. 

A right out of college job as an oil salesman didn’t turn out to be McCarty’s appropriate life’s calling. All his life, Babe never was one to have much luck with money. He had little time for such picayune concerns. He was the kind of guy that could go into Fort Knox with a grain scoop and a gunnysack and come out with his wallet missing.

But Ole Babe did turn out to be a fine basketball coach for the town of Tupelo, MS, about the time another young local boy with long sideburns and gyrating hips, singing about a hound dog, was just starting to make a name for himself playing that fancy guitar of his down at the skating rink on Saturday nights. Yes, Babe was a fine coach in Tupelo --for the junior high team.

 1963 National Champs

A graduate of Baldwyn, Mississippi High School, class of 1940, Babe spent three years as a student at Mississippi State University. Upon early graduation in 1943, McCarthy volunteered for the Army and service in World War II as a transport pilot. He returned to Baldwyn following the war’s 1945 conclusion to coach the local high school basketball team from 1946 to 1950, his team winning the state championship in 1948.   

McCarthy cut his coaching teeth as a young 20 something gung-ho pied piper for his hometown high school. He preached effort, team work and accountability. No excuses. The play of his Bearcats became for McCarthy a reflection upon his performance as a coach. It may be an imperfect world, he told his boys, but within the confines of the Baldwyn gymnasium, Babe would accept nothing short of perfection.

In 1951, during the hot days of the escalating Korean War, Babe joined the newly established military branch of the Air Force. Over a three year hitch, Babe coached a Memphis Air Force basketball team to third place in the worldwide Air Force tournament. From 1953-1955, returning to civilian life, Babe bade his time as coach of the Junior High team in Tupelo.

It seemed a long shot in 1955, when at age 31, a man who had never played college basketball and whose last coaching experience had been at the junior high level, applied for the head basketball coaching position at Mississippi State University. But that didn’t deter the confident McCarthy. Still, Babe’s ebullience and self-salesmanship, aside, it was a surprise when the Bulldogs’ Athletic Director Dudy Noble hired Babe, claiming later that he admired and was sold by the fast talking McCarthy’s boldness. Babe had told Noble at that 1955 interview, “if I don’t win big within three years, you don’t have to fire me, I will quit.” Noble told several in the athletic department that the new hoops coach he had just hired, “sure does have a mouth on him.”

The walls tumble

But, with the squalid condition of the basketball program at a college with an already inferiority complex over Ole Miss, the state’s rich man’s University over in Oxford, hiring such an unlikely candidate really wasn’t that far-fetched. Applicants were not lining up three deep in 1955 to be the basketball coach at Mississippi State. When Noble’s judgment was challenged on why he hired a coach with such limited on court coaching experience, the AD replied: “The team is playing like junior high players; I thought they needed a junior high coach.”

Babe hit the ground running, holding true to his promise to quickly build a winner in Starkville. His teams showed steady improvement. A 12-12 record in Babe’s rookie season of 1956 was a harbinger of good times to come.

 More than a game

McCarthy’s Bulldogs followed the promising start with marks of 17-8 in 1957 and 20-5 in 1958. MSU moved from a sixth place SEC finish in 1956 to 3^rd in both 1957 and 1958. He had the Bulldogs poised perfectly for a big year in 1959 and pounce they did. Lead by future Boston Celtics star Bailey Howell, the Bulldogs rolled to  a 24-1 record, a top five national ranking and the securing of an undisputed Southeastern Conference Championship, rarefied company for such a previously unheralded program. 

Before sending his team onto the floor for the decisive 1959 conference showdown with the arrogant Kentucky five, Babe told his confident team, "Now, let's cloud up and rain all over 'em." The college basketball world was in awe of how quickly “Old Magnolia Mouth” had delivered on his seemingly outlandish promises of four years before. After his team’s impressive 65-58 defeat of Kentucky, clinching for MSU the SEC championship, Babe boasted to the national press, “We can beat anybody in the country on our home court.”

The crusty old Rupp took from the start exception to the boasting of the cock-sure upstart young coach over at Starkville, taking personal affront to his impetuous barbs. McCarthy became a pain in the backside of the Baron of the Bluegrass, a man who had over the previous 30 years built at Kentucky the nation’s unquestioned top program. Always maintaining a saturnine and brooding front, Rupp’s aloofness intimidated many a coach, but not the spotlight loving and free swinging Babe who showed no respect or fear of the Adolph Rupp mystique. Contrary, he went out of his way in his gamesmanship to irritate Rupp.

In 1958, when Rupp’s Kentucky team beat Mississippi State in Lexington, the Baron ordered a black wreath nailed to the door of the visiting team’s dressing room. After the game, Babe smiled and then removed the wreath, taking it with him on the return trip back to Starkville. He told his team, we will just file this one away for future reference.

The next season, McCarthy had the home crowd whipped to a frenzy for Kentucky’s visit to Starkville for a rematch. The inspired MSU crowd (mob) did its part from the opening tip, harassing Kentucky with cowbells and students beating on plow shares. The clamorous cheering section, like none ever seen before in Starkville for a basketball game, had rowdy students jammed into the old MSU field house from the floor to the rafters.

Mississippi State won the game and Babe ordered the wreath he had taken in defeat off his team’s locker room door in Lexington the previous year to now be nailed to the dressing room door of the vanquished and dethroned Wildcats. The next year, in Lexington, MSU would beat Kentucky again. The State students, showing no respect in his home arena for the man considered the day’s top college hoops mentor, left a dead skunk under Rupp’s chair.

McCarthy followed up the breakthrough season in 1959 with Southeastern Conference titles in both 1961 and 1962. In all three seasons’, MSU turned down the invitation to represent the SEC as its representative to the NCAA’s National Tournament.

