The Indominable Joe Talton

 

Legacy is a word over used in sports, often incorrectly. Webster's take — something received from a predecessor— is far different than today's evolved meaning. Legacy has come to mean a list of awards, records and championships. But those are accomplishments on a résumé. The athlete's imprint on the future is his legacy. When Joe Talton hung up his sneakers in 1967, his legacy began.

Since 1959 the name Talton and winning basketball have been synonymous in the small northeast Missouri town of Monroe City. That September, strapping 14-year-old 6’8” Joe Talton showed up off the farm over in Hunnewell, 7 miles west of Monroe City, in his one size fits all overalls and started busting down barriers and pulling down rims. School friends say his shoulders were so wide he had to turn sideways to enter classrooms, he could hold three apples in one hand, and his handshake would swallow up a forearm. 

His earlier educational journey had been a nomadic adventure, the racial intolerance of the day a driving force of constant change. “I went to the school with white kids in Hunnewell, MO until second grade,” Joe tells me. “Then they put us in an old building for two years with only black kids from Hunnewell. Then I think it was 5^th and 6^th grade they bussed over to Monroe for a couple of years to go to school with other black kids from a bunch of towns. We had a little old broken-down bus and an old man named Thomas who drove us each day. Back and forth. Then in 7^th grade they sent us back to school in Hunnewell with the white kids.”

Why all the changes, I ask? “Don’t know,” says Joe. “We just went where they told us to.”

In 7^th grade, Talton took up the sport of basketball and it would change his life. It was a Spartan beginning.

His dad worked as a hired hand on a farm just outside town, but Joe Talton's family of seven lived-in a three-room house in Hunnewell. Mike Crain was a junior high classmate of Talton. “Joe lived across the street from the school,” Crain says. “On Saturday morning he and I would play ball on their outdoor court. (Our) school had no indoor gym. We just had an outdoor playground with a hoop. We practiced in Monroe High on Saturday during the season. The rest of the time in winter we were outside to practice, we scooped snow so we could play.”

When Joe returned to the Hunnewell school as a 6'8 7th grader, teacher Dale Purdy took one look and decided to start a basketball team. "Dale loved basketball," says Crain, "and played some when he was in the Army. Hunnewell had a high school until 1950 when they consolidated with Monroe. Dale said, 'dig out the old uniforms.' We had one leather basketball. Teams came from all over the area to play pickup games on Sunday, all ages of boys, on our outdoor court. That is how Joe got his start. I remember what a good dribbler he was. Mr. Purdy would have three of us surround Joe and try to take the ball away with little success. That is how Joe got his skills, Mr. Purdy making him work on fundamentals."

When Talton started high school at Monroe City, he was the basketball talk of the area. The legend of Joe Talton was born. The school had been integrated only five years prior to his arrival. His black skin made him even more of a novelty than his intimidating size and raw basketball skills. For four winters in the racially turbulent early 1960’s, Big Joe Talton dominated the area courts and paved the way for generations of future Black basketball stars at Monroe City High School, many named Talton.

Joe Talton didn’t ask for the role of racial trailblazer but fate and timing of the desegregation of the area schools made him a curiosity wherever the Panthers played.

Thirty-five years ago, when I came to Monroe City to coach the basketball team, the old timers told me of a great player from long ago named Joe Talton. The stories rang with a Paul Bunyon mystique of mystery. He had not lived in Monroe for over a quarter century. The picture painted to me was of a very physical young man with an angry side who struck fear in the heart of friend and foe alike. Even today, most everyone in Monroe City has heard of Joe Talton, but few know him, and many are surprised to learn he is still alive.

“I grew up hearing all those same stories, that Joe was a man hard to get to know,” says current Panther Assistant Coach Ed Talton. “He would be my second cousin.” Ed's late dad, Cliff, and Joe's late dad, Leroy, were brothers. "But I had never met Joe. He never came home," says Ed.

But when they finally met, Ed didn’t see such truculence in the son of his father’s brother.

1959 Hunnewell JH

“They say he was so good at times his play would scare people,” Ed recalls. “I didn't meet him until about 15 years ago when he came back to Monroe for a class reunion, and they announced his class at one of our home basketball games. I went up and talked to him and he was a super nice guy and it seemed like most of his classmates were happy to see him. He said he had been gone for a long time and no one around here had seen him for years. He said he just decided it was time to come back. He was in good physical shape back then, but he's had a lot of health problems the last few years. He called me, kind of out of the blue last week and told me his twin brother George had just passed away. He also said he has lost one leg to diabetes and might lose the other.”

Joe today lives down in Columbia, 70 miles southwest of Monroe City. He will soon turn 79 years of age. Ed Talton says he is proud of Joe and how he set the table for all who followed. "And I told him that last time we talked," shares Ed.

I was able to reach Joe Talton on his cell phone. We had a Sunday evening conversation that lasted over an hour. 

