Hoop Crazy: The Lives of Clair Bee and Chip Hilton

CHAPTER 4: Professor Bee and Coach Bee at Rider

CHAPTER 4 Professor Bee and Coach Bee at Rider 1926–31 Bee was eighty-one in 1977 when a writer asked him about his memories of his days at Rider College, and the first thing that came to his mind had nothing to do with launching the sports program there. “I recall the platforms at the front of the old classrooms in Trenton,” he said. “I would stride back and forth on them in front of the class, be in command, teach, and experience endless satisfaction. I always wanted to be a teacher.”1 And teaching, not coaching, is precisely how Bee started at the small New Jersey college located just a few miles south of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s paradisiacal Princeton and Owen Johnson’s aristocratic Lawrenceville School, but so far away in so many ways from both. All of Rider College was housed in one converted building in Trenton.2 In his three years as a do-everything student at Waynesburg College, Bee had developed a reputation as a multitalented individual, and in his five years at Rider College, he embellished that reputation. He came to Rider 47 as the chairman of the accounting department. He had spent the previous year as a teacher and coach at Mansfield High School, and he was fresh off a brief summer-session stint as a teacher at the National Business College in Owensboro, Kentucky. It was while at the business college that he saw an ad for the accounting position at Rider. He applied and was quickly hired.3 Early in the fall semester of 1926 Rider placed an ad in the Trenton Evening Times touting its increased enrollment and the credentials of three new faculty hires. “Due to the increased attendance in the Bachelor degree department of the College,” the ad read, “these expert educators have been secured to augment the strongest faculty in Rider history.” Professor Clair F. Bee was listed as “Dean of National University, Kentucky” as well as “Sometime Professor of Accounting, Troy College,” all of which was true, although the “Dean” reference may have been an exaggeration . He was also listed as “Sometime Professor of Education, Waynesburg College,” which was a stretch, but at least he taught night classes to townspeople in Waynesburg.4 Nevertheless , Bee came to Rider as an academic, but it did not take long before Rider tapped him as a coach, also.The newspaper ad said nothing about Bee’s coaching duties at Mansfield, but the college’s administrators were well aware of his athletic background. “Sports were a zero at Rider. They’d play a few normal schools and a lot of high schools,” Bee said, referring to a football team that played only intermittently in the years before his arrival. “After I was there a year or so, President Moore [Franklin B. Moore, who would soon become Rider president, but who was serving as registrar when Bee was hired as a teacher] said didn’t I used to coach in high school.5 I said I did. He asked would I take the Rider teams.” Initially, Bee was reluctant to do so. He told Moore that he would assume the coaching duties only if Rider committed to scheduling college opponents in all sports rather than local high school and prep school teams. Bee’s high school coaching days were behind him, he reasoned.“[Moore] asked could I get a sched48 The Early Years ule. I said yes. . . . I told him it would cost a few thousand dollars for uniforms and things. He blinked and told me I couldn’t spend any money.Well, we finally agreed to get uniforms and a schedule and I was coaching.”6 Bee, who is enshrined in the Rider Sports Hall of Fame and who received an honorary Doctor of Arts degree from Rider in 1977, singlehandedly started the Rider sports program , a pioneering effort that included women’s basketball.7 Bee launched the men’s basketball team in the 1928–29 season , and concurrently he started and coached what at the time was called the “girls’ basketball team.” The Shadow, the 1929 Rider yearbook, noted: “After much strenuous practicing under Mr. Bee’s direction, two well-organized teams were developed and although the schedule of the season was light, the girls performed creditably in every game played.” While the recap neglects to mention the team’s record, Bee is pictured in the...