 Babe McCarthy

The following March, Governor Barnett’s marching orders to the President of Mississippi State University, Dean Colvard, were once again clear and cut to the racist bone: the again Southeastern Conference champion Bulldogs, with a sparkling 1963 regular season record of 24-1 and a number 6 national ranking, were forbidden to cross the state lines of Mississippi with the intent of playing a basketball game against an integrated team. To give some judicial muscle to his directive, one widely rumored that McCarthy’s team this time intended to defy, the Governor enlisted the help of another powerful state segregationist, Sen. Billy Mitts, a former Mississippi State student body president. Mitts was instrumental in securing a willing state judge to issue a temporary injunction to prevent the team from leaving the State.

But, back in Starkville a plan of defiance was brewing. McCarthy needed a deceptive scheme to get his team out of the state of Mississippi and to East Lansing, MI and a NCAA Regional match with the Chicago’s University of Loyola and its four black starters.

Tired of his nationally ranked team becoming an annual sacrificial offering on the Segregationist alter of bigotry, McCarthy focused his legendary determination on finding a way of getting around his racist bosses’ edicts. He would, “come hell or high water,” he told his players, find a way to get his 1963 team into the NCAA’s integrated tournament. Borrowing from football’s playbook, Babe pulled off one of the   greatest end runs in sports history and in doing so struck a mighty and symbolic blow to the crumbling Jim Crow laws of the Deep South.

McCarthy would share after the game that he never could have gotten his team out of Mississippi ahead of the serving of the trip quashing subpoena if not for the resolve and courage of a sympathetic University President Dean Colvard, a man determined to take a stand against Jim Crow. To not actively use his position to integrate his University, he believed, made him culpable for the injustice of segregation.

Marion A. Ellis in the 2004 book Dean W. Colvard: Quiet Leader, wrote: "Colvard had several reasons for wanting the team to compete. First of all, it would give a positive boost to the MSU and Mississippi image. Second, he felt the four seniors on the team deserved a chance after having played together for three years and having won the SEC championship all three years."

 Mississippi Gov. Barnett

The progressive thinking Colvard was determined to bring the university out of the Neanderthal days of the Civil War and into the Space age of the 1960’s. He was, however, going to use wise caution in choosing the ground for his upcoming battle with the state’s segregationist politicians. "It had begun to look as if our first major racial issue might pertain to basketball rather than to admissions," Colvard later said. "Although I knew opinion would be divided and feelings would be intense because of the law, I thought I had gained sufficient following that, win or lose, I should take decisive action."

To get their team to Michigan and into the NCAA Regional Tournament, Colvard supported McCarthy in a plan of deception right out of a James Bond movie. He agreed to have McCarthy leave the state a day early, crossing over the Tennessee state line, thus out of the jurisdiction of any Mississippi state court injunction. While McCarthy was laid up in Memphis for the evening, Colvard discreetly traveled to Alabama for a speaking engagement, also conveniently placing him out of the reach of the serving of any legal injunction.

The plan then called for the coach and the university president to meet up the next day in Nashville where the team’s plane would make a quick landing to pick them up for the last leg of the trip to Michigan.

The following morning, in a cloak and dagger move, an MSU assistant coach transported the freshmen basketball team, disguised as the varsity, to the Starkville Airport.

 Right Wing Resistance

The local politician and law enforcement guardians of segregation swallowed the bait, rushing to the public airport, attempting to issue a futile injunction to a freshman team who had no intention of leaving the state. Meanwhile, the real varsity starting five was secretly shuttled to a private undisclosed airport where waiting was a private plane to wing the athletes to East Lansing and a date with destiny. Once the starting five were safely in the air, a call was made to send the reserves to the same secret airport as a second plane was idling in wait for the trip to Michigan.

"Being split up was the nerve-racking part," Mississippi State player Bobby Shows, one of the five starters, remembers. "We didn't have our coach. We didn't have half our team. We didn't know if we were going to be able to play the game. But it wasn't us boys. Don't build us up. It was Dr. Colvard and Coach McCarthy. Those two men had the backbone. When coach told us to jump, we said, ‘how high.’ We were just kids. We obeyed our coaches. So when Babe said, ‘boys if we win it again, we are playing in the tournament, come hell or high water,’ we believed him."

The team had help from an unexpected source. “We didn’t understand the politics,” said Shows. “But we were on pins and needles. Just as we took off, the sheriff drove through the gate. He waited until we were in the air, cause he knew we had switched airports, but turns out he wanted us to go so he was in no hurry to get there before we were in the air.”

 MSU President Colvard

On March 22, 1963, in East Lansing, MI, Jerry Harkness, the African American center for Chicago’s Loyola University Ramblers, stepped into the center jump circle and extended his hand to the waiting Joe Dan Gold, center for the Mississippi State Bulldogs. As the two shook hands, the glare of the popping flashbulbs of the media photographer’s cameras momentarily blinded both men. The official tossed the ball between the two 6’9 players and what was to become known as “the Game of Change” had finally began.

"When those flashbulbs went off -- boom, boom, pop, pop -- you felt the history of it right there," Harkness told ESPN in a 2012 interview, "but I don't think many people even know about it now. That game, if you ask me, was key. I felt like it was the beginning of things turning around in college basketball. I truly believe that. I just don't know how many other people know about it."

For the all-white Bulldog team, the trip to East Lansing and the NCAA Midwest Regional Tournament had followed a twisted path.  The long anticipated game now almost became an afterthought. So relieved to finally be able to compete in the NCAA Tournament, 50 years later, MSU players feel all the drama to just get to the tip off had mentally worn out the Bulldogs, taking the edge off of their game, thus their performance that day was uninspired. “We just put on our tennis shoes and went to go play," said Mississippi State player Bobby Shows.

A Loyola team with four African American starters and ranked at the time 3^rd in the nation had been well prepared and understood the Jim Crow system that their opponents were defying. Later, the Chicago school’s black players said that they respected the resolve of their Dixie opponents.