"Listen," he finally interrupts me, "Let's talk again another day. I am getting tired. I had my leg taken off not far back. Got to get up early tomorrow and going back to see the same guy that got this one. They might want to take the other, but if they do, I will still call you back. Promise. I might be scooting around on my ass, but I will call you back." 

I had heard that back in the day, Big Joe was a man of grit. He still is. He called back the next day assuring me that his remaining three appendages were still firmly attached.

He was very enthusiastic and willing to talk about his upbringing in Hunnewell, MO and his playing days at Monroe City High School. One old classmate, who has recently reconnected to Talton, told me Joe was a hustler. Keep that in mind when you talk to him, I was warned. Anyone who has spent a lifetime hustling is at ease around people and Joe was easy to talk to.

Joe Talton does not understand why anyone would have found him intimidating. “I am a big guy but only on the court did I use my size to get my way, only on the court, man,” he says. “Guys would step on my feet, that was a common trick back then, kick me in the shins. I didn't get mad; I just gave it back. I let everyone know right away that the lane was mine. You want to come in, you had better be ready for the 'bow, I did like to throw an elbow now and then,” he says with a high-pitched laugh.

Big Joe fondly and immodestly recalls his skills set as a player. “Some guys are big, and they make them play basketball. But I was a basketball player who just happened to be big. Can you see the difference? Then there was my twin brother George. He really didn’t want to play but since he was big (6’6”) he had to play or people would always be on him, ‘why you not playing as big as you are.’ George was mostly all four years on the B team. George didn't care. He just liked riding the bus to the games. I played on the A team all four years. I worked hard on my shooting. On my dribbling. I stayed in shape. I wanted to be good. If I had been 5’8 instead of 6’8, I would have still played and been good, people just would not be saying today they were afraid of me.”

To challenge Joe Talton was to motivate him. Madison High had a player taller than Joe. "Got tired of hearing about him," Talton says today. The two met in the Shelbina Tournament. Talton scored 50 points and cut his own forehead on the rim. MC won 75-43. Talton outscored not only his taller foe but the entire Madison team. Big Joe did not mince pre-game words with his adversary. "I told him that when I went to dunk he'd better get out of my way, or I would dunk his head right before the ball," he says with a laugh. "I was big, so I was a target, but nothing direct(ly) racial, anywhere we played. It was different back then. Blacks and Whites playing together was new to everybody and sometimes people just didn't (know) what to say."

The rims in area gyms needed to fear the wrath of Joe Talton. "I only shattered two backboards because back in my day we didn’t have many glass backboards, they were metal, or I would have got me a bunch. I don't know how many rims I bent," he says. “But I did bring down some, bent more. Back then guys didn’t jump like they do now, but I did. Boys around Monroe played on the second floor. I jumped up to the fourth. Did that scare people? If you say so, OK, but that is just how I played.”

“My Coach, Red Sylvarya, he was great to me. We both came to Monroe the same year. He always made me stay on top of my schoolwork. He would make sure my brother George and I had everything that we needed. We really had no problems between Whites and Blacks, not at least that I ever saw. We got along good on the basketball teams. We were all teammates, and we went to places as a team all the time. No problems.”

For many rural kids in the 1950's and 1960's, transportation to and from school was a major roadblock to participation in athletics and other after school activities. There was no school bus to bring them home after practice. Talton remembers the kindness that was shown to him by one of his classmates. 

"Jimmy Delashmutt was in my class and we became very good friends from almost the first day that I went to school in Monroe,” remembers Joe. “If we had practice on Saturday either his mom or dad would come out and pick my brother and I up and take us in (to Monroe) for practice and then would take us home after practice. It was about 10 miles each way. If we had a game on a school night, they would have us over to their house after school and we'd have dinner with them before going to the game. They didn’t have to do those things. They were just good people.”

Jim Delashmutt didn’t directly aid the Panthers on the floor - although transporting and feeding the team's star player was a major non-playing contribution, one could argue. “Oh no, heavens no,” laughs Joe Talton when asked what position his friend played. “Little guy and kind of fat, he was the team manager.” Delashmutt is still remembered in MC for his fun-loving nature. When he swept the floor at halftime and with the pep band playing as he saw to his custodial duties, he would dance along to the music.

If not for those types of kindness, Joe says, he never would have had the opportunity to play basketball or to go to college. “Jim and I stayed real good friends the rest of his life, like brothers,” says Talton. “He settled in Kansas City and worked for the electric company. He just passed away in the past year. It really hit me hard when he passed. And now my brother George is gone. Those were my two best friends.”

J.R. Chisom ran the point guard position for the last two years of Talton's Panther career. "He was just so strong," says Chisom. "He was 6'8" but he also weighed, I bet, 250 pounds - and it was all muscle. Joe never lifted a weight in his life. We didn't keep rebounding stats back then, but Joe had to get 20 most nights. Also, our coaches' style was to walk the ball up the floor. We did very little pressing and very seldom would we fast break. If we had played a faster pace, who knows what kind of stats Joe would have put up."

