Arvel Popp: A Man of His Time

Once, as a senior high school basketball player, a teammate and I decided one evening to drive a few miles north up Highway 61 to the Trophy Inn, a Kimmswick, MO bar, and have a couple of after practice cold beers. It was the kind of roadhouse you would expect to find a sign hanging over the urinal that said, "Don't eat the big white mint." Their lax age carding policies were well known to us. 

Sitting at the bar that night were two high school basketball coaches I immediately recognized: Coach Denver Miller of Kirkwood High School and our own Coach Arvel Popp. Like a cat out of a tree, we reversed field, hastily slipping out the same back door we had just entered. Hopefully, unnoticed. The next day, before practice, Coach Popp called my accomplice and myself into his office. “Boys,” he said, “I been drinking at the Trophy Inn for 20 years. Find a new spot.”

For my junior and senior years Coach Popp was my high school varsity basketball coach at Crystal City, MO High School. I graduated in 1975. I never had a buddy-buddy relationship with Coach Popp. Our interactions were from my side, polite and respectful, but I never thought of him as a friend or even a mentor. He was my coach.

We had a pretty good team. Back then each quarter was started with a center court jump ball. One night, we were 10 points behind at halftime to an inferior opponent when Coach Popp inspired us with a locker room two-pronged strategic adjustment: “Let’s get the tip and remember boys we shoot at the other basket this half.” He then went to his office to smoke a cigarette. Several of my teammates moved to the shower room to do the same. Inspired, kind of, we stormed from the locker room and won easily. I never felt that Coach Popp burdened us with over coaching. I decided to become a high school basketball coach. How hard could this gig be? In his career Coach Popp won over 700 games. 

In 1948 and already an established success, Coach Popp was lured away from Dexter, MO High School to take the reins of the Hornets. He stayed for 27 years, building a Hall of Fame career. A Southeast Missouri native of the town of Perryville and a World War II vet, Coach Popp was an enigmatic leader, aloof and disengaged from the community. He ran his teams as an unbending disciplinarian, totally above the grasp and influence of any of the town’s power brokers. Renowned in his younger days as a barroom brawler who seldom came up short with his fists, Coach Popp made and lived by his own rules.

Coach Popp had a scowl that could freeze a basketball player in midair. He was Hornet athletics, serving in the dual roles of Head Varsity Football Coach and Head Varsity Boys’ Basketball Coach. As an afterthought, he was also Athletic Director. 

Coach Popp maintained an omnipotent stance during his reign. The South Pacific combat war veteran was the Lord of the Manor, his players the Serfs. When I made mistakes, Coach Popp used his vitriolic tongue to correct me in front of my teammates. It was his way of toughening me up. I knew that he wanted me to play a little harder and I went out and played a little harder—sometimes.

Today, Coach Popp is remembered in Crystal City with reverence accorded to a patron saint. The high school gym, whose construction he oversaw in the mid 1950’s, is now named The Arval B. Popp Gymnasium. 

On the heels of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court Brown v Topeka Board of Education decision outlawing school racial segregation, in the fall of 1955 Coach Popp’s football team suited up four black players, the first team in the area to do so. He was given his due for a move many credit for a relatively smooth local school desegregation process. In most small rural Missouri communities in the 1950’s and 60’s, the resentment from the school segregationists spilled into the streets. Not in my hometown. 

The Hornet football juggernaut of the day out-trumped even racial prejudice. The town in the vernacular of the day seemed to say, “if those colored boys can help the team put the pigskin in the end zone, then give ‘em a uniform.” Eight years before Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech, ten years before Bloody Sunday in Selma and thirteen years before Perry Wallace would integrate Southeast Conference basketball at Vanderbilt, Coach Popp fielded an integrated football team.

How much of this principled stance should go NOT to Coach Popp but instead to a progressive school board dominated by college educated local Pittsburg Plate Glass factory administrators, is open to debate. Furthermore, the Jim Crow era Crystal City Starr black elementary school did not close its doors until 1960. Why wait an additional five years to fully integrate? Elementary students could not help the football team? This slight is still a point of consternation for older community blacks who bristle to this day at mention of the local board’s historical acclaim for racial progressiveness. 

Many of my black athletic classmates never played basketball for Coach Popp. Ironically, one of our biggest rivals, the local catholic high school, St. Pius, had for over a decade been fueled by black basketball players who had attended the Crystal City public schools through 8th grade, before (perhaps for a fairer shake) moving for high school across town to the private school. 