 You can kill a man
but not an idea

Loyola coach George Ireland, to educate his northern team, had taken his team during the 1962-63 regular season on road trips to the Deep South, entering white only tournaments in Houston and New Orleans. The Ramblers players witnessed discrimination firsthand at restaurants that refused to serve their black members and hotels that refused to house them. In Houston, the team was taunted with chants of “nigger” that cascaded down from the stands. In New Orleans, the team’s black players were not allowed to stay in the same hotel with their white teammates, forced instead to bunk in the homes of black families on the “colored” side of town.

The Ramblers - both black and white alike – used the ugly experience to help them remain focused on their goal, winning a national title. In 1963, Loyola head coach George Ireland said: "I feel Mississippi State has a right to be here, no matter what the segregationists say. They may be the best basketball team in the nation and if they are, they have a right to prove it."

Mississippi State jump to any early lead, but soon the superior floor game of the Ramblers took over. Loyola led 26-19 at the half. Mississippi State went on an 8-4 run to pull to within 30-27 early in the second half but would get no closer. State did make one more sustained run at Loyola. Cutting the lead to four with two minutes to go in the game, the Bulldogs missed on an open field goal attempt. The missed shot was a turning point in the game’s eventual outcome. Bulldog’s radio play by play man Jack Cristil remembered in 2011 that it was "a good shot that just didn't go down. We had to start shooting, and Loyola beat us by 10, 61-51. It was a disappointing loss, but it had been a marvelous opportunity for the young men."

Loyola followed the historically significant win over Mississippi State with another victory in the Regional finals the next evening. The next week they would go on to win the 1963 NCAA national championship, upsetting the defending champion and heavy favorite, the University of Cincinnati and their star black player, Oscar Robertson, in a thrilling 60-58 overtime win.

Loyola guard Ron Miller, in a 2013 interview, reminisced with writer John Thomas: "I remember the (Mississippi State) guys being nice. I remember the guys wishing us luck (after the game), and wanting us to win (the national championship). And during the game it was polite. They played a very hard, very aggressive, very strong defensive game, very clean, and they didn't back off."

In reality, the game itself proved to be anti-climactic. Mixing the two races on the basketball court had resulted in no breakdown of America’s moral fiber; no fights or riots, only the intense play of two teams dueling for post season advancement.

Back in 1963, the NCAA played a third place game in their Regional Tournaments. The Bulldogs reclaimed some pride by defeating another integrated team from the north, Bowling Green of Ohio and their African American star player, Nate Bowman, securing for a trip back to Starkville the consolation trophy. “We are not going home empty handed,” McCarthy told his team.

They for surely were not.

When the team returned to Starkville, MS, they found their reception to be surprisingly warm, almost joyous for a team who had failed. The team’s plane, after sneaking off undercover just several days prior, now landed at an airport packed with cheering fans. Polls taken that spring showed overwhelming support for the team’s defiance of the state law. It was, many now say, the beginning of the end of Jim Crow. “When we got back the cars were lined up for 20 miles with thousands of kids there to see us,” remembers Shows. “The KKK boys were pretty nasty, ugly minority. Most people were not like that. And even though we lost, we came home winners. All of us did.”

The MSU players did not recognize in 1963 that what they had just done was more than a game but an impacting catalysis to a changing way of life in Mississippi. "My dad was pretty much a segregationist until the latter part of my college career," remembered Mississippi State player Bobby Shows. "He wasn't Ku Klux Klan or anything, but he used the N-word in the house. He didn't know any better. But he was 100 percent in favor of me playing in that game. He wanted me to have a chance, and after it was over, I can't remember him ever saying anything derogatory after that."

Both the Coach and the President kept their jobs; no formal censure for their insubordination was ever issued. McCarthy stayed at MSU through the 1966 season, but never again qualified the Bulldogs for the NCAA Tournament. His teams won four SEC titles and he was named SEC coach of the year four times.

For a state that has a long and miserable record on civil rights, the courage that Colvard and McCarthy displayed in their daring defiance of the Mississippi Legislature and diehard segregationist Gov. Ross Barnett; is in many ways one of the states’ few shining historical moments of race based righteousness.

“They say athletics can break down barriers and that game did,” said Chuck Wood, a reserve on the 1963 Loyola team. “That game had a social implication on the south and the state of Mississippi. That tournament game was in March. In August, blacks registered at the school for the first time and we had no incidents. They didn’t need the National Guard. They didn’t have any problems like they did before.”

After one unfulfilling year coaching George Washington University in the nation’s capital to a forgettable record of 6-18, McCarthy was finished as a college coach. Out of his element in the District of Columbia, McCarthy’s career overall college coaching record settled at a final total of 175 wins and 103 losses. "Coach McCarthy was really ahead of his time," remembered Cristil in 2011. "He was a great innovator and a great motivator. McCarthy could get players to play above their talent level in the system they ran. McCarthy's teams challenged the best and generally came out on top."

Babe spent the rest of his coaching years in the professional ranks of the newly formed American Basketball Association. In 1968, as head coach of the New Orleans Buccaneers, McCarthy had two future coaching legends on his player’s roster, Larry Brown and Doug Moe. Morten Downey, Sr., father of the future talk show host, was the team’s President.

Coaching six pro ABA teams in a seven year period, the wacky and unpredictable maverick league fit Old Magnolia Mouth’s sense of the insolent. The ABA is remembered for its trademark red, white and blue ball and the introduction to basketball of the 3 point line. The short lived league was also infamous for bounced pay checks, folding franchises and shifting rosters. McCarthy called his years in the pro circuit his most enjoyable on the bench. McCarthy was twice named the ABA Coach of the year, in 1969 and 1974. He was the first coach in the history of the league to reach 200 wins.

