PART 1
Like most small towns of the time, the Monroe City, MO of 1956 was clannish. If you were Protestant, you lived north of the railroad tracks that dissected the once whistle stop town. If you were Catholic, you lived south of the railroad tracks. The only exception being the two streets that ran parallel, one each side of the tracks. That is where the town’s black population of the day domiciled.
Over at that public “Protestant” high school on the north side, they were coming off a 30-5 basketball season. Over the previous five years those heathens had won an unholy 152 games. Heck, at the rate the local Catholic boys at Holy Rosary were staggering along, there would be a man on the moon before this cadaver of a team ever won 152 games. Something had to be done. How desperate were the Catholics to catch up? They hired a Baptist for their coach.
Depending on who you ask but there are those who will claim within two years this miracle worker had HR caught up. Coach Ozzie Osborn had been hired to turn the Holy Rosary Trojan hardwood fortunes around. “We knew right away,” says Hoppy VanMarter, “things were going to be different.”
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| 1957 MC Panthers |
Why didn’t they play? No set answer but lots of opinions. If you care why and are old enough to remember when March Madness referred to Spring Break at the Kennedy Compound, you probably subscribe to one of these opinions: Two different size classifications. The larger public school had everything to lose and nothing to gain from such a contest. Both school’s administrations feared an over tense atmosphere that could lead to trouble spilled over to outside of school. It was more fun to wage good natured arguments over who was the best than to allow reality to destroy the fun.
They just did not.
But the players wish they could have. They respected each other, even if from afar. Holy Rosary star of the era, Chuck Kendrick remembers a star public school player, Jerry Burditt. "He was one of the greatest shooters from those great teams R-1 had," says the 1958 HR grad. "It was a gift. He could not only shoot but shoot from far out. And he was as an excellent passer, too. I wish we could have played them."
Burditt roomed at Northeast Missouri Teachers College with Holy Rosary grad Hoppy VanMarter. “Jerry had a great career at Kirksville,” VanMarter states. “His senior year the team won the regional and qualified for the national tournament in Evansville, IN. I rode out to watch with his parents. Jerry and I have been very good friends for almost 70 years.”
It was the summer of 1956. VanMarter was in between his freshman and sophomore years at Holy Rosary. The summer game plan for his ball playing buddies was an endless “American Graffiti” three months of hot rod cruising, nights of baseball games and long-legged girls. But this new basketball coach had other ideas with an intent to put wings on the previously flat-footed Trojans. “Boys, I will get you in shape,” the cocksure newcomer told his assembled team.
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| 1955-56 Schedule |
There was no mutiny, not in the simpler pre-social media days of 1956. No flash mob of protest. In 1956 coaches still had the first, last and only word. Period. “We were just so glad he wanted to coach us,” remembers VanMarter. Ozzie had never asked a boy to come out for basketball and he was not now about to start begging them to play. With this group, there was no need to.
By that summer of ‘56, across town, the public MC bunch had been on quite a run. In the fall of 1946, Coach Morrie Schroeter came to town. He found a community ready for some fun. Over a decade of the Great Depression and four years of World War had taken its toll. Students entering high school as freshman in 1946 had known nothing but national crisis their entire lives. It would be a brief reprise in the storm, as conflict in Korea was only four years away, but for the time, if not a lasting peace, at least peace in time.
Schroeter’s first team recorded a record of 25-10, his second 36-8, falling one game short of the 1948 state tournament. Schroeter’s final two teams in 1951 and 1952 both won 30 games; 31-8 and 31-11 respectfully. The 1951 team fell to University High of Columbia, the eventual state champs, in the semifinals of the regional. Schroeter would stay one more season.
In the fall of 1952, Billy Key moved up from Wellsville and took the helm of the Panthers. His tenure was for four years, and he would compile a record of 106-27.
Key departed not only Monroe City in 1956, but the high school coaching ranks, as well, taking the head coaching position at Harris Stowe College in St. Louis, MO. He would later spend 23 years as the head coach at the University of Missouri-Rolla. In 1988 he was elected to the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame.
Key's final team at Monroe City would finish their 1955-56 season with 30 wins against 5 loses and were defeated 78-57 in the state quarterfinals by eventual state champs, Pembroke Day of Kansas City. Jerry Burditt scored 18 points for the Panthers and Gene Mudd added 12. The private school from KC was an all-boys school. The following year, the Missouri State High School Activities Association imposed a rule that said an all boys school would, for classification purposes, have its enrollment doubled. (In 1956 girls high school athletics did not have a state wide organization.) This rule in effect in 1956 would have bumped up the team that defeated MC to Class L, the state's largest.
Jim Gottman was a star player and a MC 1957 grad. He played for both Coaches Billy Key and Frank Kirby, who followed Key. The catholic boys, he is sure, over at Holy Rosary knew well the corporal wrath of a no-nonsense nun’s ruler, but Gottman says the nuns were sandlot wannabe sluggers compared to the Micky Mantle home run stroke of Coach Billy Key. “Coach Key was a disciplinarian,” recalls Gottman, a long-time area farmer. “You did not want to cross him. He had a rod, a stick, he would carry around with him and he didn’t hesitate to use it on your rear end, if he thought he needed to get your attention. I remember one night we were playing Palmyra. At half time he was really upset with how we were playing. He got out the stick and he stung our butts good. And yeah, we did come back and win,” Gottman says with a laugh.
At MCHS, 1955-56 was a school year of change. Panther teams had always, until 1955, taken the basketball floor in their traditional colors of Black, Gold and Caucasian.
From their inception in 1925, when the team went winless in five games, through the 1955 season - the same year Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Birmingham, AL bus and the year after the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that racial school segregation was unconstitutional, Monroe City maintained segregated high schools.