As a white 1920’s product of the state’s bootheel, an area near Mississippi, Coach Popp would have had little exposure growing up to racial tolerance. For the first half of his life, Coach Popp lived under state laws that mandated racial segregation; everything from education, to housing, to public restrooms. Interracial intimate relations were not only against the law, but in extreme cases led to lynchings, one in Missouri as late as 1933. The legacies of racial discrimination are deeply ingrained in Missouri.

Coach Popp was like all of us, a product of his times. Is it in this retrospective context how the racial culture Coach Popp built and oversaw as the leader of CCHS athletics for almost three decades be judged?

In the mid-18th century, Thomas Jefferson impregnated his 14-year-old slave. In his time, the future President and founder of the University of Virgina was viewed as a national treasure. We still to this day name monuments after him. His face adorns Mount Rushmore. Crystal City is in Jefferson County. But his type of pedophiliac Epstein-like behavior today would draw universal scorn and likely lead to Jefferson’s imprisonment. 

If America can judge Jefferson’s life as a total body of work, tempered by the ethics of his time, can I do the same for Coach Popp? He was no neo-fascistic racist. But there were some post-World War II coaches, cut from the same social cloth era as Coach Popp, who bucked the racial stereotyping of the times. North Carolina’s Dean Smith was one - brave coaches who used their influential voices to make often-unpopular statements for racial social justice. However, Coach Popp was not one. 

If my black classmates had been on the basketball team, I may not have played much. My black classmate the late Elroy “Jaw Man” Bequette, a local playground basketball legend, never played a minute of high school basketball for Coach Popp. Jaw Man eventually played four years of college basketball at the JUCO and NCAA Division I level. At CCHS in 1975, that is just the way it was. 

Perhaps, Coach Popp hung on too long. According to players from his early Hornet years, he was a sharp-tongued disciplinarian and notorious perfectionist. But hard-nosed old school coaches like him, by 1975, were out of their element, did not relate to a youth culture weaned on the chaos of Vietnam, the Civil Right movement and Watergate. Questioning authority we viewed as our birthright. 

Today, my hometown is a bedroom community of daily rush hour commuters. But Crystal City was in 1975 still a multi-generational blue-collar factory town built around a melting pot of racial diversity – and Coach Popp’s Hornets were the social glue that bound all facets cohesively together. To our parents he was the coach who had turned the boys of their class into men. And he did not suffer slackers gladly. But, by 1975 he was on his last legs. To us, Coach Popp was an alien who had descended in a pod from outer space. He laughed at the wrong places. He was irascible, cantankerous, immovable ol' Coach Popp. 

We had a younger hip Assistant Coach in Mr. Rolla Herbert. With his long hair and mastery of current jargon, he became our sounding board. It was more than just an age disparity. Mr. Herbert had a background of closeness to his players I doubt he ever lost, a trait Coach Popp, at any age, I doubt ever had. Once on an away game bus ride, Coach Popp joked that with Coach Herbert around, it allowed him as head coach to be the evil coach. 

After the 1976 season, Coach Popp retired. For several years after his retirement, he served CCHS in a new role as a substitute teacher. I found that to be out of character for the Coach Popp I had known. My younger brothers were in school then, and they found him engaging and lighthearted. He even let his hair grow over his ears.

Coach Popp passed away on January 25, 1996, at the age of 81. 

So, who was Arvel Popp? As the years have passed, my memories of Coach Popp have become more nuanced, the discordance bouncing around in my head for the last 50 years. He was a man of his time, but it was not a good time. I do respect what he did professionally. He will always be, and justifiably so, a legend in my hometown.

No One Makes It Alone

I didn’t really enjoy high school. I didn’t do a lot of loud stuff, make a lot of scenes. I don’t have any true horror stories, I didn’t really get bullied, I had numerous friends, and I got passable grades… I just didn’t like it. One exception for me - playing football and basketball in my senior year. By then, I was good enough, I guess, that for the first time in my life, I felt noticed. I floated through my senior year.

Crystal City, MO Hornet athletics in 1975, the year I graduated from the local high school, was the lifeblood of the townsfolk. On basketball home game nights, it was always a full house in the school gymnasium, a utilitarian structure that also served at varied times as, concert hall, graduation stage, prom venue, banquet hall, and, on occasion, funeral parlor. Winning coaches could be a dominant personage in that sort of place, legends in the making to a grateful and proud factory town.

