“To us, the ashes of our ancestors are sacred and their resting place is hallowed ground.”
Chief Seattle
Chapter 1
Hit the Ground Running
“Start where you are. Use what you have.
Do what you can.”
Arthur Ashe
Carved from a
Mississippi River flood plain, surrounded by acres of sediment rich soil as
black as midnight when cultivated for spring soybean planting; lies 100 yards
of hallowed turf. For the past 88 years
this plot has served as testing grounds for the gallantry of a small Missouri town’s
young warriors. Since 1928, the Crystal City Hornets have played their home
high school football games here.
 |
| The First Hornets - 1926 |
Today, to the east of the gridiron lays an abandoned railroad track that once served as the lifeline to a thriving factory town. One half mile down these tracks to the south, commencing in the 1880s, the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company (PPG) operated the largest glass manufacturing plant west of the Mississippi River. Around the clock, loaded rail cars would haul in the rich mixture of the glassmaking ingredients of silica and sand. The finished plate glass would exit via the same tracks, bound for a young nation bursting with industrial growth. For nearly 100 years, this three-shift, seven-day-a-week operation supported generation after generation of an authentic American melting pot.
A true company town in boom times, a majority of adult males
residing in Crystal City worked for PPG. The arrangement provided steady and
abundant factory jobs. Immigrant laborers from Italy, Germany, Eastern Europe
and Ireland joined transplanted southern blacks - some born into slavery - to
form a heterogeneous community that became a safe haven; a fine place for a man
to work hard, to raise a God-fearing family, to grow old gracefully and to die
content for having built a better life for those who followed.
In 1926, a 24 year old history teacher at Crystal City High
School named Aburey (A.E.) Powers took it upon himself to organize a football
team, “because our boys need something to do after school.” Powers and his
players worked out all that first summer, from 5 am to 8 am, and in September hit
the ground running.
Dr. D.J.
Commerford Field
In 1975, Powers related, in an entertaining story written by
Steve Jennings, a favorite early Hornet memory. “In 1927, we played Kirkwood, a
big school from St. Louis. Their coach thought so little of us he didn’t even
dress his first team backfield. At halftime it was 12-3 in our favor. I
overheard the coach tell his backfield, ‘You boys got to get your suits on,
score a couple of touchdowns and I will put the others back in.’ I told our
boys that and they just went wild. We won 37-3.” Today, 90 years after the
fact, when listening to the coach’s words of how his little country team
slapped the arrogance out of the big city slickers – “they just went wild” -
time does little to diminish the pride that resonates through the years.
Underdog became the Hornets’ mantra and a factory town’s love affair with its
feisty little football team had begun.
In 1928, the home field was again relocated, this time
permanently to its current river bottom home. In 1964, the grounds were named
Dr. J.J. Commerford Field.
By 1929, under Powers’ masterful leadership, the Hornets had
earned the respect of the entire St. Louis area, no longer able to sneak up on
overconfident big city foes. In the first three years of Hornet football, the
young and innovative coach led the small school to an impressive record of
25-4. With De Soto the only local competition available, many of the wins came
over big city St. Louis schools with five to ten times larger enrollments. The
Hornets took on all comers. Roosevelt, Cleveland, St. Louis University High,
Normandy, Soldan, Christian Brothers College; a virtual who’s who of the area high
school football powers of the time filled out the Hornets’ schedule.
 |
| Commeford Stadium |
During the early years, Powers even scheduled - and his country boys defeated - several college freshman squads. The St. Louis Post Dispatch reported that the Crystal City High School of 1930 “consists of 105 students, 53 boys, 30 of who are on the football team.” In 1928, the Hornets allowed their goal line to be crossed only once, while scoring 152 points in eleven games and logging major victories over area powers St. Louis University High, 13-0, and Ritenour High, 37-0. So dominant were the Hornets in the win over St. Louis University High, considered at the time the top program in St. Louis, the city 11 never came closer to their end zone than the Hornet’s 38 yard line. Crystal City recorded 18 first downs to the visitors’ measly five. The only blemish on the season ledger in ’28 was a 6-0 loss to the St. Louis University Freshman team. The 10 wins in 1928 remains, to this day, the Hornet’s high mark for a single season.
