Basketball Season

The Verdigre Eagle is one of the best small-town newspapers I've ever read so that my older sister saves theirs for me--her husband is a Verdigre graduate--even though I no longer know many in that community. When I was in high school, I knew most of the high schoolers in all the county towns and, because of my parents, many of the adults too, not hard in a rural county where family trees keep branching into each other. Anyway, one of my favorite columns is Glenna Pavlik's "Glancing Back," anniversary selections from "73 Years Ago" to "10 Years Ago." (Last year was a banner year for me in the "50 Years Ago" section, my high school graduation year, and she is good enough to mention Center periodically.) Other county newspapers have these but far fewer items, hit-and-run. Anyway, in the 30 December issue was an amusing "Dec. 10, 1931" sketch of the seasonal sport that I think should be more widely shared before I move back to some Center musings.

Basketball: Basketball is loosely described as an indoor sport and is distinguished from others by its costume, which begins late and leaves off early, and is therefore scarcely suited to dominoes, bridge, or ordinary shuffle board. The object of the game is to throw a ball into a basket, but since the basket--through some inexplicable oversight of the rule makers--has no bottom, the ball must be thrown into it repeatedly and there is really nothing final or conclusive about the game. Practically the entire attention of the players, officials, and spectators at a basketball game is devoted to fouls and penalties in atonement and repentance for them. If a player turns suddenly logical and tucks the ball under his arm or walks or runs away with it, it is a technical foul. If he seizes one of his opponents by the slack of the trousers--of where there is none to spare--it is a personal foul. If he hits him in the nose, bites his ear, kicks his shins, or breaks his ribs, it is a very personal foul and arouses to fever pitch the aesthetic sensibilities of the audience.

As some of my high school photos show, the trunks were like later hot pants, very tight and very brief in shiny material, with the undershirt above, now mutated into stylized T-shirts and baggy pants that give me the giggles because they're barely disguised culottes (women's very baggy divided pants with enough material to resemble skirts, the only way women could wear pants publicly without scandal for some years, weirdly enough). Such sports drollery was to hit a high point in My Favorite Year, 1954, in another sport with Andy Griffith's hugely successful, hilariously comic monologue, "What It Was Was Football" (as experienced by a naive hillbilly). I tried to find the text for it, but it's still selling and undoubtedly fiercely guarded by vendors and copyright. The other side of the record was his "Romeo and Juliet" satire, the 45 rpm now selling for $25 up.

Basketball was THE Center High sport. We were the orange-and-black Center Panthers. We had a baseball team, but the budget couldn't support another sport like football. In fact we had the choice between playing six-man football or building a new gymn; and, given that we played basketball--our superintendent-coach's obsession--from October to March, ending in intramural tournaments after the state hoopla, we built the gymn, which also gave us noisy heaters and air-conditioning, a hard tile floor, a spacious stage, shop classrooms above the large locker rooms that could double as locker rooms for tournaments, a kitchen for a hot-lunch program, and a new community center for, among other events, dances. We could finally, proudly host tournaments in a better gymn than the bigger towns then had. It was new enough for me to draw for our 1954 annual and now the only wrecked remnant of the town's schools left up on Schoolhouse Hill, the two-story schoolhouse and, much later, the one-room schoolhouse moved in for elementary grades where my sisters first went gone with the passing times. (Much earlier the place where we played anti-i-over, a long stable southwest of the big schoolhouse, was razed, though pupils still rode to school when I started, especially when the roads were bad. For that matter farmers still came to town with teams and wagons, and we're talking the 1940s.)

Up to that time, we were consigned to playing basketball in the old hall, a gutted two-story hotel on the north end of Main Street with wooden floors, some of the slats buckling, some dead spots, a small stage with no work space, two small subterranean low-ceilinged locker rooms with stairs down on each side of the stage to their dim dankness. The spectators sat in a single row of folding chairs around the perimeter and stood in the corners. This made for close encounters of a very sweaty kind, and we were used to nasty complaints from other towns, though Verdigre's school gymn was also very small with high walls (but balconies for the spectators) and Spencer's was impossible because of being a dance pavilion with large low crossing beams regularly spaced preventing any lobbed passes or long arced shots (there was even a trick to making free throws). A furnace beneath the stage between the locker rooms could heat the place, but nothing could cool our old hall except opening the doors. When we started practicing, approximately a month before other towns, we contended with wasps, and the ceiling and upper walls occasionally had honey stains.

This hall also served not only for dances but our movie theater on Saturday nights in the wintertime, where we held fund-raising carnivals and town meetings, where we hosted the large crowd from around the state for the church's 50th Anniversary celebration, where we gave our class plays, school programs, commencements. It was where I was the eighth-grade Scrooge in a very abbreviated Christmas Carol and the lead in the only freshman-sophomore class play ever.

Out back of that long gone important community center was a two-holer for extra use when the locker rooms were occupied or locked, that outdoor toilet the only one I ever got to tip over on Halloween and also my paradigm for Mom's attitude about behavior. Dad's having been the mayor for years--43 ultimately, I think--I was supposed to be a role model, or so Mom contended, a useful opposition to peer pressure (and an empty claim, no other kids caring what I did). Actually, I knew that his being mayor meant that he had to clean out the sewer periodically, to unclog the plugged culverts when the Coulee flooded through town after summer thunderstorms (before he got a levee built), to fix the streetlights and town well pump, to put up the meager Christmas lights, to flood our home-made skating rink, to see that the streets were plowed after big snows, or to otherwise serve as the town's handyman, which the position mostly called for, besides presiding at town council meetings and fielding neighbors' disputes. Mom controlled me thoroughly anyway, but this social claim afforded a polite additional weapon. A hallowed Halloween custom was tipping over the several wooden toilets out back of stores, Dad's shop, private residences, considered dutiful comic vandalism by the same ones who soaped all the business windows and flung toilet paper into trees. Now that I look back at the practice, I realize it's one of those ancient remnants of human carnival, like Mardi Gras, a social steam-letting that dates to early religious rites and the Lord of Misrule from Roman Saturnalia and medieval Christmas celebrations. But none of us knew anything that anthropological then, and I was scarcely allowed out to go trick-or-treating. In my junior or senior year, however, I actually persuaded Mom to let me just once tip over a toilet--promising to right it the next day, which made my request even sillier--specifying the old two-holer behind the hall. It sat not far from our trash pile, where--before the EPA and OSHA--we dumped and burned our garbage/trash, which creates interesting middens for archeologists hundreds and thousands of years later, so we were making history of sorts. (Middens were originally dunghills, but the word now applies to kitchen refuse heaps, packrat piles, and antiquated garbage dumps.) Well, in my rush after the dirty deed, I tripped over our trashpile and ran a stick into my wrist, leaving a permanent scar as just punishment, to which--as my sisters are mightily tired of hearing--Mom snapped, "Serves you right!" while treating the wound. As I said, my paradigm for her code of conduct.