From 1980 until 2024, with a couple of short breaks, I coached high school and college athletic teams, the first four years as an assistant, the other years as a head coach. My wife does not buy it, but today in 2025, I am done. Probably.

My approach evolved over the years to praise them when they hit the standard but never lower the standard. When you take care of your athletes, help them grow, the winning will take care of itself. Saying no, not yes, was hard initially for me to master. It took a few years. It is very easy to say yes. But when you say no you build a culture of accountability, you literally get to the soul of your athletes.

Coaches Rodney Mills and Dick Cook were my high school football coaches. In unique and divergent ways, both got to my soul. My personal coaching ethos became, “remember how fun it was to play and imagine you are coaching 1975 you.” I wanted to do for my athletes what those two did for me.

Coach Mills, a 1955 Hornet grad, began coaching at CCHS in 1962. He stayed until he retired in 1986. He told me once he was, “too ornery, too cussed independent,” for any other school to take a chance on him, so he stayed. By day, Coach Mills taught the complexities of the structure of the English language to an often-unmotivated captive audience of 15-year-old sophomores. After school, he corrected the errors of would-be football lineman with a combination of inspirational practice field quotes and the surgically precise placement of the pointed end of a size 12 Wilson coaching shoe up the butt of the player in need of direction.

Coach Mills told me at halftime in the first high school football game of my career, a JV game, that if I shanked just one more punt, “I am going to raise more hell than the alligators did when the pond went dry.” Not my fault, I pleaded. The up-back blocking for me backed into me.

Coach Mills immediately waved me off. You can make excuses, or you can get the job done, but you can’t do both, was his brutal message. Coach Mills, I finally figured out, would recount the disasters to demonstrate his fidelity. He had seen me at the outset at my worst, and he hammered home to me my inadequacy. Now our relationship had nowhere to go but up - you are a horrible punter, but you are “my” horrible punter. I learned a valuable lesson from Coach Mills - never try to con a con man.

Every Quixote needs his windmill. For Coach Mills it was the hated cross town rival Festus Tigers. Just the mention of the name would send CCHS’s version of the Renaissance Man twirling around in a gale. Coach Mills gathered us seniors together before a Monday practice and said, "Friday night you will play Festus. For the rest of your lives, you will carry with you YOUR senior year Festus game." It was that big of a deal.

One of our seniors attended the first half of the school day at the Vocational Tech School at Jefferson College in Hillsboro. All the county public high schools bussed students there. From a Festus football player and VoTech classmate of one of our teammates, Coach Mills learned that the Tigers, who were suffering a down year while we were rolling, had a desperate plan for Friday night. The hapless Tigers were spending the week installing the archaic Single Wing offensive formation. They were going to catch us unprepared. This unorthodox strategy would be the equivalent of pulling the 1970’s Wishbone offense from the football mothballs in 2025. Crazy. But maybe just crazy enough to work?

Coach Mills had our defense locked in on how to defend the Single Wing. There were many reasons why teams no longer ran this offense, and Coach Mills knew them all. When Festus huddled up for their first offensive play from scrimmage, Coach Mills had the defense chanting, “Single Wing, Single Wing.” The surprise factor was gone before the first snap. For the master of “One Upmanship,” it was Coach Mills at his best. Our defense owned the night, shutting out Festus in their Homecoming game 28-0. We had earned, at least for that evening, Main Street cruising bragging rights.

His practice field rants were often hyperbolic, but their substance was real. Nobody crossed Coach Mills. Impious and blasphemous, he relished throwing snowballs at top hats. When the teams I coached went on the road for a big rivalry game, I taught my guys to be confident, aggressive and obnoxious, just like Coach Mills had taught us.

Somehow, his varied and disparate approaches would find a confluence and Coach Mills was well liked and successful in both the classroom and on the football field. To this day, sneaking up on 90 years of age, he remains unbroken, irreverent and as he told me a few years back, “loudly humble.”

Coach Dick Cook graduated from CCHS in 1956. He then played football and ran track at the University of Missouri. Coach Cook was the calming voice of the Captain Cook/General Mills dynamic duo, displaying always patience and reason. The two coaches' personalities were a good mix.

