Camelot

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. 

RON TURNER 1965

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 recently 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 Superintendent s’ 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 Darly 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 1971. Then, we went to Lincoln, Nebraska for seven years. I oversaw educational TV for the state of Nebraska. While in Lincoln, our three boys were born, and it seemed like I was never home. My big job was fundraising. I was always in Washington DC or New York City doing that. 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. 

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.

 

 

 

The Third Poster

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

Call this one The Third Poster.

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

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

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

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

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

I seek an answer by going to the source.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Town Equal Parts Mark Twain and Bruce Springsteen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Highway 83

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

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

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

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