The Fight--Cheyenne, Wyoming 1960

Maybe I needed a nun to teach me to stand up to bullies and fight like a Christian.

Note—It was a spring day not unlike this one a long time ago.  This reminiscence is adapted from a presentation at a Panel on Peace presented at what was then still the Congregational Unitarian Church of Woodstock on November 30, 2008.  It may also be of interest in light of the current interest in bullying.

I pretty much defined the word dork. That was the preferred term, way back when, for guys who would now be called nerds or geeks.  Back in the sixth grade at Eastridge Elementary School in Cheyenne, Wyoming, I was the pasty, pudgy kid with the cowlick and thick horn-rim glasses.  A bookish kid with an irritating know-it-all attitude, I favored plaid shirts with—no kidding—pocket protectors and an assortment of leaking pens.  And I stuffed that cowlick under a grey, broad-brimmed hat pinned up on one side with an Army insignia stolen from my Dad’s World War II uniform, an homage to my personal hero, Theodore Roosevelt.  I told you I was a dork.

Then, as now, dorks have few friends.  In fact in school I had exactly zero friends.  I irritated just about everyone, including my teachers, mostly because I just would not shut up.  Despite being kind of a large oaf, I naturally got picked on—a lot—on the playground. Teachers, who thought I was pretty much getting what I deserved anyway, made a point of being occupied elsewhere when I was getting my face washed with gravely snow, being tied up with the girls’ jump ropes, or having my pants pulled down.

I dealt with it by reading a lot, watching old movies on TV, and indulging in a rich, rich fantasy life.  Mostly I read histories and biographies with a dose of hairy-chested fiction with historical themes, by which I mean I mostly read about war.  I watched the old John Wayne war movies on TV re-enacting my father’s war, the war of all of the neighborhood fathers.  And I, this lump of child who never could stand up the most pathetic playground bully, dreamed of being a hero, dreamed of glory.

One fine spring day it happened.  Instead of just being teased and roughed up at recess, I was called out. In the time honored way school boys, I was formally challenged to a fight.  The challenger was a grade up from me.  I barely knew him.  I am sure that he barely knew me.  I have no memory of what perceived offense I committed against him.  Indeed, there may have been none at all.  He may have just needed to notch up a cheap and easy victory to establish himself in the school pecking order.  I was a big kid, but he was bigger—a full head taller and maybe twenty pounds heavier.

The usual procedure was to meet out by the dumpsters behind the school for the fight.  I told the kid I wouldn’t meet him.  I didn’t have any reason to fight him.  He taunted me and we were soon surrounded by a knot of others, all jeering.  “Fine,” I said at last, “I’m not looking for a fight.  But I cut across the football field every night on my way home.  You can find me if you want.”

It was a fine, bright, sunny afternoon cold enough for heavy coats and breath that hung in visible clouds.  Time moved like molasses as I crossed the wide school yard, the gravel parking lot, the cinder track.  I carried my books in my dad’s old briefcase in one gloved hand, and my lunch box in the other.  Ahead a dozen or so eager spectators gathered on the gridiron in anticipation of a fine beating.  The kid stood apart, arms folded waiting my slow approach.

My heart boomed in my hollow chest, my stomach knotted, my breathing labored.  I had never in my entire life known such abject terror.  I walked directly up to my doom.  “Ya gonna fight?” he asked.

“No,” I said and tried to move around him.  His fist caught me by the side of the head before I ever saw it.  My glasses and hat etched different arcs in the air as I stumbled and crumpled ripping a hole in the knee of my jeans.  I was stunned, but oddly felt no pain.  I could hear the cheering and yelling as if it came from far, far away.  I groped for my glasses, hat, brief case and lunch box and rose unsteadily. 

“Now,” the kid demanded.  “No,” I said and tried to move forward.  This time I saw the fist coming, square at my face.  I could feel my lip split and the metallic taste of blood seep between my teeth and bathe my tongue.  I stumbled backwards but kept my feet somehow.  “Fight! Fight! Fight!” little mob chanted.

I clutched by bag and box tighter and pushed forward one more time.  This time he hit me in the stomach, the weak spot of any fat kid.  He hit me so hard that I turned a forward somersault in the air landing with a crashing thud on my back, all the wind knocked out of me.  I lay stunned and gasping for a moment.  The crowd grew quiet.  The kid pushed at me with the toe of his boot, not kicking but just kind of nudging my body.  I rose very slowly and gathered my things.  I began walking again.  Nobody stopped me.   Nobody said a word.