As a coach, I started our practice every day by blowing my whistle with: gimme three lines, gimme three lines. One day I decided to be cute, I came out and said gimme two lines and everybody looked at me like I just asked them to cure cancer. Practice was a disaster. A lot of coaching is what you choose not to do, not to see. Coach Cook was adept at not allowing distractions to disrupt the day’s plan. I figured as a coach I was wrong 80% of the time, but it would take too much time to go back and make “me right.” I learned from Coach Cook to not complicate things; check your coaching ego at the practice field gate and just keep moving forward. And when you get lucky, roll with it.

Coach Mills shared a good story with me. Randy Cayce was a star running back on the undefeated Hornet football team of 1965. He later played for the Denver Broncos and the Buffalo Bills, as a teammate to O.J. Simpson. “We are playing up at Fox. Coach Cook calls for Randy to sweep to the right. Of course, wherever Randy went, so did the 11 on the other side. Well, Randy sees he is boxed in, comes to a complete stop, I mean a complete stop with both feet; he looks around and then takes off around the left end and outruns the whole Fox team for a touchdown. Nobody laid a hand on him. I saddled up to Coach Cook on the sideline and said, ‘Nice call Coach, just how you drew it up.”'

In basketball, team chemistry follows the shot chart. Everyone wants to shoot the basketball. You've got to have your best shooter shoot more, but the others must shoot enough. The ability to create and maintain that balance amongst a group of testosterone fed teenage boys takes skill. The task when overseeing a football team, I would assume, is similar. There is only so much room in the next day’s headlines. I was never an indispensable cog on any team, in high school or college, but more than any other coach I played for, Coach Cook made me feel valued.

The cerebral Coach Cook would successfully wear many coaching hats in his long tenure at CCHS and over the years has filled a plethora of civic leadership roles as a respected public servant in support of his beloved hometown. Coach Cook, who won six consecutive state championships between 1984 and 1989 coaching the Hornet’s girls’ track teams, ascended to his current community god like status by sticking to a philosophy that emphasizes the practical and the unpretentious. Win or lose, turn the page.

Coach Cook was instrumental in helping me get a college football scholarship. I lasted one semester. I came home and got a job washing dishes. I dreaded the thought of letting Coach know I was a failure, that I had wasted his efforts. After Christmas break I made my way to the elementary school where he taught PE. In his usual disarming way, Coach spoke for a half hour with me. His message was: "Do what you want with your life; it's all up to you." Most importantly, he offered to again help me. I did not squander my second chance.

Times have changed. I came through at a good time. Coaching high school athletes in the 1970’s was still both manly and honorable. They were unique men, instilling a post-war type of football discipline on its last legs - weed out the weak during summer camp and then "dressout" those left standing. But those coaches were the Last Cowboys. They represented a time that has vanished (maybe for good reason - three-hour mid-day August practices with no water breaks) from high school athletics and from this nation. But good coaches can still teach life lessons that transcend the scoreboard - keep your composure amid chaos, form a plan when all seems lost and find the guts to carry it out.

You manage things; you lead people. Rodney Mills and Dick Cook were mentors to me - authority figures who allowed me to see the hope inside myself. I have tried over the years to pay it forward.  Nobody makes it alone. And we are all mentors to people even when we don't know it.

Boarder Wars

Those in the Twin City's still on the sunny side of 50 don't have the context to appreciate how important and bitter the Crystal City Hornets vs. Festus Tiger annual football game was. It was the single most important event on the area calendar. The last game between the two was contested 36 years ago.

Fifty falls ago, Coach Rodney Mills, a 1955 Hornet grad himself, gathered us seniors together before the Monday practice and said, "Friday night you will play Festus. For the rest of your lives, you will carry with you YOUR senior year Festus game." It was that important. At their Homecoming, we shut them out 28-0.

The two “Twin Cities,” separated only by a single street; played each other 45 times between 1946 and 1989, twice in 1947, the second game on Thanksgiving Day. The rivalry was intense. Older fans, for example, still debate the legality of the “sleeper play” CCHS pulled off in the 1949 game. The Hornets dominated the early years, the Tigers the later.

From 1963 to 1967, CC pitched five straight defensive shutouts over Festus. Go back seven years, 1961 to 1967, and the totally outmanned Tigers crossed the Crystal City goal line only once; scoring a grand total of only six points, an average of less than one point per game. The Hornets won all seven.