Powers used deception to compensate for his team’s lack of
size. One area coach of the day glibly described the Hornets’ style as such: “They
used freakish formations to a great extent and throughout the game had us up in
the air trying to fathom the plays.”
Crystal City became the first team in the area to play at
night. On September 26, 1930, one year into the Great Depression, the
resourceful Powers had somehow found the funds to install “flood lights” at his
river bottom field. The squad from Normandy High School provided the opening
night opposition. It was reported in the St.
Louis Post Dispatch that, “with their field forming a natural stadium, the
installation of lights makes it one of the most attractive high school football
fields in the state.” The lights of the time were of such a poor standard that
a special white football was designed to help players see the pigskin. For some
perspective, Major League Baseball did not play its first night game until five
years after the trend-setting Hornets had initiated their own version of
“Friday Night Lights.”
A date on the Hornet’s dance card became the hottest ticket
in the area, schools lining up for the chance to experience nighttime football.
In 1930, CC’s first seven games were all played on their home turf and all on
Friday night.
In 1946, visiting foe Principia chartered several special
rail coaches and received permission from PPG to park them on the railroad
tracks next to the field. Filled with their team, the school faculty, the
student body and “a large number of supporters” from the St. Louis school, the
entire festive troupe was, one hour before game time, dropped off, valet
parking style, at the field’s east sideline.
The factory railroad tracks that adjoined the north/south field
on the east provided a great sightline and a free view of the game. Stories are
told of second shift factory workers being given “extended lunch breaks” to
walk the short distance up the tracks from the factory to cheer on their team.
Within a decade, the red-and-black-clad Crystal City Hornets
had become an inherent shining light in the life of a depression era factory
town, a source of deep and abiding civic pride.
Powers departed Crystal City after the 1932 season. A
progression of seven coaches then took the Hornets through the remainder of the
Great Depression and the war years. Several seasons performances stand out,
most notably the 1946 team, coached by Murrell Godwin, that won the Jefferson
County Conference and finished with an 8-1 mark. Godwin eventually crossed
Highway 61 to become the athletic director and football coach at hated rival
Festus.
Chapter 2
Coach Arvel Popp
“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when
his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.”
Lao Tzu
The coaching
carousel stopped in 1948 when Arvel Popp was lured away from Dexter, Missouri High
School to take the reins of the Hornets. Popp stayed for 27 years, winning six
conference titles. Crystal City football was well known when Popp arrived. When
he retired, it was legendary. A Southeast Missouri native of the town of
Perryville and a World War II vet, Popp was an enigmatic leader, aloof and
disengaged from the community. He ran his Hornets as an unbending
disciplinarian, totally above the grasp and influence of any of the town’s
power brokers. Renown in his younger days as a bar room brawler who seldom came
up short with his fists, Popp made and lived by his own rules. The crusty coach
had no interest in moving into school administration nor harbored any plans of
using his coaching notoriety as a stepping stone to outside enriching
employment. He was first, foremost, and only - a coach.
Running off the unwilling, while molding the survivors into
men, to Popp football was an equivalence test of character. It was an era when
a football coach often had more influence over a young man than his own father.
“I played for Coach Popp,” 1954 grad Rodney Mills recalls. “He was a ‘rub a
little dirt on it and get back in there’ type of coach.” As a winning football
coach in the America of the 1950s, Popp wielded both respect and power, his steely glare over
the years cutting like a laser through many a malingering high school boy.
Coaching was his life’s calling and Crystal City had proved to be the perfect
fit.
Popp was also the head coach of the basketball team. Over
his long career his Cagers won nearly 800 games, over 500 by his Hornet teams.