By the time I walked the half mile or so home, I was strangely exhilarated, almost euphoric.  I had not fought.  They could not make me fight.  But I had not given in.  I kept getting back up.  I imagined—foolishly as it turned out—that my bravery and determination had some how won the grudging respect of the kid and crowd.  It turned out, they all just thought I was crazy and the legend of my dorkiness only grew.  But for that one afternoon, I imagined something like glory.

My mother, of course, was horrified and was ready to march back to school to demand punishment of my tormentors until I literally threw myself in the door to prevent it.  I didn’t try to tell her what happened.  She would not have understood it.  When my Dad came home from work, I did tell him, blurting it all out with excitement and even pride.  He tried to understand and to be supportive, but I could tell that he would much rather that I just “stood up and fought back.”  For him, there was greater honor in taking a licking in a fair fight than refraining from being goaded into one.

And I knew, when I thought about it laying in bed alone that night, that my hero Teddy Roosevelt, another fat, four-eyed, asthmatic outcast, would not have approved either.  He would have—as he did—studied boxing for months and come back and given the miscreant the thrashing he so richly deserved.  I knew I was supposed to be a failure.  But still didn’t feel like one.

Where had this strange thing come from, this oddly prideful, totally unexpected pacifism?

Maybe I had just taken too literally to heart the Sunday School lessons about the Gentle Jesus in all of his brightly colored, lithographed glory in my weekly study tracts.  Had I actually taken to heart the Master’s words—I tell you, don't resist him who is evil; but whoever strikes you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also—spelled out in bright red letters in my very own King James Version of the Bible?

Of course as a good Christian boy, I knew that what ever good I might have done following the great preaching, I had washed away in my sinful pride.  There were, after all, so many ways to be unworthy.

And could this one commandment overturn a lifetime of playing Davey Crocket, Hopalong Cassidy, Teddy Roosevelt himself, and gallant GI’s storming bloody beaches and imagining over and over the accolades and honors due a fighting hero?  It seemed doubtful.

Time went by.  I never stopped being the star of the violent movies that played in my head.  But I never fought.  And I never ceased to be a dork. 

By the mid-Sixties, I was becoming aware of a new kind of hero, brought to me in grainy black and white by Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, and Walter Cronkite—Martin Luther King and the marchers and protestors who stood up to dogs, batons, and fire hoses, singing hymns, turning cheeks and changing the world by just getting back up and walking again.

Later, when the time came, I chose peace over war.  I resisted the Vietnam draft.  I did my stint in prison.  And I was as unfoundedly prideful over that as I had been on a cold and sunny football field more than a decade earlier.

The Tragedy that Continues to Haunt—The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

 

Note:  A version of this was posted on this blog last year for the centennial observance.

It was a sunny but raw day in New York City.  It was a late Saturday afternoon and the streets near Washington Square in the immigrant Greenwich Village neighborhood were teaming with traffic.  Around 4:45, as the many garment industry sweatshops were preparing for their “early” Saturday closing, pedestrians began to notice smoke billowing from the upper floors of the Asch Building, at 29 Washington Place. 

Crowds gathered to watch as horse drawn fire engines and ladder trucks pounded to the scene.  Soon witnesses watched in horror as one after another young women leapt from the burning building to sure death on the pavement below—the Fire Department’s ladders were too short to reach the windows from which they jumped.

It was March 25, 1911.  The top three floors of the building, housing the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory had turned into a roaring inferno.  About 500 workers were getting ready to leave when the fire started as smoldering in the scrap bin under a cutting table, probably ignited by a carelessly discarded cigarette or cigar.  Before it was over 146 of them, mostly young Italian and Jewish women would perish in the flames, of smoke inhalation, or trampled at padlocked exits.  Sixty-two victims leaped to their death on the sidewalk or were killed when the sole fire escape collapsed.  Others jumped down elevator shafts after the elevators, which managed to rescue several, stopped working when the fire’s heat twisted the rails on which they ran.  At least 71 others were reported injured, although many more were probably tended at home, unable to afford medical care.