In 1989, the annual border war was discontinued by mutual agreement. The Tigers won the last ten played. As Festus’ enrollment grew and landlocked CCHS’s dropped, the game became no longer competitive. The final tally stands as a draw, 21-21-3, perhaps, a perfect ending to the greatest sports rivalry this community will ever know.

Tom Pendergast, the Farm and Uncle Joe Murphy

Tom Pendergast was the most famous crime boss in the history of the state of Missouri. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Pendergast]

He controlled every yard of concrete that was poured in the state between 1910 and 1940. His concrete business was a front during prohibition and Pendergast also controlled most of the state's illegal liquor. He was also the man who brought Harry Truman to power.

My uncle Joe Murphy and his road grading construction company in the first 30 years of the 20th century was massive. They won and completed most of the large contracts in the state at a time when roads couldn’t be paved fast enough. I know they paved Kings Highway all the way to Potosi, large parts of Grand Avenue in St. Louis and many other major and minor thoroughfares not only in Missouri, but throughout the nation. They were very wealthy. 

Uncle Joe Murphy was quite the gambler. Our family farm south of Festus where we grew up was inherited from Joe and my Aunt Annie. Aunt Annie was the sister of my paternal grandfather, Robert Almany who died in 1933 at a very young age, when my dad was two years old.

Family lore always said that Joe Murphy won the farm in a poker game. I don’t know if that’s true, but I heard from many old timers growing up that the most high stakes poker games in the state were played in this little Log house, pictured here , on the Murphy farm. Interesting, after its gambling days the log house became the house where I lived the first four years of my life. When I lived there, it had no electricity and no running water. It has fallen into obvious disarray.

Uncle Joe and Tom Pendergast became fast friends. They not only shared the demand for the concrete they both needed in the road construction business, but they both had an affinity for high stakes poker.  Dad insisted that Pendergast was a regular at the log house poker games. The games would sometimes run three straight days. Family bragging also likes to note that several times a young Harry Truman tagged along with Pendergast. Truman was well known as president for his love of a good poker game. I don’t know if Harry Truman playing poker on the farm is true or not, but it makes a good story, so what the heck. But I do know Pendergast was a regular.

Uncle Joe employed a large number of black laborers. They did all of the road grading back then by mule. They had huge road graders that took a large team of mules to pull. I’ve seen pictures or the entire hillside of the barn on the Murphy Farm south of Festus covered with mules. Uncle Joe would winter his black employees at the farm and then in the spring send them and his mule teams out by rail around the country.

Dad loved to tell this story and I’ve heard it from others as well so I think it is true. There was a member of local law enforcement who did not take kindly to so many blacks spending the winter on the farm. Dad always called him out by name but I won’t do that. It’s a well-known local name.  The local cop let Uncle Joe know that he would tolerate the blacks staying on the farm, but they needed to stay out of town, and the cop would need two dollars a head per month for security for each black wintering on the Murphy farm.

Uncle Joe called his friend Pendergast who then sent down a couple of his Goons. Dad said they were both about 6 foot five inches tall and dressed like they had just stepped off an Untouchables movie set. They asked Uncle Joe if he could take them to town and point out this constable as they would like to try to reason with him.

Uncle Joe took them to town and they found the local policeman on Main Street at a gas station with a bunch of his friends. It’s exactly what Pendergast’s boys wanted.

They both got out of the car, each grabbed the local policeman by an arm and lifted him up 3 feet off of the ground. One reached into the local cop’s pocket and pulled out a little Derringer pistol that he was known to carry. The other said, "if you ever try to shake down Joe Murphy again, we will be back and we will stick this toy pop gun straight up your ass.”

Dad said the two goons set the cop down, put his pistol back in his pocket, straighten his jacket for him and patted him on the head. Half the town saw it. Uncle Joe never got harassed again about his black workers staying on the farm.

Mrs. Gruber

Crystal City High School in the 1960’s and 1970’s employed a star-studded faculty. Coaches Rodney Mills, Dick Cook and Rolla Herbert were glib, hip – all well-liked and successful. Men like Mr. Don Housett and Mr. Elmer Smith, by their mere presence in the building wielded control and demanded respect. I liked Mrs. LeFlore and her art classes. And Mr. Wills was the best teacher I ever had. I am not sure who would be second, but they are a distant second.