Interestingly, he had more success in his first decade of tenure at CCHS
leading the Hornets on the hardwood than he did on the gridiron. Having the
round ball skills of Bill Bradley, at
the time then state’s all-time leading scorer, a future collegiate All-American,
All-Pro, Rhodes Scholar, captain of the gold medal winning 1964 Olympic team
and a 12 year U.S. Senator, at his disposal, didn’t hurt. Bradley said that
Popp was the only man, “I would ever call Coach.”
 |
| Arvel Popp and DJ Byas - 1970 |
However, Popp left no doubt that the flagship program at his Crystal City High School would always be his football team. The no nonsense taskmaster made it very clear that any young man wearing the red and black who dreamed of basketball glory had better dutifully report the first day of fall football practice. He made an exception for Bradley, although as an 8th grader Popp had told the future Princeton Tiger and New York Knicks star that he would make him the “greatest pass catching end in the history of the University of Missouri’s football team.” Bradley passed on the offer and spent his high school falls preparing for the upcoming hoops season. But, as Popp would for years inform many a basketball player wannabee balking at his football playing responsibilities, “You are no Bradley.” Danny LaRose, 1957 alum, remembers, “You couldn’t even wear a letter jacket unless you played football, Coach Popp’s rule. I don’t think even Bradley got one.”
In 1953, led by all-state center Jack O’Bryan, Popp produced
his first championship team. The Hornets finished 8-0-1 to win the conference
title. O’Bryan would go on to play at the University of Missouri, the first of
many stars Popp would send to the state university. It was a harbinger, under Popp’s
tutelage, of good times to come.
During the 1960’s, Popp would bring back two of his former
players as assistant coaches. Over the next 25 years Dick Cook and Rodney Mills
would both leave their indelible coaching mark upon their alma mater.
Dick Cook graduated from CCHS in 1956. He then played
football and ran track at the University of Missouri. The cerebral 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 home town. After college graduation, Cook had
short stays as an assistant coach at Poplar Bluff High School (three years) and
Herculaneum High School (one year) before in 1964 joining Popp at CCHS. Cook
jumped at the chance to return to his home high school. “In 1964,” says Cook,
“Crystal City was a destination stop for any teacher or coach. This is where
you wanted to be. Teachers and coaches at other schools envied us. I knew once
I was here, I would never leave.”
 |
| L to R Dick Cook, Rodney Mills |
Rodney Mills played football for and earned his teaching credentials from Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau. After receiving his college degree, he spent four years as an assistant coach at Herculaneum before in 1962 joining Popp’s staff at CCHS. Mills was the “Renaissance Man” of the Hornet coaching staff. By day, he 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 an offender’s ass. He once told a hapless punter in a JV game that if the young man shanked just one more punt, “I am going to raise more hell than the alligators did when the pond went dry.” Somehow, his varied and disparate approaches would find a confluence and Mills was well liked and successful in both venues. To this day, at 80 years of age, Mills remains unbroken, irreverent and in his own words, “loudly humble.”
“Crystal City in the ‘50s was a great place to grow up and
Crystal City in the ‘60s was a great place to coach,” Mills remembers.
Popp, in time, deferred most of the running of the football
program to his two trusted assistants. From 1964 on, Cook ran the offense,
Mills the defense. Mills’ 1964 defense was so impregnable they were not scored
upon until the 4th quarter of the final game of the season, when Fredericktown
returned a punt for a touchdown. At the time, the Hornets led 39-0 and had a
number of young substitutes in the game. Cook’s 1970 Hornet offense averaged
39.1 points per game.
1970
Arvel Popp passed away on January 25, 1996 at the age of 81.
Chapter 3
A Shining Exception
“The very ink with
which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.”
Mark Twain
In 1954, the
United States Supreme Court handed down its landmark Brown v. the Topeka Board
of Education decision, a ruling that outlawed the racial segregation of the
nation’s public schools. As a southern border state, the evil of separate but
equal Jim Crow was deeply rooted in rural Missouri’s social norms. Many Missouri
school districts initially ignored the federal edict then challenged it in the
state courts first, and then the federal courts, often delaying school
desegregation in many Missouri towns until far into the 1960s.
Crystal City was a shining exception.
Led by an educated school board, many of its members college
grads who worked in administrative roles at the local PPG plant, the district
immediately and fully desegregated its high school. In 1955, Popp issued football
uniforms to three African-American athletes; Richard Byas, Bennie Evans and Don
Riney. In the years that followed, African-American student-athletes would play
prominent roles on every outstanding Hornet squad.