Fittingly for a man who had always enjoyed his slightly off kilter reputation, after winning the league’s top coaching award in 1974, McCarthy was fired by the Kentucky Colonels. He never coached again.

Award winning sportswriter Bob Ryan covered McCarthy when he coached in the ABA. Ryan told Terry Pluto in the book Loose Balls, a definitive history of the ABA, “This guy was special. He had that wonderful southern accent that made him sound like Charles Loughton in Advice and Consent.” Long time editor of the magazine Basketball Times, Larry Donald, has many memories of McCarthy from back in the ABA days, most centering on his outgoing behavior. “He loved to talk and tell stories. When he coached the Kentucky Colonels, he had a suite at the Executive Inn, which was right across the street from the Arena. After games, he would invite the reporters over, open up a bottle of Jack Daniels and then talk until the break of day, so long as there was someone around to listen.”

McCarthy was a player’s coach. Doug Moe remembers how Babe, as his coach in New Orleans, could sense when to lay down the hammer, but also when to back off. “He worked us hard, but he knew not to take practice too serious. A couple of times he would bring us to the gym to practice and then he would say, ‘boys the doors are locked and I don’t have a key. Why don’t we just take it easy today.’”

On March 17, 1975, Babe “Old Magnolia Mouth” McCarty died after a short battle with colon cancer. He was 51 years of age and was laid to eternal rest under the Pine trees in the pastoral setting of the country cemetery of his home town of Baldwyn, MS. His pallbearers on that unseasonably warm spring day were members of his 1948 Baldwyn Bearcats state championship basketball team.

McCarthy faced death with the same “bring it on” attitude he displayed when staring down the likes of Adolph Rupp and the Governor of Mississippi. “Why panic at 5 in the morning because it’s still dark outside,” he reasoned, days before his death.

It was reported in the local paper that the overflow crowd attending the funeral of the smooth talking local boy who had snookered the conservative state establishment while spitting in the eye of the segregationists; was composed of mourners in the comfort of bib overalls that far outnumbered those attired in stiff shirt and tie.

Camelot

Ron Turner 1965

 In high school, much to the chagrin of my late mother, I graduated in the bottom academic half of my class - but I liked learning things. The simplicity and the complexity of the US Constitution (Mr. Herbert). A short story must have a single mood, and every sentence must contribute (Mr. Wills). All the horrible and wonderful things people have done in the last four thousand years, I wanted to know of. All of it. 

A good teacher touches the future. It is the magical “aha” moments. I owe my love of reading to the 1970’s English faculty of Crystal City, MO High School, to Mr. Robert Wills and Mr. Rodney Mills.  Fifty-three years ago, reading was not an escape for me; it was an aspect of direct experience of what my high school English classes exposed me to. 

As a fourteen-year-old, I did not distinguish between the fictional world of literacy and the real one. Reading was not a substitute refuge from reality; it was an extension of what I lived. I was what I read. I still am. 

Dr. Ron Turner taught Senior English and Speech at Crystal City High School during the 1963-64 and 1964-65 school terms. He was a recent graduate of Southwest Missouri State in Springfield, MO when at 20 years of age he signed a contract to join the CCHS faculty. 

I have recently found a connected kindred spirit in Turner of Columbia, MO. We have talked several times at length. Sixty-two years ago, he was a rookie wet-behind-the-ears CCHS English instructor and debate coach. 

Between us, Ron and I have walked this earth for over one and a half centuries and our common life’s denominator is the CCHS English Department and how it created an upward trajectory in our lives.

The hometown I grew up in was not perfect, but it was perfectly imperfect. We all need “that place” we unabatingly view through rose colored glasses. Ann Landers said they do not make rose colored glass with bifocals for good reason, “no one wants to read the fine print of their dreams.” 

Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, my 1960’s and 1970’s Crystal City memories constitute a fleeting moment of bliss - a time when a significant little chunk of my adolescent life was fantastic, confusing, compelling, and emotionally passionate - a mental bridge to expanding horizons seen through youthful eyes. 

We, in 2026, live in a time dominated by  the politics of “manipulativeness, indifference to morality, lack of empathy, and a calculated focus on self-interest” -  a Machiavellian bi-polar disconnect from calm.

 But be honest – it has always been this way; we just like to remember our youth as not so much. Watergate and the counter-revolutionary events of Vietnam, Woodstock and the Civil Rights movement dominated my youth. Today it is “drill baby, drill”. In 1968 it was “burn baby, burn”. This too shall pass. 

And this is why we all need a Camelot - a hidden brain Utopia where we can rest from our personal challenges. For me, Crystal City circa 1975, the year I graduated from the local high school, is my Shining City on the Hill, a neurological destiny where I safely store a self-collection of youthful spiritual awakenings. 

I asked Turner about his Crystal City 1963-1965 memories.

“When I graduated from Southwest Missouri State,” Turner says, “I was 20 years old and I saw a notice posted in the placement office that the Crystal City superintendent would be on campus to conduct interviews. That’s how I met Crystal City Superintendent David Max.”

Turner says shortly after the interview, he was hired. “He hired me but that summer I was scheduled to start work on my master’s on the Columbia campus of the University of Missouri, so I didn’t move to Crystal City until right before school started.”

High School students didn’t slow down for rookie teachers in those days. They swallowed them whole and waited to see who could breathe. Recently married, he jumped headfirst into a two-year adventure he now recalls with fondness. 

He took over a classroom that had not been always conducive to an orderly learning environment. On warm days during the previous year, those in need of a little fresh air would exit feet first through the open first story windows. And Turner’s new classroom shared a west wall with the Superintendents’ office. Now, under both the spotlight and the microscope, the tasks the rookie Turner faced were daunting in both an intellectual and practical sense.  He says he thrived. 