It was not the first fire in such a factory.  In fact, authorities had reported an “epidemic” of fires at shirtwaist factories.  This was one, however, was made worse because of overcrowding on the shop floors, failure to clear flammable material—that scrap bin had not been emptied in two months—and because a stair ways and exits were either blocked by bales of material or padlocked to prevent employee pilferage. The factory occupied the 8, 9, and 10 floors of the building, all beyond the reach of ladders which could only reach a sixth floor at full extension.  There was no alarm system and on the most crowded production floor, the 9th, the first warning was literally when flames erupted.  By that time most office personnel, including the owners and their visiting children had already been able to evacuate from higher floor to the safety of the roof.

There had, of course, been awful industrial accidents and fires before.  Mine collapses were common place.  Many were killed in boiler explosions on steamships and riverboats, others died in railroad accidents.  Fires had devastated lint-filled textile plants.  But never had such a calamity played out so publicly on the streets of the nation’s premier city with the press—including photographers—on hand to record the horror.  The fact that most of the victims were young women, girls in their teens mostly, added to the impact.  Grimy men were expected to be expendable, girls were not.

Lurid headlines and gruesome photos spread across the country.  Both the city and state governments launched investigations, which would lead eventually to the establishment of the nation’s strongest industrial workplace safety and labor laws.  The fire also spurred the growth of the labor movement in the needle trades, especially the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU).  Eventually the Federal government added its weight to worker safety with the establishment of the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) under the Department of Labor.

Today the labor movement is commemorating the anniversary, but the hard fought gains paid for by those dead shop girls, are under attack from coast-to-coast.  Whether under the guise of cost cutting, deregulation, or a frank assault on the working class, attempts are ongoing to defund, strip authority from, or abolish altogether OSHA and its state counterparts while blocking in every possible way the rights of workers to defend themselves through unions or by suing for damages in the courts.

The old battles have to be refought.  Hopefully it will not take another tragedy of epic proportion to re-prick the public conscience.

Today the Asch Building, now known as the Brown Building still stands.  It is a designated landmark, as much, we are told, for its architectural significance as the site of a tragedy.  And just last year after years of painstaking research, the last 10 victims of the fire were finally identified. 

Happy Birthday Lawrence Ferlinghetti!

Born on March 24, 1919 Lawrence Ferlinghetti celebrates his 93rd birthday today, still active and apparently in reasonably good health.  Can’t keep a good poet down.  And for my money Ferlinghetti is the super-nova in the constellation of Beat poets even including other bright spots like Alan Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, and Gary Snyder—all of whom he befriended, mentored and published.

The poet was born in Yonkers, New York.  His father was an Italian immigrant auctioneer who had shortened the family name to Ferlin.  Young Larry did not know his real family name until he entered the Navy in 1942.  His mother was of mixed French, Portuguese, and Sephardic Jewish extraction.  He only began using the original family name for his published work until 1955 when his first published collection, Pictures of the Gone World was published.

His father died before he was born and his mother when he was at an early age.  He was raised largely by a French aunt Emily who took her charge with her to France while she worked as a governess there for several years.  French became his first language.

Upon returning to the United States he was placed for a time in a Chappaqua, New York orphanage until his aunt could find a new position.  She was hired as governess to the daughter of Presley Eugene Bisland and Anna Lawrence Bisland, in Bronxville, New York.  Anna was the cultured daughter of the founder of Sarah Lawrence Academy.  The couple took a shine to the bright boy and eventually became virtual parents to him.  He stayed on their estate after Emily left.

The Bislands paid for his tuition at smart day and prep schools and at the University of North Carolina where the young man became interested in journalism and wrote for the college paper.

While on summer vacation in 1940 he and two classmates lived on an island off the coast of Maine making a living lobstering, fishing, and beach combing.  The experience cemented a lifelong love of the sea and the seacoast.

When World War II broke out, Larry naturally enlisted in the navy and was educated as a Midshipman and first shipped out as a very junior officer on J.P. Morgan’s former yacht which had been fitted out for anti-submarine patrol along the East Coast when those waters were among the most dangerous in the world.  He advanced and later served on three larger anti-sub ships.  He was Captain of the subchaser USS SC1308 which served in the fleet protecting the Normandy invasion.  Later he transferred to the Pacific where he was navigator on a troop ship.