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| 1955 - First Integrated Team |
Dick Cook. “It was never an issue. They were never excluded, due to their race, from anything we did as a team. If we hung out as a team at a certain place away from school, they hung with us.” Cook remembers a sort of de facto segregation in the community before 1955 - nothing written, but just an accepted fact that there were certain places in town local blacks just didn’t patronize. “Looking back, I feel we broke a lot of those (assumed) racial barriers, although at the time we didn’t realize it. I remember no problems anywhere we went as a team. Athletics, no doubt, helped in the transition,” Cook recalls. “If you wore our uniform, you were our teammate. It was that simple.” All three black athletes earned their acceptance by proving their mettle on the football field. “If they could help us win, then that was all that mattered,” says Cook.
Former Hornet Danny LaRose was an established star player at
the University of Missouri in 1958 when St. Louis Vashon High School graduate
Norris Stevenson became the first African-American to earn a football
scholarship to the state’s flagship university. LaRose put into practice the
diversity lessons he had learned as a Hornet teammate to Byas, Evans and Riney.
Years later, upon his induction to the Missouri Athletic Hall of Fame,
Stevenson gave a newspaper interview in which he recalled the positive role
LaRose played in Stevenson’s trailblazing and sometimes rocky path as a Tiger.
“When I first came to
(Missouri) Danny LaRose was a team leader and (he) went out of his way to make
me feel welcome,” a still grateful Stevenson remembered. Racism was a constant
companion for Stevenson in his years at Mizzou. With many football players from
the South on the roster and a campus heavily decorated with the Confederate
Flag and a “Dixie gonna do it again” mentality, without the symbolic message the
respected LaRose’s actions sent to the rest of the squad, Stevenson feels his
road to acceptance, or at least tolerance, would have been much steeper. “It
says a lot about LaRose’s character,” said Stevenson. “It wasn’t a popular
stance he took with many on the team at the time.” But it was a just stance and
LaRose’s actions validate the progressive action the Crystal City public
schools took in 1955.
1970
However, Crystal City High School in the 1950s and 60s was
not a racial utopia either. Randy Cayce
was a standout African-American running back and defensive back for the 1963 to
1965 Hornets and remembers the volatile years of desegregation with negatives
many local whites did not see, or maybe, choose today not to remember. Even as
a star football player in a football crazy town, Cayce was not immune to the
intolerance that seethed below the surface of small town 1960s America, left to
wonder as to the level of sincerity of the postgame back slaps heaped upon him
by smitten white fans. Cayce had attended the “colored” Star Elementary School.
“It was a hard time,” Cayce says today, recalling the trauma-induced anxiety of
a young teenage boy moving up to a just-integrated high school. Cayce agrees
that the power positions in the community were manned by progressive minds, and
that expedited school integration, but the hateful sting was still felt. “The
racists were still there. Even if they had no power, (they) couldn’t keep us
out of school like they did some places, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t
make our lives miserable, and some did. It was over 50 years ago, but I still
remember the hurt.”
Having been taught by a proud father to never be bitter,
Cayce’s views today of his years at CCHS are shaped with a more philosophical
bent than when he was younger, tempered by the years, which he says, brings
perspective. “There was racism, for sure, in Crystal City in the ‘60s. How
could there not be, considering the times? I mean, this was several years
before Dr. King was murdered; we still had a long ways to go. But, when we went
to practice, that all changed. My teammates were great, I can’t emphasize that
enough. And Coach Cook and his wife were like second parents to me, (as) fine a
people as I have ever known. You see, that is why sports are so important. My
teammates knew me as a person, respected me as a teammate. There are good people
and there are bad people everywhere. Athletics brought out the good people of
Crystal City. I have always been proud to be from Crystal City. ”
Chapter 4
The Standouts
“Oh, the days of Kerry dancing,
Oh, the ring of
the pipers tune,
Oh, for one of those hours of gladness,
Gone, alas, like
our youth, too soon.”