Business teacher Mrs. Pauline Gruber would have never made the era’s CCHS faculty list of “Cool Kids.” She was not an extrovert in any sense, and, with all the panache of a cloistered nun, her colleagues were generally far more colorful than she. To be honest, I could have seen her in my grandma’s quilting circle, grinning through a weekly dose of fabric fusion fellowship.

But in Mrs. Gruber’s own way she was special. It has taken some time, like 50 years, for me to give Mrs. Gruber her due, but today she is my gold standard for teaching with dignity and unadulterated care.

The first semester of my junior year Mrs. Guber taught me high school Bookkeeping. It didn’t take long for us to come to the agreement that we needed to find for me a new second semester warm seat to occupy, in another class. But before my short-lived accounting career could come to an inglorious end, we first had to get me north of the first semester passing line.

For the last two weeks of the semester, each day at the start of lunch hour I would dutifully report to Mrs. Gruber’s room. After a few days, I secretly began to look forward to the tutorial sessions. In between bites of her brown bag bologna and cheese on white bread (the menu never varied) she drilled me relentlessly on Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Cash Flow and Balance Sheets; sanding down the bumps until, finally, the path between my failing grade and 60%, while not as smooth as glass, was reachable. By the end I am proud to say, I could at least balance a check book. I just assumed I was the worst student Mrs. Gruber ever taught, but she pulled me through. She cared about me, she really did. And I strove to please her. Strange how that dynamic relationship works, isn’t it?

Several years after I graduated, I walked into Dr. Hagen’s dental waiting room, and there sat Mrs. Gruber. I remember I was a little taken back that she had a life outside of her classroom. I had no knowledge of her personal life. I don’t think any of us did. I enjoyed that afternoon visiting with her. I never saw her again.

I found an online obituary for Mrs. Gruber. It was brief. It was also short and predictably bland. She taught at CCHS from 1961 until the mid 1980's. Mrs. Gruber passed away in Horn Lake, Mississippi in 2012 at the age of 89. She was born in Cardwell, MO, where she was buried. She was raised in Senatobia, MS, where after high school she became a hairstylist. When World War II broke out Mrs. Gruber joined the Navy and was stationed in San Diego, CA. After the war, she used the GI Bill to earn her teaching degree. Her first husband passed away in 1953. Her second husband in1987. She spent her retirement years living in Mississippi near her son and his family.

Remember: Mrs. Gruber was a teacher. That may sound elementary, but it's not. Such simplicity is boring to some, but for those who watch closely, there's a purity that's almost surreal. Why did she leave such an impression on me?  A fine God-given mind, for one thing. She had the disposition and inclinations of a teacher, the ability to motivate the most unlikely (myself) to rush to her classroom when the lunch bell rang, because "I couldn't wait."

Mrs. Gruber would have been the last to seek the spotlight. I am sure she never worked the room; more likely she would fade to a quiet corner. But just once, while we still can show appreciation, let’s call her from the shadows of forgotten ambiguity, and ask her to take a bow.

Little League Revisited

 

This photo could not be more evocative. A group of scrubbed clean white boys and their smiling ear to ear black teammates, along with two coaches pose with a trophy proclaiming them kid baseball champions of some corner of a 12-year old’s universe. It is sometime in the 1960’s, I would guess, and the boys are from the blue-collar factory towns of Crystal City and Festus, MO. They live lives dominated by a huge glass factory, not far from their Field of Dreams, that throbbed and clanged night and day. But they don’t care about any of that grown-up stuff. They pose proud and happy, not realizing this is a snapshot in time they should forever treasure. This is as good as life gets.

According to their website, the Crystal City and Festus, Missouri neighbors in 1939 chartered the Twin City Baseball Little League. It has operated at full strength ever since. By the early 1950’s ’s the league had racially integrated. Local historians today note that co-op helped pave a mostly smooth late-1950’s integration of the local schools. In fact, the national Little League organization had always taken a progressive stand on race, especially when compared with the slow pace of integration of major league baseball. In the 1950’s, four Little League World Series champions were integrated teams from New Jersey and Connecticut. In 1955 white teams in South Carolina refused to take the field to play an all-black team of 12-year-olds from Charleston, so the national organization in Williamsport, PA ruled that state's championship vacant and invited the black Charleston team to the World Series in Williamsport as honorary, though nonplaying, South Carolina champs.

Today, Youth Baseball has been revolutionized by select travel teams, preying on parents’ vicarious desire to secure college scholarships and high-paying major league careers for their offspring. A group called U.S. Specialty Sports Association ranks the nation’s top 30 four-year-old and under teams – as in preschoolers.

