A Dissenting Vote

Every saga in the fight for fairness needs both a villain and an unsung hero. 

For the saga of the improbable Red Bud volleyball team's march to the state tournament in Charleston, Charles Harter over at the Waterloo Republic filled the role of villain like a dream straight from Central Casting.  I found Charlie, the guy who did the 1974 "who do you think you are," story on the Red Bud girls. He became a lawyer specializing in personal injury lawsuits- an ambulance chaser. 

Just as a plaintiff, Charlie, representing himself over 20 times has sued everyone but God. I did find one time he prevailed and a whole lot of, "judgement for defendant, case dismissed." 

When I asked him if he wanted to tell his side in the book - the hatchet job on these girls he pulled as a reporter for the Waterloo paper, he threatened to sue me. I told him, "Dude, you want to take on the First Amendment on this one, you better find a lawyer with one heck of a lot better batting average than you have." 

This story just gets better and better, but I am saving that for the book.

The role of unsung hero fell to Red Bud former Principal, Thomas Eson, who was willing to fight his own conference to allow his girls a chance. He is now 79 years old and living his retirement years in Edwardsville, Il, with his wife of 60 years, Joyce. He has suffered five strokes, but when I mentioned Charlie and the 1975 state volleyball tournament, he popped alive with a big grin. “Oh yeah, did we get him back,” he says with a laugh. 

With some help from his wife, we put together a timeline of his years in Red Bud. “It was my fifth year in Red Bud (1974), but I was only 31 years old. I had been a principal at 24, two years before I came to Red Bud. At the time they said at 24 I was the youngest principal in the state.”

Thomas Eson 2022

The Illinois High School Association (IHSA) had set the second week of January for the regional volleyball tournaments to be played at 64 sites around the state. The winners would advance to 16 Sectionals, then to 8 Super-sectional battles, with the survivors advancing to a state tournament with a field of 8. There were no classes by size, the best played the best and the winner take all. 

The quarterfinals were to be played in Charleston on January 24, 1975, and the semis and final rounds on January 25. This timeline would require practice to start in October and the regular season and conference games to be contested in November and December. Such a schedule would create conflict with gym usage with boys’ basketball teams. For the 1974-1975 school year, the IHSA would not offer girls basketball.

The 10 team Cahokia Conference, an alliance of which Red Bud was a member, voted to not allow its members to play volleyball in the fall and winter, but to counter with a four-week round robin schedule of matches in April, only between the 10 conference schools. In essence, a nine game, four-week season with no opportunity for statewide advancement. Their reasoning was simple, the boys needed the gym October through March for basketball practice so the girls would have nowhere to practice or play until the gym was cleared in April by the outside (boys) spring sports. 

The Conference also decided that no team could choose both options, either play in the state sanctioned time frame of winter or the April conference slate. It was one or the other. If a school choose to enter the regional tournament and compete for the honor of going to the state tournament, they were to be removed from the conference roster of volleyball teams.

Charlie, in Proxy, 1975

Eson cried foul. He cried long and hard. The story got into the local media and Eson did not back down with his steadfast opinion that the girls were not being treated fairly. As no good deed goes unpunished, for his principled stand, he took the wrath of his colleagues. And one area sportswriter. Charlie accused Eson of showing poor sportsmanship for demanding equality for his girls. 

Eson says he didn’t care. He was used to being the lone wolf at Cahokia Conference principal meetings. “I was young and still fiery, I guess would be the word. The other principals were older, and I felt a lot of the time just wanted to do what was easiest,” he says of the proverbial path of least resistance approach by the majority of his colleagues.

His wife agrees that his young age for a principal in 1974 helped define his style. “He was young, and he was always for the kids first,” she says of his erring on the side of the student. Eson was often the oddball at Cahokia Conference meetings. “We had a lot of “them against me” votes,” he says with a laugh at the memory of his often-lone dissenter status. “But I am glad it worked out how it did for the volleyball girls. It sure got the town excited, that I do remember.”

When the Red Bud 6 needed a provocateur with thick skin, Eson delivered. In October 1974 he was a one-man band, and a one-man band plays all alone. He was both the promoter and the booster his girls needed. He may have been a lost voice, but his stance was a fair one and as most votes of inclusion will in time garner its due, has stance of fairness withstood the test of time. 

Eson was a hands-on, friendly principal who interacted daily and well with the students. He tells me he never saw himself as a disciplinarian. Some in the community felt the reign he maintained at the school were somewhat too loose. By 1975, a problem that had been building for several years was now discussed openly and often in both the town social gathering spots and in the local press; too many RBHS students were now pot heads.  Eson gives a cavalier shrug of his shoulders today, just as he did in 1975, when the issue is raised. I don't press him on the controversy, but his body language seems to tell me there were lots of pot heads in the class of 1975, nationwide, Red Bud High School included. 

In sports, thanks to the saturation of social media, virtue, we are told, can be found in every action, from the benign to the preposterous. It is over hyped. In Eson's case it is not. If he does not take a stand in the fall of 1974, I am not writing this book.

Eson does not strike me as one desiring to become some stuffy sort of a new paradigm for educational courage. I also doubt he has ever been called charismatic. Without prodding, he has little in the way of self-promotion to contribute to this project. His speech is slow and altered. When I do say something that solicits a response it comes back slow and sometimes halting in delivery. 

He says backing his coach and his girls was an easy decision, they were his girls and his coach. “I didn’t think about the outside things, like who would disagree and not support me," he says. "You just do your job, do what is right and enjoy what you're doing. That is how I approached everything that came my way. It is not that hard. We all know what is right, just sometimes it can be pretty darn hard to do what is right.” And easier to roll with the majority. Thankfully for the Red Bud 6, he still had that youthful idealistic mindset to tilt at windmills. Maybe he mellowed as he aged, maybe not. He ignores my inquiry as to such. 

I tell him he is the unsung hero of this story. Without him, there is no story – yet today his personal stand is no more than an occasional recollection in the mind of a small town, a forgotten foot note. But the rippling effect of the lives of six girls he did not have to aid, but did, lives on forever. And maybe in the end -not recollection or recognition but effect - is what really matters. 

To his colleagues he was a pain and bothersome, prickly to their orderly meetings: stubborn, bullying, unpopular and wheedling. But he held the door of opportunity open for his girls and they charged through. In 1974, the Red Bud 6 were told the demeaning offer of passing on district play and a Mickey Mouse little four-week local conference schedule was the best they could get - so girls, take it or leave it. Tom Eson allowed them and their coach to choose the skedaddle option, flipping off the rest of the conference on their way out the door and on the road to Charleston to show Charlie.