Irish Folk Song
Benny La Presta - 1927
The Hornets’
first marquee player was Benny La Presta. Playing in the backfield for the 1926
and 1927 teams, he was described in the local media as a, “flashy line plunger
and broken field runner. The short but husky Italian is a dependable blocker
and he knows how to back up his line.” After his high school graduation, La
Presta matriculated 30 miles north to St. Louis University where in 1930, 1931
and 1932 he was the leading ground gainer and point maker for the Billikens in
an era when the Missouri Valley Conference member played a major college
football schedule.
Dr. J.J.
Danny LaRose was arguably the best to ever pad up for the
Hornets. The 1957 CCHS grad went on to become one of the top linemen in the
history of the University of Missouri Tigers. After his 1960 senior year,
LaRose, a two way end, was named to several All-American teams. He finished in
the top ten in that fall’s Heisman Trophy balloting for top player in the
nation, the highest rating that season of any lineman. A first round NFL draft
choice of the Detroit Lions, LaRose played offensive tackle for four NFL teams
over a seven year career. LaRose is now retired from a second career, selling
medical equipment; living the good life with his wife in a riverside log cabin
in upstate Michigan.
“Danny was just a big old kid in high school,” remembers
teammate Cook. “He played in the line and didn’t get a lot of recognition. But
when he got to Mizzou, he just took off.”
“For me, growing up in Crystal City, sports were everything,”
LaRose recalls. “My mom died when I was 13 and my older sister was in nursing
school, so it was just me and my dad at home. Every other week he worked the
evening shift over at PPG, so for a week I would not see him at all. I was
always up at the school playing sports for something to do. Once, I was home alone
cooking some Spaghetti O’s and I forgot it was Friday night and we had a game
and the bus pulls up to my house and Coach Popp is yelling at me to get my big
dumb butt on the bus.”
“Coach knew I was on my own a lot and he looked out for me,”
LaRose continued. “Coach was a hard-nosed old school type of guy. He is one of
the most honest people I've ever met. Sometimes he would be too honest, and it
could hurt your feelings. But that honesty was what a kid like me needed to
hear. His son, Jerry, was my age and Coach was really hard on the poor guy, use
to make him box me in the gym and I was a lot bigger, but I better not let up,
either, or coach would have been all over me. But, Coach also had a soft side
he tried hard to hide. He knew I needed some special looking after and he saw I
got it.”
 |
| Danny La Rose |
“Sports in high school kept me in school, no doubt,” LaRose says. “I just had so much fun in high school. In 1957, Richard Byas and I were a two man track team and we won the state track meet. Richard won both sprints and the hurdles race and I won the shot and discus. Fifty points between us and it was good enough to win. Richard was so fast, unbelievably fast. His mom had never seen him play football and she finally came to a game one night. Richard scores four touchdowns that game and his mom makes him quit football. Said she never realized it was so rough. Can you believe that? But man, was he fast, fast as anyone I played with in pro ball. Only one who could slow him down, I guess, was his mom.”
Nineteen fifty-one CCHS grad Ike Jennings was a two way lineman
at the University of Missouri and for the Green Bay Packers. The charismatic “Big
Ike” looked the way a football player in the 1950s was supposed to look and he
acted the way a football player in the 1950s was supposed to act. In high
school, he was a combination of strength and speed, witnessed by winning the
state track title in both the shot put and the 440 yard (400 meter) dash. After
his brief career with the Packers, Jennings was for six years an assistant
coach, and then the head coach of county rival Herculaneum, but he never forgot
his CCHS roots. After leaving coaching to enter private business, Jennings was
a highly visible and vocal supporter of his home school and several of his offspring
were star Hornet athletes. As one friend said about Jennings’ life of the party
personality, “You liked him or you didn’t, but you never forgot him.” Jennings
passed away in 2007 at 74 years of age.