Turner was not shaking in his boots as a first year teacher. He says he found his assignment not the least bit daunting. “Once classes started, the more I got into it, the more I enjoyed teaching the curriculum and interacting with the students just seemed natural,” he says. “It was not stressful at all.”

Turner’s teaching preparation was out of the norm. “During my last semester of my undergrad, I had an option to fulfill my student teaching requirement by directing a play at the Southwest Missouri State’s Greenwood Laboratory School instead of student teaching in a classroom,” he recalls. “I chose that and believe it or not, I only had a total of four hours of student teaching standing before a class. So, when I started in the fall of 1963 at Crystal City High School, I was really a rookie.” 

“The students (at CCHS) were great,” Turner recalls. “I was a good student myself, so I knew what academic performance was and my students at Crystal City performed. I was young, but I never considered that an issue. I wore a suit and tie, I think, every day that I was there. I dressed professionally and I acted professional and I think the students could sense that. Plus, teaching mostly seniors who were so well prepared so far as grammar by the time I got them, I focused on literature, and I think the students enjoyed that. Irma Jennings and Rodney Mills (fellow English Department staff) had had these (students) as freshman, sophomores and juniors and they were very well prepared in grammar.” 

Turner’s wife, Mary Jane, secured employment as a teacher at nearby DeSoto, MO High School. “My wife was a very good Business Education teacher. She comes from a long family line of teachers. She was just a natural. We made our home in DeSoto and every day I drove a 1953 Chevrolet from De Soto to Crystal City.”

His time as a Hornet was short lived, Turner says, but left on him memories more indelible than ink, molding him not only as the distinguished educator he became, but also as a man. “It was a great school, and I knew from the first day, I was blessed to be there. I loved every day of my time there.” 

Young people need models, not critics. Turner says he learned more himself in two years than he taught his students. “I made a lot of mistakes, but the students were patient with me, so well behaved and respectful is what I remember. And the staff took me under their wings. Rodney (Mills) was a young fellow English teacher. He was a local and graduated from CCHS and was well respected by both students and staff. I leaned on him a lot.”

Mentoring is a brain to pick, an ear to listen, and a nudge in the right direction. Turner found all in the school’s boiler room. It was a sort of de facto teachers’ lounge, lacking any no smoking signs, Turner recalls. 

“I would go to the boiler room each day to eat my bagged lunch. I am not sure where the (official) teachers’ lounge was. It was quite a (diverse) crew in the boiler room. It was mostly a male group, and the stories could get colorful. I am not sure where the female teachers ate lunch. And I have no recall of a student cafeteria in the building. Isn’t that strange?”

“Howard Cowan was the janitor, and he would always bring his lunch and eat with us. Howard knew everybody in town, and he knew all the inner workings of what made Crystal City run. Al Sherman was the band teacher, and he was a very interesting man. He played in a dance band in the evenings up in the Old Gaslight Square District in the city (St. Louis). He’d have some (insightful) stories to tell about how the city night life (flowed). Coach (Bill) Young was the baseball coach and he was big into horse races. After school when he wasn’t coaching, he usually hit the track. We got to hear the next day how well he did or didn’t do. It was just an (eclectic) group. I was young and I learned so much. I always looked forward to lunch in the boiler room.”

The spring of 1965 was the high-water mark for Crystal City athletics. Camelot in cleats. The football team had gone undefeated and was in the midst of an 18-game winning streak. Springtime saw the Hornet’s baseball team, in a game played at Busch Stadium against St. Louis Southwest, win the large school state championship. Hornet Randy Cayce set a state record that to this day still stands, with four stolen bases. And alum Bill Bradley was just finishing up his career at Princeton as the best collegiate basketball player in the nation. He was on his way to Oxford and two years as a Rhodes Scholar before returning to the States to claim two NBA titles as an all-star with the New York Knicks. He followed his basketball career with an 18-year run as a Democratic United States Senator from New Jersey. 

Randy Cayce was a student in Turner’s English class, “a good student.” And Bradley, Turner learned quickly, was a local treasure. In 1963 his halo glowed omnipresent over the school. “I didn’t know much about him in the fall of ’63,” Turner says. “His picture in his Princeton uniform hung in the front hallway, so I knew he was a big deal. Early in my first year I made some offhand remark about Bradley that was not accurate and Darrell Kearns was in the class and was the football team’s quarterback. He set me straight,” Turner shares with a laugh. 

“Being the speech teacher,” Turner continues, “I was drafted into the role of PA announcer at the home basketball games. I had a good athletic background from my hometown years in Conway (a small rural burg in Southwest Missouri). “Sports were important to me growing up and I always respected the role sports played in (my hometown) community. That was a good background for my time at CCHS because the sports teams (at CCHS) were successful and a huge source of town pride, and the athletes in my class were like all my students, respectful.”

“I had little contact with Arvel Popp,” long time Hornet Hall of Fame football and basketball coach, Turner recalls. “We operated in completely different universes.” Turner said he knew of Popp’s reputation of respect throughout the school. “One of the few times I spoke to him directly was the spring of my second year, when I had announced I was leaving. He made a point of approaching me and told me that leaving Crystal City High School would be the biggest mistake I would ever make,” Turner recalls with a chuckle, proving that when it came to loyalty, Popp-a man of few words- bled Hornet Red and Black.

“I only had one discipline issue with a student,” Turner says. “I remember he was a football player, and he responded to me in a way that I took as disrespectful. I sent him to see (Principal) Mr. (Edward) Rapp. It was taken care of. That was early in my first year. I don’t recall ever again (referring) anyone to the office. Mr. Rapp ran a very orderly school.”

