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.