Bill Schmidt was another Hornet who found success on the collegiate
field in Columbia, Missouri. A two way star for the Hornets and a senior leader
for the 1965 undefeated, untied juggernaut; from 1967 to 1969 Schmidt was a
defensive mainstay for three of Dan Devine’s most decorated University of
Missouri teams. In the Festus game, his high school senior year, Schmidt
suffered a horrific injury, a broken back that left him in a brace for four
months. Most college suitors lost interest in securing Schmidt’s future
football services. Not Mizzou. Popp’s reputation as a straight shooter
convinced the home state university to take a chance on a player many now
considered, “damaged goods.” Then Mizzou Assistant Coach Al Onofrio said during
Schmidt’s junior season at Mizzou, “Coach Popp recommended him and Coach Popp’s
word has always been good enough for us.”
Randy Cayce, a 1966 CCHS grad, played a leading role on the
undefeated 1964 and 1965 squads. The marquee member of a talented backfield on
offense and a ball hawking defender, Cayce used a freakish mixture of strength,
size and speed to dominate opponents. Coach Popp, after Cayce’s senior year, stated
that Cayce was one of the fastest players to ever suit up for one of his teams.
Coach Rodney Mills has a fond Cayce memory he likes to tell. “We are playing up
at Fox. Coach Cook calls for Randy to sweep to the right. Of course, where ever
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.’”
 |
| Randy Cayce |
Playing college football first at Mesa Junior College in Colorado and then Wichita State University in Kansas; Cayce completed his eligibility at WSU one year prior to the October 1970 plane crash that wiped-out a majority of the football team. “The coaches at WSU wanted me to redshirt and I said, no, or I would have still been playing at WSU in 1970,” Cayce states about a fateful decision that possibly saved his life. “I even went to summer school to graduate on time (May, 1970). I wanted to get to pro ball as quick as I could, or I would have been on that plane. It has just been in the last year that I could force myself to visit the crash site. I was on the practice field with the (Denver) Broncos when I was called off and told that the plane had crashed. Since that moment, I have felt I am living on borrowed time. I try to make each day count.”
Cayce spent three years as a running back with the Denver
Broncos and one year as a teammate with OJ Simpson (“everyone wants to know
about OJ,” Cayce says with a laugh) on the Buffalo Bills roster. In 1973, after
a knee injury, he left football behind and settled in the Denver, Colorado,
area. Cayce is now retired from a long career with the Denver Fire Department. He
spends his days running the flooring installation company he has owned since
the 1970s and doting over his four grown children and 14 grandchildren.
The introspective Cayce, the son of a father who never, “let
me get too full of myself,” keeps his role as a football hero in the well-grounded
reality of his small town raising. “Many people in Denver remember me as a
Bronco,” Cayce states, “but I am also proud of my years with the fire
department. I have signed a lot of autographs over the years because a long
time ago I ran with a ball. I saved lives with the fire department and nobody
ever asked for my autograph. Tell me, which job was more important, more
impacting?”
Chapter 5
The Golden Years
“Winning isn't
everything, it's the only thing.”
Vince Lombardi
Without
question, the golden age of Crystal City football was a five season run from
1963 to 1967. The Hornets dominated the area with a 41-4-1 record. Along the
way they pounded out an 18 game winning streak and spun the program’s only
undefeated, untied season, 1965’s 9-0 masterpiece. After a gut-wrenching last second loss to
Herculaneum to end the 1963 season, the Hornets would not taste defeat again
until 1966. Only a scoreless tie with Herculaneum in the second game of the
1964 season marred a perfect three year record.
Dick Cook had the unusual view from both sidelines for the
classic Crystal City vs Herculaneum games of 1963 and 1964. “I was an assistant
to Coach (Bill) Holmes at Herculaneum in 1963 and to Coach Popp here in 1964,”
Cook says. “Those were two great games between two great teams, spirited but
friendly rivals with coaching staffs that respected and liked each other, maybe
the best short term rivalry this area has ever seen.”
The 1963 contest against Herculaneum is widely recognized as
the best game in the history of Hornet football. Both teams entered the
November showdown, the last game of the year for both teams, undefeated. With
no post season state playoffs in 1963, this was a winner-take-all match up and
the buildup was intense. On a bone-chilling cold night, the biggest crowd to
ever see a football game at the Dr. J.J. Commerford Field was privy to a
classic. Herculaneum overcame a two score 4th quarter deficit, scoring the go-ahead
touchdown on a 9 yard last second pass to dethrone the Hornets, 18-13.