After two years it was time for Turner to move on.  “I had an offer in the spring of 1965 to return to the campus in Columbia with a full scholarship to finish my master’s and then get into my doctoral program. I took that, it was too good to pass up, and I finished my doctorate in 1970. Then, we went to Lincoln, Nebraska for seven years. I was a fundraiser and an administrator for the state of Nebraska ETV Network. While in Lincoln, our three boys were born, and it seemed like I was never home. With a big part of my job involving fundraising, I was always in Washington DC or New York City. So, I wanted something a little more home based.”

“I had an offer to return to the University of Missouri with an office located, as administrative associate Dean, in St. Louis on the University of Missouri- St. Louis campus. I did that from 1977 to 1985. I then returned to Columbia and had a lot of different duties but Special Assistant to the President was my general title. I retired from the University of Missouri in 2005. I recently fell and broke a hip, but I am rehabbing that and for 83 years of age, I am doing well.”

Dr. Ron Turner currently holds the title of Executive Vice President Emeritus.

 Often, we confuse activity with productivity. Many people are simply busy being busy. But Turner’s professional life has been one of both activity and productivity. 

Turner’s resume is loaded with titles and activities: he  directed the University of Missouri South African Education Program from inception through its first 18 years, served as Senior Fellow in the Harry S Truman School of Public Affairs, served 2 terms on the Board of Directors of the National Storytelling Association, received a Lifetime Achievement Award as founding chairman of the award-winning St. Louis Storytelling Festival. And he authored an award-winning screenplay: “Offsides: The Revolution in College Football”.

Turner has lived 83 years of what he calls his Golden Years. When you start being enthusiastic about whatever you like, he points out, then that is the golden age for you, and his golden age, he notes, has covered a lifetime. 

The Crystal City High School student body in 1965 dedicated the yearbook to 23-year-old second year teacher Ron Turner. That says a lot. It was noted in the dedication proclamation that Turner was always ready to give extra help and attention to a student in need.        

Young teachers walk through the schoolhouse doors brimming with the enthusiasm of one ready to change the world. Tragically, most will have the carpet of idealism pulled out from under their feet. Ron Turner says he never did. 

Our conversations, he told me, reopened a time of life Turner had moved on years ago from. He admits to me “I get a lump in my throat talking about this and that catches me by surprise, thinking about those days and that community.”

“When I broke my hip a few months ago, it slowed me down,” Turner admits. “But with time on my hands I reached out on Facebook to Rodney (Mills) and it was good to reconnect with him. That brought me back to my two years in Crystal City.”

It was the time of JFK and Turner says the Camelot analogy is apt.  

For a whole generation born in the immediate years after World War II, November 22, 1963, was the day that innocence died. “I remember standing outside my classroom when Bill Hinds, the guidance counselor, told me that President Kennedy was dead.” Turner says. “The remainder of that day all classes passed in silence. Many students openly wept.” 

So much of the deep lingering sadness from that day was about the unfinished promise of Camelot, the wondering about what might have been if Kennedy had lived.

I believe God has instilled in us a hunger, a deep hankering to ride with Him on a fabulous five-star adventure. To not jump on board is to deny our ordained and predestined life’s journey. I believe that. There must be a reason for living.  Yet many of us crawl along in life without even a glimpse of our hidden passion. 

A short two-year stint on the star-studied CCHS faculty, over 60 years ago, opened Ron Turner’s eyes to his hidden passion - the blessings and impact of education, a destiny bound with the destinies of others. The ripples are still felt today. That is the beauty of teaching. 

Camelot. Crystal City in 1965 was a very fine town, and the high school, which stood in the middle of it, on a hill, was truly majestic. A good beginning makes a good end. And for rookie educator Ron Turner, it all began there.

An Athlete Dying Young

Coach Bill Holmes

I accept that my life is completely accidental and random, ruled by chance. You can blow on the dice all you want, but whether they come up 'seven' is still a function of random luck. 

Such stoic acceptance makes it easier to soldier on when bad things happen to good people. Sometimes that means faith in the Guy up in a cloud pulling the strings; sometimes it means accepting bad karma swirling through an unforgiving universe; sometimes it means young men die needlessly.

There are good people who are dealt a bad hand by fate, and bad people who live long, comfortable, privileged lives. A small twist of fate can save or end a life; random chance is a permanent and powerful player.

If you took World Lit 101 you probably read “To an Athlete Dying Young,” A. E. Housman's 19^th century classic poem about a former star athlete who passed, still in his youth. Housman sees the hometown hero in an envious light, having died young, he will never lose his youth to old age. The poem ironically suggests that perhaps this fate is better than watching one’s glory fade over time.

I don’t know. Death is coming no matter what, but when I was young, I gave it no passing thought, too occupied with the next big challenge. When you are young death is a distant rumor. As a young man, even when I wasn't sure where I was going, I was always in a hurry.

On January 27, 1949, a black man in the age of Jim Crow, Crystal City native Charles (Bonk) Byas, age 20, suffered an accidental but tragic death in a Golden Gloves boxing match in Moberly, Missouri. In the third and final round of the bout, Byas and his white opponent cracked heads together. Byas received a deep gash under his eye. The referee stopped the fight immediately. Byas died in ambulance in route to the hospital without regaining consciousness. The local Coroner attributed Byas death to a cerebral hemorrhage.

In 1949 Byas was a student at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, MO. He was in the Pre-Med program. Byas had graduated from the racially segregated Douglas High School in Festus, MO in 1947. He would have never sat in a classroom with white kids. He had been a basketball and track star for the Trojans. After high school graduation Byas worked for a year for the city of Crystal City to acquire funds to enable him to attend college. He was, by all obituary accounts from family and friends, a focused and well-liked young man. Known by all as Bonk, Byas was the son of Joseph and Corine Byas and was survived by six brothers Joseph, Donald, Marvin, Wayne, Richard and Cecil.