Travel team tryouts are held in the fall and 11-month seasons dominate and often overwhelm a young player’s schedule (and life).The neighborhood pickup games of the past are as gone as the summer mosquito spray truck. Over the last 50 years we have organized the lifeblood out of youth baseball. Heavy on the mechanics and too light on the fun. Fun requires a summer afternoon in the backyard while dad is at work. Remember Indian Ball? Hot Box? Burnout? Too many recreational leagues today just check off the boxes of “equal opportunity.” We stick kids in the outfield in T-ball leagues, where nobody hits them a ball for an hour, and wonder why they end up on skateboards. I give the Twin City Little League its kudos, since 1939 every child in the Twin City Little League gets a uniform, and every child gets to play. It is a throwback inclusive philosophy, found not often enough today.

From the ages of 10 to 12 I played in the Twin City Little League, for the Indians. It is my favorite childhood memory. We played two games a week through the months of June and July. Our uniforms were gray flannel with blue pin stripes and my number was 6, same as Stan Musial.

In our league the coach was a father who arrived at games straight from work, often still wearing his work attire, and he probably knew more about slide rules or union bylaws than about the double cutoff or a suicide squeeze. My team, the Indians, were an exception. My Coach was Poogie Skaggs. As far as I can recall, he was the only non-father coach in the league. Poogie was perhaps in his mid-30’s. By day, he was a meat cutter at the local IGA. While most teams would shuffle in a new coach each year (as the coaches’ son would age out of the league) Poogie was a fixture with the Indians. Year after year. And the Indians were the New York Yankees of the 1960’s Twin City Little League. When you were selected in the 10-year-old draft, you wanted it to be by the Indians.

Poogie did the little things that made a 10-year-old feel special. Every year he would buy each player a blue long-sleeved shirt to wear under our jersey, just like what we saw on the Saturday afternoon Major League TV Game of the Week. No other team in our league had them. Poogie hammered into us the importance of the pregame infield warmup routine. We drilled and perfected it every practice. With the opposition watching from their dugout, we would sprint from our dugout to our warmup position with enthusiasm and snap. Everybody “chattered” No wasted motion, synchronized execution that left our opponents slack jawed with envy. Poogie and his ever-present fungo bat put us through the warmup. We sent the message, "we are here to win." We finished with a fungo pop up to the catcher who then fired the ball to the starting pitcher standing in the door of our dugout. "Game on," was the message. I was the catcher. Poogie is the only human I have ever encountered who could stand on home plate and hit a baseball straight up in the air.

Poogie was a task master, but he was fun to play for. If I made a mistake, most often I knew it and Poogie never said a word, certainly never yelled at me. If I needed correction or instruction, it was given in a firm manner. I always wanted his approval. For years, Poogie was on the chain gang for the Crystal City Hornet home football games. Even as a high school senior, if I made a good play on the football field, I always glanced Poogie's way and he would acknowledge me with a wave. I always shook his hand after the game.

I coached high school and college athletes for 43 years. When I retrace my path the image of every coach over the past nearly 60 years who passed along their wisdom to me, hand-to-hand, like a bucket on the way to a fire, appears. Poogie is the first.

 

Mr. Peterein

Some stories you hear at a young impressionable age stick with you, mold you. One for me was a tale of when President Lyndon B. Johnson in the late 1960’s was inspecting the operational setup at NASA. As he was walking through the halls LBJ viewed a janitor who was cleaning with a mop in his hand with the intensity of the Energizer Bunny.  The President walked over to the janitor and told him he was the best janitor he had ever seen. The janitor replied, "Sir, I'm not just a janitor, I am helping to put a man on the moon." This man had a purpose. He saw the big picture.

I attended Crystal City, MO High School and graduated in May 1975. In all four of my years of attendance Mr. Charles  Peterein was a fixture in the hallways. He was the janitor. I learned from Mr. Peterein that all work matters.

Our teachers and administrators taught us, and taught us well, the academic knowledge found in textbooks. But every school needs that blue collar guy who models personal responsibility - devoted to the most mundane of tasks through the dignity of honest work. Mr. Peterein was that guy. He had a lot of energy—good energy, positive energy. Just a person you wanted to be around.

If we accept the operational definition of leadership as the effect one has on others, then for me, Mr. Peterein rated among the most powerful leaders in the building. And he did it while pushing a broom, toting in the belt loop of his blue jeans a huge ring of keys.