The four years that Talton led the fortunes of the Panther basketballers, 1960-1963, were highly successful. Monroe City compiled an 82 and 21 record and won four consecutive conference championships. They also won the prestigious 16 team Monroe City Tournament three of Talton’s four years. They were upset by Paris during his senior year and Talton has not forgotten the cause. “Bad officiating,” he told me, “They just wouldn't let me play that night and they didn’t beat us, the refs did, because Paris would have never stopped me.”

After graduation in the spring of 1963, Talton became the first black athlete to play at Southwest Baptist College in Bolivar MO. “I had four really good years down there.” he tells me. “People treated me good. I had some offers from bigger schools, but my high school coach told me a smaller school would be better for me and he was right.”

When Talton started play for the Bearcats in the fall of 1963, SWB competed as a two-year junior college. After his sophomore year, the school transitioned to four-year competition and joined the NAIA (National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics). “I could have left after two years,” Talton says, “but I just had it too good there.”

In the Junior College Regional Championship game in March 1964, Joe Talton led Southwest Baptist to a titanic upset of national power Moberly Junior College and its future Hall of Fame and NBA championship coach, Cotton Fitzsimmons. Joe dominated the glass grabbing 18 rebounds as SWB advanced to the national tournament in Hutchinson, KS. Fitzsimmons noted that Talton averaged 20 points and 19 rebounds per game and lamented on how he had allowed the superstar from Monroe City, only 40 miles away, to be recruited away from right under the coaches' nose. 

Talton was named JUCO All-American both years he played on the Junior College level. 

Talton said he had always dreamed of playing professional basketball. “But to be honest,” he says today, “I just didn't work hard enough. It was too easy for me playing against the boys I played against in high school and college,” saying he wasn’t challenged enough by small school competition.  “I had a try out in Kansas City for the pros, but it didn't go real well. Nobody to blame but myself,” he says without further explanation.

Hunnewell School Today

He was set to student teach at Monroe City in the fall of 1967 but at the last minute changed his mind and joined the Army. “I never did go back (to Southwest Baptist) and graduate. That is something I still regret. But I was just tired of school. I was going to get drafted anyway, so it was better to go ahead and enlist. I wanted to be a cook and by enlisting it guaranteed me that job and training. I spent a year and a half in Vietnam. They told me that being a cook I'd be safe. But man, we were right up there on the front line. Lots of shooting and rockets and such. I guess they have to eat up there as well. I was in Da Nang, right on the Hahn River and when I was there in '67 and '68, things were really hot. But I got home okay. I played a little bit of basketball when I was in the Army and after I got home, some in a men's league in Macon, but not a whole lot. I pretty well knew by then my playing days were done.”

Talton became a family man during his senior year of high school. “I got married and we had a baby,” he shares with me. “Sure, we were too young, but I had responsibilities and I wanted to meet them. I told Southwest Baptist I can't come, ‘I'm gonna be a dad.’ They said ‘we'll take care of you.’ And they did. I stayed married all four years I was in college and there were people that helped me out with money that I could send home.” When I asked for further details of the financial arrangements, he deferred saying, “let's just leave it at that.”

Talton spent his adult life working in a number of factories in Missouri, Iowa and Indiana. "I was big and strong and work for me was not hard to find. Drove a truck some too," Talton says. He and his wife are today living their retirement years contently, he says.

Today Talton is happily remarried and said he's very proud of his three children: a 59-year-old son, a 51-year-old daughter and a 40-year-old daughter. 

"None of my kids really got into playing sports," Talton says. "But my older brother Ronald had a boy who was pretty good. What was his name? Boy went by his mommy's name. Her and my brother didn't get along." 

Talton calls to his wife, "What was the name of that boy of Ronald's who played basketball?" Cecil Estes, I hear her say. Cecil Estes? In 1984 Cecil Estes, from Columbia, MO Hickman High was one of the top high school recruits in the nation. He spent one year at Mizzou and in a game against North Carolina, according to the Columbia Tribune, in a head-to-head dual played circles around Michael Jordan. Estes couldn't break away from the homeboys over at Douglas Park. He was dead before he was forty. "Yeah, that was him," says Talton. "Said he was a good player." 

Joe Talton still dreams of basketball successes he never had. “I did ok for a kid from Hunnewell, I guess. But I really wanted to play pro ball, it's all I ever really wanted to do. I still think about it all the time.” 

Joe Talton, whose larger-than-life presence on a basketball court once sent shivers through entire opposing teams, is an old man now of 79, recently having lost one leg and two best friends. 

The Godfather of the Monroe City basketball dynasty asks me, “You say my cousin Cliff has some grandbabies who are good players?" I list for him their names and accomplishments. “You tell them I will be watching,” says Big Joe Talton, whose legacy has paved their way.

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