After his ship moored in Japan and transferred its troops to occupation duty, the young officer took time to visit devastated Nagasaki.  He was shocked, even traumatized to what he saw only weeks after the atomic bomb was dropped on the civilian population.  He became a lifelong, committed pacifist.

After the war he enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University in New York City with the help of the GI Bill.  He read widely and deeply in both the classics of English literature and was influenced by modern American poets like Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Marianne Moore, and E. E. Cummings he also devoured American novelists Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos.  He was searching for an authentically American, democratic voice.  Instructors at Columbia included a who’s who of the New York literati-- Babette Deutsch, Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, and Mark Van Doren.  He earned his master’s degree in 1947.

Then it was off for further study at the Sorbonne in Paris.  He lived and studied in the City of Lights until getting his doctorate with honors in 1951.  One of his two main theses was on the city as symbolism in poetry, another recurring theme in future work.

 In 1953 Ferlinghetti and his wife, Selden Kirby-Smith who he had married after returning to the States from France, settled in San Francisco.  He taught and tutored French and spent most of his time painting and free lancing as an art critic.  His first foray into poetry was as a translator of work in French published by Peter Martin in his City Lights magazine.  It was the beginning of a close collaboration that really blossomed when the two men joined forces to open City Lights Bookstore in the heart of the bohemian North Beach area.  It was the first all paperback bookstore in the U.S. and specialized in poetry, literary fiction, and a good supply of the latest European literature.

Martin opted out of the partnership in 1955 and Ferlinghetti expanded operations by launch its own publishing house.  The first volume in what would become the famous Pocket Poet series was Pictures of the Gone World.  It would be followed by volumes by Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levitov, William Carlos Williams, and Gregory Corso.

City Lights was never intended to be exclusively a Beat imprint—it issued work by  a number of European writers and Williams who represented an avante garde of an earlier era—but it became the most important publisher of the movement.  He also published prose by Charles Bukowski, Neil Cassady and others and leftist essays by Noam Chomsky, Tom Hayden, and Howard Zinn.  Under Ferlinghetti’s still active supervision, it continues to be an important source of culturally cutting edge work.

Ferlinghetti first heard New York based Alan Ginsburg read Howl at the famous Six Gallery Reading in October 1956 which was the formal introduction of the Beat movement to the San Francisco arts community.  The next day Ferlinghetti sent Ginsburg a wire that began, “I greet you at the beginning of an illustrious career.”  Howl became the fourth volume in the Pocket Poet series.  It also became a famous cause célèbre.

Ferlinghetti and his book store manager were arrested by San Francisco police and charged with obscenity for publishing and selling the book.  The case against the manager was dropped, but the city vigorously went after the publisher.  It was a long trial and Ferlinghetti was represented by an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer.  Major literary and academic figures testified about the artistic merit of the book.  In the end judge Clayton Horn acquitted Ferlinghetti and ruled that Howl had significant artistic merit.  It was one of the cases that finally broke the back of censorship of literature.

The book that cemented Ferlinghetti’s own reputation as a poet was not published by City Lights.   A Coney Island of the Mind was published by New Directions, a prestigious New York in 1958.   It was both a critical and a popular success.  In a country that has largely rejected poetry as a popular medium, it has sold over a million copies over the last fifty plus years and has never gone out of sight.

Ferlinghetti’s masterpiece, perhaps my own favorite book of poetry, was unlike the work of most of the beats.  It was lyrical and often told a story.  But then the poet often said he didn’t personally consider himself a Beat, despite his fondness for them, but considered himself a bohemian in the tradition of Williams, E.E. Cummings, and Ezra Pound.

The prolific writer has since produced dozens of book of poetry, poetry broadsides, plays, criticism, and political writing most recently 50 Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti 50 Images by Armando Milani in 2010.

Ferlinghetti always considered his art an extension of his personal anarcho-pacifist philosophy and socialist politics.  He echoed one of his heroes, Vachel Lyndsay in his Populist Manifesto, “Poets, come out of your closets, Open your windows, open your doors, You have been holed up too long in your closed worlds…Poetry should transport the public to higher places, than other wheels can carry it.”

Meaning what he wrote, he has often brought his poetry to the forefront of the struggle to peace and disarmament, civil rights, and justice.

Ferlinghetti still lives in California.  He travels widely.  He continues to paint and recently had a 50 year retrospective exhibit of his works on canvas.

Way to go, master.  May we all live so long and so well.