With 1:40 left in the game, “Herky” had scored a touchdown
but had muffed the point after attempt and still trailed by one point, 13-12.
After a mad scramble occurred for the ensuing on-side kick and after several
minutes of debate amongst the officials as to who had recovered, much to the
dismay of the Hornets’ bench, the ball was awarded to the Blackcats, setting up
the last second heroics.
Ironically, if Herculaneum had been successful on the extra
point attempt to tie the game at 13-13, the Hornet coaching staff had already
made the decision to run out the clock and with no overtime rule in 1963, the
game would have ended in a tie. By missing the extra point and being forced
into the desperation on-side kick, Herculaneum had unknowingly given itself a
chance to win.
In the ’64 scoreless tie, played at Herculaneum, Crystal
City had two touchdowns called back by penalty and one denied by an
“inadvertent whistle.” Long time Hornet Coach Paul Browning, for years,
sarcastically referred to the 1964 game as, “the 18-0 tie.”
 |
| 1970 Hornets |
From 1963 to 1967, CC pitched five straight shutouts over their bitter neighboring rival, the Festus Tigers. Go back seven years, 1961 to 1967, and the Tigers only crossed the Crystal City goal line once; scoring a grand total of only six points, an average of less than one point per game. The Hornets won all seven. 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.
Coach Mills, a lineman during his playing days, was on the
Hornet’s undefeated 1953 team and has memories that underscore the importance
of the annual battle with Festus. “We tied Festus 0-0 in the first game of the
year. If we had played them later, we would have won easily,” Mills states, in
a matter-of - fact way. “But the rivalry had gotten so intense and the
mischievous behavior turned to vandalism so bad, that both schools’
administrations agreed the game needed to be played early in the school year
and gotten done with before the intensity had time to pick up steam.”
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 finally
tally stands as a draw, 21-21-3, perhaps, a perfect ending.
However, the long and dominant Hornet run of the mid ‘60s
proved to be of poor timing as Missouri high schools did not adopt a state wide
playoff system, culminating in the crowning of a state champ, until the 1968
season. How many state titles would the Hornets have claimed from 1963 to 1967
will remain always a historically unanswered question.
After two atypical substandard back-to-back losing seasons
in 1968 and 1969, the Hornets tore through the 1970 regular season schedule
with a vengeance, unchallenged while qualifying for the state playoffs. Led by
the dynamic triple option duo of quarterback Mark Dement and tailback D.J.
Byas, running behind a line anchored by the bruising and aptly named 240 pound
lineman, Greg Block, the Hornets led the St. Louis area in scoring. Dement
became the final member of a long line of Coach Popp’s players to compete on
the gridiron for the University of Missouri.
Through the 1980s, 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium,
the Hornets would periodically rise up and there were some shining football
moments. For example, there were the Bequette brothers of the early 80s, Jay
and Chris; both who went on to star for the University of Arkansas Razorbacks,
following the footsteps of their father George, a Hornet who played on the U of
A’s 1956 Cotton Bowl team. But, it was just not the same. There was no blame,
specifically, to place. The kids still played hard and the coaches still
coached hard, and as the parents often reminded the players, it is only a game.
But the passion was gone.
An obvious understatement: You can’t have a school without
students. Today, a steadily dropping school enrollment in Crystal City
seriously challenges not only the football team’s prospects, but the very
survival of the school itself. As a landlocked entity - the Mississippi River
on the east and three other school districts boundaries abutted on every other
side – the Crystal City schools has neither room nor direction to grow. Coupled
with an aging population that each succeeding year sends fewer and fewer of its
sons and daughters to the local public school, Crystal City High School’s
enrollment has today dropped to below 150. Only 22 boys, in the summer of 2016,
answered the call when pre-season football practice began.
Chapter 6
The Glory of Their Times
“All these were honored in their generation,
And were the
glory of their times.”