Byas is a storied Crystal City name. All seven Byas boys were accomplished athletes. In the fall of 1955, Bonk Byas second youngest brother of Richard Byas, helped integrate Crystal City High School and in his only season as a Hornet was both a football star in the fall and in the spring took three gold medals in leading CCHS to a state track championship. Richard was voted by his majority white classmates to the office of Senior Class Vice President.

1955 Douglas High Last Team

According to a story in the Moberly Evening-Democrat, reported the day following his death in the ring, Bonk Byas had passed a pre-fight physical. He was declared by the attending physician to be in excellent condition.

Byas’ opponent that fateful night was William Holmes, a freshman at Northeast Missouri State Teachers College in Kirksville Missouri. Holmes had graduated the previous spring from St. Louis Beaumont High School. He was the starting center as a freshman in the previous fall of 1948 on the Bulldog football team.

Both fighters were bleeding from face cuts after the first round of what was described by the local media as, “a whirlwind slugging match.”  Byas suffered a small cut near his left eye. Holmes was bleeding from the nose and from a cut on his face. The referee inspected both fighters in their corners after the first round before allowing the fight to continue. The third round was described as a “battling give and take,” that brought the packed auditorium crowd to its feet. The fight was stopped, and Holmes declared the winner by technical knockout, with 33 seconds left in the third and final round.

Byas entered the fight at 175 1/2 pounds and Holmes at 162 pounds. Both fighters had won two previous tournament bouts.

The referee and one judge declared Byas the winner of the first round 20 to 18, while the second judge favorite Holmes, 20 to 19. All three gave Holmes the second round by a slight margin of 20 to 19. With less than a minute to go in the fight, Holmes was still taking punishing blows from Byas but found an opening and drove Byas to the ropes with a series of left and right blows to the head.

A signal conceding the fight was then  given by Byas’ corner man, Charles Hoard, Lincoln University’s Dean of Men. Byas was still on his feet when the referee stopped the fight, walked after the stoppage to his corner and then collapsed to his knees. Lifted to his feet, Byas then slumped again over the ropes. He never regained consciousness.

The Kirksville coaches made the decision not to inform Holmes of his opponent’s death until after the team had returned to Kirksville. When Holmes learned of the tragedy, he immediately returned to his home in St. Louis.

Life has a funny way of doing things. Ironically, Charles (Bonk) Byas’ final opponent, Bill Holmes, a decade after the chance encounter in Moberly with the Crystal City native, started a six-year run as the Head Football Coach of the Crystal City rival conference foe, Herculaneum. Holmes was ultra successful leading Herculaneum football. Sixty years later, Holmes’ name is still revered in area football circles.

Coach Holmes employed at Herculaneum as assistants some CCHS football royalty: Ike Jennings, Dick Cook and Rodney Mills. Jennings would replace Holmes as head coach at Herculaneum and Cook and Mills would move on to long and distinguished careers as Hornet coaches. The Herculaneum High School Principal during the final years of Holmes tenure was future Crystal City boys’ basketball coach Rolla Herbert.

The 1963 contest against Holmes’ Herculaneum squad is widely recognized as the best game in the history of Crystal City Hornet football. Both teams entered the November showdown, the last game of the year for both teams, undefeated. With no post-season state playoffs in 1963, this was a winner-take-all match up and the buildup was intense. On a bone-chilling cold night, the biggest crowd to ever see a football game at Dr. J.J. Commerford Field were privy to a classic. Herculaneum overcame a two-score 4th quarter deficit, scoring the go-ahead touchdown on a 9-yard last second pass to dethrone the Hornets, 18-13.

Rhonda Byas

With 1:40 left in the game, “Herky” had scored a touchdown but had muffed the point after attempt and still trailed by one point, 13-12. After a mad scramble occurred for the ensuing on-side kick and after several minutes of debate amongst the officials as to who had recovered, much to the dismay of the Hornets’ bench, the ball was awarded to the Blackcats, setting up the last second heroics.

Ironically, if Herculaneum had been successful on the extra point attempt to tie the game at 13-13, the Hornet coaching staff had already made the decision to run out the clock and with no overtime rule in 1963, the game would have ended in a tie. By missing the extra point and being forced into the desperation on-side kick, Herculaneum had unknowingly given itself a chance to win.

Coach Holmes was also my football coach from 1977-79 at Central Methodist College in Fayette, MO. I was one of many CCHS grid grads who played at CMC for Coach Holmes. He was a tough man. For three years he intimidated me. No one crossed Coach Holmes. We had heard the rumor that he once had killed a man in the boxing ring. None of us doubted its authenticity.  I had no idea until a few years ago that the deceased opponent was from my hometown and from a well-known and respected family.

Some coaches utilize a star system. Not Coach Holmes. He demanded role players. He was the star. We had our star players, but that was their role, their cog in the wheel, no better or less than the rest of us. If you are going to have a team of role players, then you had better have a team of players who truly understand their roles. I knew mine and I never swerved from my lane. Drilling down the idea of “just do your job,” Coach Holmes built a culture of accountability and locker room cohesiveness. He kept his words few and cryptic and his players on their toes. I stayed as far away from him as I could.

Coach Holmes was in many ways a bizarre character. He would greet all with his trademark booming welcome of, “Hey, Baby.” He was the archetype of the coach those of us a certain age once played for. He had cut steps into a step hill on the side of his practice field. Raise his practice field ire and it was, “get your ass on that hill,” with the promise we would run until he was tired. Despite his old school approach to discipline, he was far ahead of his time when it came to spreading the field and throwing the football.

Coach Holmes eventually ran afoul of the Central Methodist administration and by my senior year we had a new coach, a 14-year former NFL All-Pro linebacker who had recently coached with the Oakland Raiders. He was the worst coach I ever played for, a complete nut case. Regardless, I did have a good senior year. But the League was not in my future, so it was on to the next challenge.

