By Roger L. Guffey, Lexington
In the early 1970s, high school boys converged on the library every Monday morning to check out the Litkenhous Ratings in the Louisville Courier-Journal for all of the state’s basketball teams. Rooting for the home team was a major component of student life in Kentucky high schools.
The gymnasium filled to capacity for home games, and school buses transported our Wayne County High School Cardinal fans to the away games. The school held pep rallies to cheer on the teams and give the school band opportunities to perform. Is there any high school band anywhere that did not play the instrumental “The Horse” by Cliff Nobles? Fifty-five years later, that catchy tune is still a mainstay of high school and college bands.
The weekly ratings filled an entire page of the newspaper because there were so many high schools. The Kentucky High School Athletic Association home page lists more than 1,000 high schools that have ever existed in the state as well as the team mascot of each school. The most popular mascots were Tigers (64), Wildcats (58), Bulldogs (53), Eagles (53), Cardinals (43), Panthers (40) and Yellowjackets (26). A few schools had unique mascots: Horse Cave had the Cavemen, Hazel Green the Bullfrogs, Nicholasville the Tarantulas, and—my favorite—the Van Lear Bank Mules.
The high schools were focal points of the communities, with enthusiastic fans who supported their teams. Outsiders may have trouble truly understanding how isolating the rough topography of Appalachia can be. With limited bus transportation and substandard roadways, many students had to walk to the numerous schools nestled in the hills and hollers. Today, Floyd County’s 18 high schools have dwindled to three, Pike County from 18 to five, Perry County from 19 to one, and Knox County from 14 to two.
Cheering on your home team provided a respite from the oppressive burdens of life in Appalachia. High mortality rates, serious illnesses and dangerous occupations plagued the region’s people, but fans gathered every Tuesday and Friday night to support their teams like so many hopeful Walter Mittys. In the extreme poverty of Appalachia, basketball became popular because it was inexpensive, requiring only a ball, a hoop, a flat place to play, and five players.
Small community high schools afforded dozens of students the opportunity to play in interscholastic competitions. Before Title IX, only boys played organized sports, but they were the rock stars who paraded around the town wearing their school jackets emblazoned with their names and mascots.
A perfect storm of events was brewing that spelled the demise of small schools. The onset of World War II siphoned off 307,000 Kentuckians to the European and Pacific theaters. After the war, the GI Bill of 1944 provided an impetus for returning soldiers to pursue new vocational and educational opportunities. Between 1941 and 1944, very few non-military vehicles were produced by the Big Three automakers. Ford, General Motors and Chrysler dedicated their factories to building tanks, airplanes, and Jeeps to support the war effort. By the end of the decade, automotive and other factories had retooled again to produce civilian vehicles. All they needed was a labor force.
These industrial giants found just what they needed in Appalachia and surrounding areas. To young people facing physically demanding and dangerous lives in the mines, farms and sawmills, the assembly lines were a walk in the park. The work ethic and eagerness of the migrants convinced the industries that these people could be taught to do a wide variety of tasks. Nearly every family in the mountains saw children join the great northern exodus to the greener pastures of Detroit, Indianapolis, Kokomo and Cleveland. Between 1960 and 1970, the population of my home county, Wayne, declined by 10.8 percent. As young people migrated north to start their own families, the number of school-age children declined dramatically, and the small high schools no longer were economically sustainable.
The energy crisis and rust belt collapse stemmed the tide after 1970. Between 1970 and 1980, the migrating workers retired and moved back home. Unfortunately, their children and grandchildren did not relocate because they had no connection to the mountains; they would never root for the Marion Blue Terrors or the Joppa Bloodhounds.
The consolidation of small schools met considerable opposition from fans who wanted to preserve the athletic traditions of the schools. What would happen to the trophies and memorabilia of their beloved teams? Sadly, most were discarded or lost in the transition to the new schools.
Larger high schools offered a more diverse and advanced curriculum with modern facilities and better-trained faculties, but they also had unforeseen consequences. Student anonymity allowed drugs, gangs, violence and guns to filter into the schools. Educational experts now recommend the maximum high school size to be between 700 and 1,000 students, but the chances of breaking up the big high schools are slim to none.
Students today have lost many of the intangibles associated with small schools. At Wayne County High School, the classes and clubs built floats for the homecoming parade and marched through town to cheer on their beloved Cardinals. Seniors held an autumn carnival and sold magazine subscriptions, candy and other merchandise to raise money to pay for a senior trip to Washington and New York City, places most of them would never have gotten to visit otherwise.
Even worse, the communities of the mountains have diminished the oral traditions of the vanished basketball teams. One of the best examples is the Carr Creek Indians. The 1928 team from Knott County did not even have uniforms until fans in Richmond bought them when the team won the regional title. All eight of the players were related, and the team traveled to the national tournament in Chicago. Billed as the “Barefoot Boys,” they created such a national frenzy that a wealthy Northerner offered to buy them shoes. Even actor and comic Will Rogers heralded their unlikely success.
The story of Carr Creek is just one of the hundreds of remarkable stories about the heroes of the small high school teams. I seriously doubt that students today—distracted by cell phones, the internet, Instagram and the temptations of drugs and alcohol—will ever have stories that will be remembered so fondly by so many Kentuckians a generation from now.
The Howell Hustlin’ Owls, the Benham Tigers and the Flat Gap Greyhounds have gone the way of the passenger pigeon, driven to extinction by the inexorable march of progress. Still, my curiosity got the better of me and I had to research what the Van Lear “Bank Mule” was. A bank mule hauled the coal mined from the underground seams to the surface. What could be a more fitting high school basketball team mascot than one so intimately linked to the lifeblood of the community?
Even today, two score and 10 years later, I still hear an old cheer echoing down the halls of my memories:
One, two, three, four, Let’s go Cardinals, SCORE, SCORE, SCORE!