Constantly Risking Absurdity (#15)

Constantly risking absurdity

                                             and death

            whenever he performs

                                        above the heads

                                                            of his audience

   the poet like an acrobat

                                 climbs on rime

                                          to a high wire of his own making

and balancing on eyebeams

                                     above a sea of faces

             paces his way

                               to the other side of day

    performing entrechats

                               and sleight-of-foot tricks

and other high theatrics

                               and all without mistaking

                     any thing

                               for what it may not be

       For he's the super realist

                                     who must perforce perceive

                   taut truth

                                 before the taking of each stance or step

in his supposed advance

                                  toward that still higher perch

where Beauty stands and waits

                                     with gravity

                                                to start her death-defying leap

      And he

             a little charleychaplin man

                                           who may or may not catch

               her fair eternal form

                                     spreadeagled in the empty air

                  of existence

—Lawrence Ferlinghetti from A Coney Island of the Mind

The Definitive Sports David and Goliath Tale

The '52 Hebron Green Giants and their coach ride in one of the many parades where they were honored.

I didn’t get to it, but yesterday was the 60th anniversary of a sports upset so astounding it enrapt a state and got the attention of a nation.  Here in McHenry County, Illinois we know the story well.  But you likely haven’t heard it.  Even if you are not a sports fan, sit back, put your feet up and enjoy.

America was a different, dimly remembered place in 1952.  Despite a pesky, almost forgotten war in far off Korea and a national kerfuffle over the red menace under the bed, most folks got through their days undisturbed by those events.  The flush of the Great Prosperity was just picking up full steam.  Folks whose lives had been disrupted by decades of Depression and war were going about the business of finally living their lives.

Television was the great new thing.  But away from the bigger cities most folks couldn’t yet pick up a station and most Americans did not yet own a set.  People found their entertainment and amusements in their communities.  Fraternal organizations and social clubs flourished.   People got up and got out, went to movies, played in the park with their children, mingled with their neighbors on front porches and stoops.

Small towns across the country were not yet by passed by the Interstate.  The train still pulled up to the depot.  The shopping center at the edge of town was something folks mostly read about in Life or Look—it may be coming but wasn’t there yet for most.  Downtowns were busy, thriving places.

I don’t mean to paint this as a Utopia.  People had problems.  There was conflict.  Folks were expected to stay close to carefully assigned gender, race, and class roles, to shut up, get with the program, and not make waves.  It was just a different time.

The vital center of interest in many of the medium sized cities, towns, and even rural villages was the fate of the local High School athletic teams.  Things had been disrupted some by the mobility caused by the War, but a lot of folks stayed in or near the towns where they grew up.  They were loyal to the schools they attended and that their children still attended.  People knew each other, knew the players on the teams or at least some of their kin folk.  And on any given night there was nothing more exciting to do in town than to turn out to cheer the boys—and they were all boys then—on.

In Illinois basketball was the big thing.  Maybe it didn’t reach the legendary mania of neighboring Indiana, but it came damn close.  Of course football was exciting and where it was played bleachers were filled.  But it required huge squads and expensive equipment.  A lot of small town schools could not afford the expense or muster enough players for a team.  Baseball was great, but it was far too cold in Illinois to play much as a varsity sport.  People followed local semi-pro or American Legion teams.

But basketball only required 5 guys in their underwear, a ball and a gym floor.  Every school had those.

The biggest annual sporting event in the state, bar none, was the annual Illinois High School Association (IHSA) Basketball Championship played in an elimination tournament before packed houses at the University of Illinois Huff Gym in downstate Champaign.  Games were broadcast to wide audiences on the radio.  Every newspaper in the state from small town weeklies to the mighty Chicago Tribune dispatched their top sports writers and photographers to capture every exciting detail.

In those bygone days the IHSA had not yet divided schools into separate classes by size.  Every school big and small competed head to head.   Winners of conference championships and regionals  headed for Champaign on an equal footing.

Which brings us to Green Giants of Hebron High School. 

Hebron was a farming village in northern McHenry County, not far south of the Wisconsin border in the heart of a rich corn and dairy farming region.  The Village of Hebron boasted about 700 souls and the whole of Hebron Township, from which the High School largely drew its student body, about double that.  Hebron High had 96 students, 36 of them males eligible for the varsity basketball team.