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| 1958 HR Trojans |
Coach Key left a lot of talent for his replacement, Frank Kirby. Jerry Burditt was the only mainstay lost from the 1956 team. Many rank Kirby's first team, 1956-57, as the best in the history of the school.
“I don’t remember much change with a new coach for my senior year,” recalls Gottman. “I guess there could have been, but Coach Kirby was a pretty laid back guy and he was smart not to come in and try to change a lot of things. We had all been together for so long and always won, so he just let us play.”
The Panther juggernaut rolled unimpeded and unbeaten through the regular season, 33-0, reaching the state Class M state tournament round of 16. In 1957, the sixteen regional winners amongst the Class M schools all gathered in Columbia, MO for a single elimination weeklong tournament. The teams were seeded by a tournament committee. Geographic location, which had determined the regional assignments, played no role in the state level bracket. Monroe City would face off in round one with Gainesville, representing the Ozark Mountain region of southwest Missouri. Despite owning the best record in the sixteen team field, the Panthers were given the 9th overall seed. According to an article in the Moberly Index, the tournament committee had not been impressed with the level of regular season competition MC had faced. Gainsville, the 8th seed, brought with them to Columbia a 22-6 season mark.
Kirby’s team stormed out of the gate against Gainesville, racing to a 24-7 first quarter lead. They maintained a solid advantage through the second quarter, leaving the floor for halftime with a still comfortable 41-26 lead. But the tide of momentum would soon shift. Disaster stuck MC in the third quarter, going over five minutes without scoring. Monroe clung to a now slender 47-44 lead as the now close contest entered its last 8-minute quarter. Monroe City again went into an offensive deep freeze, not scoring for over one half of the final 8-minute stanza. Gainesville won going away 70-57. Gene Mudd led Monroe in scoring with 19 points and Kenny Sullivan added 13. Gainsville was led by the one two punch of Louis Joe Scott who scorched the nets for 32 points and Ronnie Goodwyn with 28. The combo outscored the entire Monroe City team., 60-57. Goodwyn was a perfect 14-14 from the free throw line.
I heard from several that the flu had hit the Panthers at the wrong time and the team just wore out in the second half. Gottman does not remember it that way. “I was not sick,” he says today, “and I don’t remember anyone else being sick. No, to be honest, Coach Kirby was just pretty young, and I do remember them with a real good press in the second half that we didn’t handle it well, No adjustments from the bench.”
Gottman says the schedule stayed the same, but the competition dropped off for the 1957 season. “The area had some good teams our junior year (1956), but a lot of teams lost a lot with graduation that year. Even though we beat them three times in '56, including the regional finals, Palmyra was good that year. All three games were close. We always said we were glad we didn’t have to play them a fourth time. Palmyra was not near as good our senior year, really, we didn’t get pushed much by anyone and I think that hurt us when we got into state.”
When Ozzie took over at HR, the town’s other team, the Panthers, had won 30 plus games in five of the previous ten years, punctuated with four regional titles. The Trojans over on the south side of town, according to Hoppy, “didn’t even know how to set a proper pick.”
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| D. Scott, Coach Key |
Holy Rosary also had a new gymnasium, opened in time for 1955-56 season, the Father Connolly Gymnasium. A man whose passion was athletics, Fr. Connolly was an institution at Holy Rosary who by 1956 had served the parish for nearly a half century. The stately looking priest, born in Ireland, had snow-white thinning hair and a well-seamed face that could break easily into a grandfatherly smile or just as quickly set severely into an expression of elderly disapproval.
He had coached every sport the school had ever offered – football, baseball and basketball, boys and girls – had led the drive for the new gym, built by and on land bought by the local Knights of Columbus. The Quonset hut structure now bore his name and was deemed worthy of hosting a regional basketball tournament. It would also provoke cries of “homer” unfairness by area competing schools.
Tom Spalding is a Holy Rosary High grad. Like most HR students he was terrified of the ancient priest with a sharp tongue. A nervous mistake by an altar boy would elicit from Connolly an admonishment of, "what the hell."
“I once accidentally walked into Msgr. Connolly's bedroom," Spalding recalls today, "thinking I was going downstairs to the basement. Msgr. was in his underwear and said to me; ‘What the HELL do you want!’ I went to confession.” Spalding’s penance? The usual, “5 Hail Mary’s and 3 Our Father’s.”
Coach Osborn was a demonstrative coach. I heard the rumor, never confirmed, that once so incensed with an official he ripped off the offending ref's whistle and hurled it into the stands. How did Father Connoley react to his coach indulging in conduct unbecoming a catholic institution of learning? "He loved Ozzie," shares Hoppy. The Trojans had needed a new coach, not a new Pope.
The Holy Dome, as the structure would became affectionately known, was ahead of its time. Even the hotshot Panthers over at the public school and their bandbox size “gym on a stage,” looked with envy at what Fr. Connelly’s boys had for a home court. It would be another decade, until the 1960’s, and the zenith of area rural school consolidation until huge, clean field houses began springing up like Levittowns to replace northeast Missouri’s many tiny bandbox gyms.
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| Fr. Connoley |
Long-time Paris coach, Donnie Williams, in time just accepted the Trojan’s home court advantage. “You were 10 down when you got off the bus,” he once groused, in only the way the rough around-the-edges, burr haircut Williams could. “Then you go inside and see the crucifix behind each basket and figure with God on their side, there goes another ten points. Now it is 20-0 and we are not even in the locker room, yet. Then when the officials walk in wearing their Knights of Columbus hats, you just figure what the heck, let’s just get back on the bus and go back home.”
TO BE CONTINUED
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