Fast forward. In 1984, I became the 26-year-old Head Boys Basketball Coach at Monroe City, MO High School. Irony struck again, as that same summer 55-year-old Bill Holmes was named the Head Football Coach at Paris, MO High school, just a few miles down the road from my new home. We reunited into a completely new relationship. We became beer drinking buddies.

Coach Holmes lasted two seasons at Paris. In January 1986, he resigned. I was surprised as his teams had done well on the field. He told me that one day while fulfilling his duties as the high school lunchroom supervisor, he had requested a boy dial down his enthusiasm. The teenager responded with an inquiry as to Coach Holmes’ interest of engaging in a consensual sex act. Coach Holmes demonstrated his lack of interest by hanging the young scholar from a nearby coat rack.

Coach now needed a job but with an ex-wife in Fayette, he was not moving back there. He had an old house in Paris, which describes 95% of the 1986 domiciles there. He was in a constant state of home renovation and improvement. Past the age of 70 years, Coach Holmes by hand dug under his existing house a new basement.

 I recommended him as a full-time sub in Monroe City. The kids loved him. He also became my scout of upcoming basketball opponents. He had a surprisingly sharp grasp of the intricacies of basketball strategy.

In 1986, we had a basketball team marching towards the state tournament. On a Wednesday night, in the second week of March we played a state sectional game in Kirksville against Scotland County. We won 63-51, our 14^th straight win to raise our season record to 24-3.

The sectional game opposite us was won by Blair Oaks who would now be our Saturday night quarterfinal opponent. I had sent Coach Holmes to Eldon to scout the game.  Blair Oaks’ record stood at 29-1. The Jefferson City area school was ranked number 1 in the state, with a front line that stood 6’8, 6’5 and 6’4. We did not have a starter over 6’1. What we did have were a bunch of nail drivers who could run and jump and a cocky young coach. We feared no one.

With little video tape available in those days, in person scouting was the norm. I met with Coach Holmes after our sectional win around midnight to begin preparation for the Saturday matchup with Blair Oaks, the winner headed to the state Final Four.

My obvious first question was how do we guard Blair Oaks’ 6’8 star, who would go on to play Division 1 college basketball?

“How many fouls does your post player get,” Coach Holmes asked?

What? I was tired and now concerned. Five, I stated the obvious.

“No.”  Coach said, “you have 20 fouls.”

What?

“You have four midgets you rotate (at the post),” Coach Holmes declared, “so you have 20 fouls from your post. Use them. Every time the big guy touches the ball in the paint, knock him on his ass.”  

To clarify, I repeated, “Foul him every time he touches the ball in the paint?”

Wrong answer. Fifteen years prior I would have heard, “get you ass on that hill!” This night Coach was more constructive, but still emphatic.  “Hey baby, I didn’t say foul him, I said knock him on his ass. He is soft. He will quit.”

We did and he did. The Bill Laimbeer approach was perfect. We led by 23 in the first half and cruised onto the State Finals. Best scouting report I ever got.

I have fond memories of Coach Holmes that spring of 1986 sitting on my living room floor playing patty cake with my infant son. I could not have imagined the relationship we had as player/coach blossoming seven years later into this rapprochement status. Random fate, again. I can trace our progression back to a young punk hanging from a coat rack in the Paris High School cafeteria.

Coach Holmes passed away on January 27, 2017, in Paris, MO at the age of 86.

Bonk Byas brother Donald was the father of D.J. and Rhonda Byas. D.J. was an all-state running back for the Hornets, graduating in 1971. Rhonda, class of 1972, was a senior cheerleader and volleyball player, definitely one of the cool kids. While in 1972 she ruled, I was a lowly CCHS freshman.

Fast forward to the fall of 1975, I was enrolled as a college freshman on a football scholarship at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, MO. Rhonda Byas was entering her senior year at NWMSU. We were the only two CC kids on campus.

Summer football camp was three weeks of hell before the start of the fall class semester. By the second week I was homesick. It is something every kid away from home for the first time experiences, but when you are 8 hours from home and in its throes, it seems like the end of the world.

Rhonda’s work study job was checking meal tickets at the cafeteria door. On a slow day at breakfast during my second week on campus, she looked at my card, and said something like, “I heard you were going to school here.” I was surprised she knew who I was.

Rhonda asked how I was doing. I lied. I am sure she could tell. You need to meet some people, she said, be outside the dorm at 8 tonight.

At the appointed time she picked me up in a VW beetle and took me to an off-campus party. In 1975 there might have been 50 black students at the rural college - and they were all at this party. It was a scene straight from a 70’s Blaxploitation film: Afros roomy enough to sleep six, hazy marijuana smoke, strobe lights and Shaft posters galore. And my skinny little butt was the sole representative of the Caucasian race.

One of the football team’s star players was a bad dude from the KC Paseo named Claude. He cornered me demanding to know why I was at a black party with, “the best-looking sister on campus.” Rhonda intervened and told Claude to ease off. “He is cool, he is from Crystal City and we go way back.” Right, all the way back to lunch, I thought.

Rhonda Byas didn’t have to reach out to me. I am sure she sensed I was struggling. Maybe her freshman year she had gone through the same. For whatever reason, it helped. I didn’t suddenly morph into a Big Man on Campus - I remember walking home that night alone - but slowly things got better.

Two years and a school transfer later, my coach was a man whose right fist had accidently cut her uncle’s life tragically short. Rhonda was born in 1954, five years after the death of an uncle she never knew. Rhonda Byas passed away on September 28, 2013.

I like to write about growing up in my hometown of Crystal City, MO. I like to write about human conditions. I like to write about how life events develop; people come and go. The above story checks all the boxes. These randomly diverting scenes that form the tapestry of my life are often just so many distracting stitches. I must strain to see the fundamental fibers that tie them all together. But they are there.