Sweet Charlie, Dike, Cazzie, and Bobby Joe: HIGH SCHOOL BASKETBALL IN ILLINOIS

Chapter 1: The 1940s

1 The 1940s Centralia: Winningest Team in History The Green Grill is to Centralia what Fritzel’s was to Chicago, what Toots Shor’s was to New York, and what the Brown Derby was to Hollywood.After a basketball game, everybody who was anybody showed up for a beer and burger. It opened in 1934 on North Poplar before moving to its current location on Route 161 at Route 51 in downtown Centralia in 1936. In the 1940s and 1950s, however, Centralia’s great basketball stars, Ken “Preacher” McBride and Bobby Joe Mason, couldn’t go there. “There were about a thousand blacks in the community, 120 in the high school,” Mason recalled.“We became aware of racial things that were going on when we went out of town, when we went to eat at restaurants.We had to go in the back door for blacks in Centralia.I couldn’t go into certain places,like the Green Grill.At the movie theater, I had to sit upstairs.” Mason, whose retired number 14 jersey hangs in Trout Gym with Dike Eddleman’s number 40 and Lowell Spurgeon’s number 13, doesn’t live in Centralia. He once worked for his former Centralia classmate Roland Burris when Burris was comptroller and attorney general of Illinois. Now he lives in Springfield and is employed by the Springfield Housing Authority’s Community Center. McBride, a three-sport athlete and an All-State basketball player in 1947, settled in Centralia in 1987 after playing with the Harlem Magicians and then working for a YMCA in Chicago for sixteen years and for the State of Illinois for ten years. “There was a lot of prejudice in the 1940s when I was growing up,” said McBride, who started on Centralia’s 1946 state runner-up.“When the city built a new swimming pool in Fairview Park,we couldn’t swim in it.Segregation was accepted in those days. Now I ask why it was like that.Why did we accept it? What could we have done about it? We had no power.” A sign at one restaurant read:“Colored served to go.” But McBride claimed that he found no prejudice at the high school.He credited the coach,Arthur Trout.When some townspeople complained that two blacks were on the 1945 team,Trout said that he would play his best players, no matter what color.“That set the tone,” McBride said. So there was McBride,sitting in the dining room of the Green Grill,enjoying a lunch with Lowell Spurgeon, Bill Castleman, Bob Jones, Bill Niepoetter, Butch Border, and Bill“Pops”Taylor, swapping stories and reliving memories of Trout, Eddleman, Mason, the Wonder Five, 1942, 1946, and 1963. Spurgeon, looking fit at age eighty-seven, graduated in 1934 with twelve varsity 8 / Sweet Charlie, Dike, Cazzie, and Bobby Joe letters. He was a three-time All-Stater in football and a two-time All-Stater in basketball . He held the state high jump record of 6 ft., 5 1 ⁄8 in., for twenty-seven years. McBride’s heroes were Spurgeon and Jesse Owens. He built a jumping pit in his backyard.He started to play basketball after his father reminded him that he couldn’t play major league baseball because he was black. Castleman played on the Wonder Five in 1941 but never went to college.He wanted to work on the railroad, like his father.After five years, he joined a private company, then worked for the City of Centralia. He retired in 1985. He has attended games at Trout Gym for five decades. Jones was born in Ashley, a few miles south of Centralia. He coached at McLeansboro, Norris City, and Metropolis before succeeding Bill Davies as head coach at Centralia in 1962. He coached until 1972 and served as athletic director until 1983. Niepoetter, a 1946 Centralia graduate, left college when his father was killed in a coal mine disaster. He joined the Centralia Sentinel as a sportswriter in 1957 and retired in 1979. He cofounded the Centralia Sports Hall of Fame with Bob Jenkins. Border, a 1961 Centralia graduate, has served as president of Centralia’s all-sports booster club since 1994. He is also a former president of the Centralia Sports Hall of Fame, which was founded in 1980. Taylor, a 1962 Centralia graduate, describes himself as “the biggest fan the school has ever had.” He also is very...