That was up a tad over previous years.  The one-room school house district of even tinier neighboring Alden had been closed the year before and its handful of high school age students came to the school for the first time in the fall of 1951.

Despite its small numbers, Hebron had a proud basketball tradition.  It frequently led or was close to the top of its conference.  Back in 1940 the Green Giants had even made it to the State Championships.  They didn’t win, but 12 seasons later the community was still talking about it.  All of the boys on the team grew up hearing about it even though they had no memory themselves.

In 1948 Russell Ahern took over the team from the beloved long time coach who had led that 1940 squad.  Ahern’s only coaching experience was in baseball.  But the social studies teacher who had majored in psychology threw himself into his new assignment and studied the game.  He also studied motivation.  And he had serious ambitions for his team.

He had the nucleus of a very good squad in 1951.  Four junior were going to be returning seniors.  Twins Paul and Phil Judson were the heart of the team.  They had been playing together all of their lives and were said to have “one mind.”  They anticipated each other’s moves and fed the ball to each other with uncanny accuracy.  Also on the team were two other seasoned players, Kenny Spooner and Don Wilbrandt. 

The team didn’t make the Finals in ’51, but Ahern took his juniors to Champaign anyway.  They watched games together from nosebleed seats, high up so they could follow the action.  Ahern wanted the boys to get a feel for the atmosphere of the playoffs and see the caliber and style of play of the big teams that dominated the contribution.

The final piece of the team puzzle walked into the school for the first time in September.  Farm boy Bill Schultz was one of the kids from Alden.  He never played basketball in his life.  But he stood 6 foot 10.  Ahern had found a center—if he could teach him how to play.

That season in addition to conference opponents Ahern scheduled contests with many large teams to get his squad used to playing in big noisy gyms and high level players.  Likely many of those opposing coaches thought they were agreeing to a gimmie game against the tiny school.  Boy were they wrong.

The team went 35 and 1 for the season, the only loss being to Crystal Lake.  As the momentum of the season picked up, so did notice, even from big city papers.  The team was ranked No.1 in the state almost all season by both the AP and UPI polls.  Tickets to their home games in a tiny gymnasium were almost impossible to get.  Local fans followed them to the big schools they played.

The Green Giants came to Champaign as one of the Sweet Sixteen.  One by one they knocked of big powerhouse schools.  They beat Lawrenceville and then Rock Island to advance to the finals against Quincy, the number 1 seed in the tournament.  The Quad City school boasted of an enrollment of over 1,200 students.

The two teams met on March 22.  It was the first IHSA championship broadcast on television to an estimated audience of over a million.  Many times that number were glued to radios across the state to follow the action.

It was a tight, fast paced game, tied at the end of regular play.  The Green Giants busted it open in overtime wining 64-56.  Astonishingly the five starters played almost every minute of the game except for a few plays which Phil Judson, who had fpour fouls, sat out.

The game captured headlines across the state.  It was splashed across the top of the Tribune sports page dwarfing a mention that the University of Illinois had made it into the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA Tournament.

Crowds lined the streets in towns all the way from Champaign to Hebron to cheer the unlikely champions.  The reception back home was never to be forgotten.

No other team from such a small school ever won the Championship under the old system.  Even when schools were divided by class, the record stands in the small school division.

Hebron has never stopped celebrating.  Drive to the town today and you will see from all directions the globular water tower painted to look like a basketball and proclaiming Hebron the “Home of the 1952 State Champions.”  Businesses in town are named for the team.  One whole wall of the local tavern is dedicated to photos and memorabilia.  The owners report that it is still a destination of pilgrimage for former Hebronites or for anyone inspired by the legendary team

The McHenry County Historical Society Museum in Union features a permanent exhibition about the team and its players.  It may be the museum’s most popular attraction.

The Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield has an exhibit with photos of the team, coach, and cheerleaders and a game ball.

The team’s accomplishments were celebrated in a 2002 documentary Becoming Giants and in a book, Once There Were Giants by Scott Johnson and Julie Kistler.

The team has regularly assembled for anniversaries of the event.

Coach Ahern died in 1976.  All of his players came to his bed side before he passed. 

Amazingly four of the five starters were alive this year to gather at what is now known as Alden-Hebron High School this past Sunday for a 60th anniversary celebration.  Team Captain Wilbrandt died in 1998.

For them and their town, the thrill has never gone away.