I have heard God called the great janitor of The Universe. If true, then perhaps the problem when things don't work is we keep looking for some guy wearing a tie, instead of the man with all the keys.

One of my Crystal City uncles knew Mr. Peterein well. While I was a high school student, he told me he had no doubt Mr. Peterein could take a car completely apart and flying solo, put it back together. Give him all the materials, my Uncle Pete said, and Mr. Peterein could single-handedly build a house in the backyard. Practicality is a good thing.

An online obituary I found stated that Mr. Peterein liked to tinker with clocks. When you take a clock apart, there's little screws, and pins and wheels with spokes. If you fail to put all back in correct alignment and order, that thing ain't gonna work. Working with clocks is a skill that requires patience as a virtue.  It implies self-control and forbearance.

Mr. Peterein passed away in 2020 at age 95. He was active and engaged until the end. He was honored as the Grand Marshal for the 2019 Herculaneum Veterans’ Day Parade. He was born in 1925 in Sicely. He was a part of the last wave of the Italian immigrants who were so significant in the building of Crystal City. He raised three sons and three daughters and lived to see his great-great grandchildren.

Mr. Peterein was a Poster Child for the Greatest Generation - us Baby Boomers Parents and Grandparents - who tamed the Great Depression and whipped the Axis Powers. He was a U.S. Army veteran who served in the Asiatic Pacific Theater during World War II. Along with his 30-year employment with the Crystal City Schools, Mr. Peterein worked as a dairy farmer. He was a member of Sacred Heart Church in Crystal City, a charter member of the ROMEO club, a 63-year member of American Legion Post 554 and a member of VFW Post 3777.

When each day the bell rang signaling the end of the school day, Mr. Peterein could be found, push broom in hand, leaning against the hallway wall outside of the Wood Working Shop. It was a chaotic daily ritual, the equivalent of catching the last helicopter out of Saigon, students sprinting down the crowded halls bound for the freedom of the parking lot. I often stopped to speak with Mr. Peterien. He had an unhurried cool and a lightness of being that made him popular with students, a quiet man in a noisy place.

Mr. Peterein loved to talk about CCHS Hornet sports. His sons Mike and Bob were football teammates. He always wanted to know how practice was going; is the team ready for Friday night. At the start of my junior season, I was mulling over dropping myself from the basketball team, not sure where I fit in. Mr. Peterein told me, “don’t do it. You will regret it.”

Those of us who came of age in Crystal City in the 1960’s and 1970’s can appreciate the omnipresent glow of 1961 CCHS grad Bill Bradley’s basketball halo that lit the town. Bradley had been an All-American at Princeton University. He scored 63 points in a NCAA Final Four game playing for an Ivy League team. He was a Rhodes Scholar and the captain of the 1964 Olympic Gold medal winning USA basketball team. What hometown would not be button busting proud of such a favored son?

At the time of our talk, 1973, Bradley had just earned his second NBA World Championship ring as a starter for the New York Knicks. 

I don’t recall the exact words, but Mr. Peterein encouraged me to be like Bradley. Here is a paraphrase of our conversation as I recall it: Bradley doesn't have a lot of color, but he's a great defensive player and a heck of a team player. And he seldom makes mental mistakes. His job is do what needs to be done to help the Knicks win.

I now realize Mr. Peterein was imploring me to not only emulate Bradley, but by example, also himself - show up quietly each day and work hard and everything will sort out fine.

I didn’t really want to quit basketball, I just needed an empathetic adult I trusted to validate my effort. It did all sort out fine. For most of my adult life I have chased a bouncing basketball. My life would be much different today if not for that sage advice given to me over a half century ago by the school janitor. The result, a 52 year and counting detour. That was Mr. Peterein, unassuming but unforgettable. He didn’t roar like a lion. He spoke softly and in measured terms—and thankfully on that long ago day I listened.

As we age, change sneaks up on us. In the 1970’s, I had an Afro hair style roomy enough to sleep six. Now, I use a razor in place of a comb, transitioning my look from Billy Preston to Sigourney Weaver in Alien 3. On a morning so clear you can peer into your past, it is nice to reflect back on these somewhat now dim memories of a good man who impacted my development at an age when I can truly only now savor its value.

It takes strength to clean up after others. Mr. Peterein did it with grace.