Ecclesiasticus
44:7
At its zenith,
Crystal City was a quintessential setting for the Great American Dream, the
ideal Rockwellian hometown. In 1986, with the town’s halcyon years now a bygone
memory, PPG - itself a victim of shifting worldwide economic trends and the
bulldozers of progress - was shuttered and eventually torn down. Any
salvageable materials were crated and shipped out on the same railroad tracks
that had once dispensed to the world the highest grade plate glass produced in
North America. The rails were then summarily (and symbolically) ripped up. By
the mid-1980s, Crystal City had transitioned from a factory town to a bedroom
community, many of its citizens now commuters dependent upon jobs 30 miles
north in the metro St. Louis area. With its small town identity now lost, the
love affair with its high school football team also diminished.
 |
| Bob Freese |
Bob Freese is a long time Hornet booster, maybe its most avid, the kind of guy when the wife asks, “Are you going to the game tonight,” answers rhetorically; “They are playing, aren’t they?” A 1954 grad, he has served many roles over the years in backing the local team, from Booster Club president to long time official scorekeeper. Freese revels in the past glories of his home town teams. “It just meant everything back then,” he recalls, tapping his fist on the table for emphasis. “Friday night in the fall meant high school football. I went to games with my dad as early as I can remember.”
The spring of 1965 was the high-water mark for Crystal City
athletics. The football team had gone undefeated and was in the midst of an 18
game winning streak. Springtime saw the Hornet’s baseball team, in a game
played at Busch Stadium against St. Louis Southwest, win the large school state
championship. Hornet Randy Cayce set a state record that to this day still
stands, with four stolen bases. And alum Bill Bradley was just finishing up his
career at Princeton as the best collegiate basketball player in the nation, the
kind of favorite son who would make any hometown button-busting proud.
Winning at Crystal City, in 1965, was expected. “Maybe we
got to taking it for granted,” says Freese, “but darn, it was such a great
time. Home games, away games, the whole town was there. We had a saying around
the town back then, ‘You never bet against Vince Lombardi and the Green Bay
Packers on Sunday, Ara Parseghian and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish on Saturday
or Arvel Popp and the Crystal City Hornets on Friday.’ We have lost that and it
is a shame. Losing the factory hurt, not just for the jobs, but for the
stability. They (PPG) were always very supportive of the schools.”
“We have had some great players here,” Freese observed,
“many who had great college careers and several who even went on to play pro
ball, but it’s also the little guys you remember, the ones who played and then
got on with life. They represent what our teams were all about, what this town
was all about. There were so many over the years, but to hold up just one, I
would say, Tony Picarella on our ‘63 and ‘64 teams.” Freese’s longtime friend
Cook enthusiastically concurs. “He was 150 pounds, maybe 155, but no taller
than 5’8”, but man could he hit you. He just loved playing football,” gushes
the veteran coach. “And was he fun to watch,” says Freese. “He was never going
to play in college at that size, but he was one tough little Crystal City
Hornet.”
Most, who wore the CC football uniform never let themselves
be deluded by athletics, never let their dreams grow bigger than what the
limited reality of a Tony Picarella’s 5’8” 155 lb. body allowed for. Crystal
City was a blue collar town. High school graduation meant time to find a job,
to “get on with life,” as Freese says. Factory workers are practical people and
they raise practical sons. For most, football was never a means to an end, a
college scholarship. As much as most adored football, four more years of
studying just to buy four more autumns of football was not an attractive offer.
Most stayed in Crystal City, which makes sense. Where else would a hometown
hero live besides his hometown? In the early days, at least, employment meant a
laborer’s job at Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company; trading a letter jacket for a
lunch pail, 40 hours of toil a week and a union paycheck; plus, a seat in the
bleachers come fall and Friday night. It would be a tough wean, at first, for
many, but Crystal City football was about family and in a few years yesterday’s
hero would be toting along his own young sons to the game, embedding the next
generation of Hornets into the proud tradition.
That was then, now is now. Times change. Towns change. The
days of the baby booming post war 1940s, 1950s and 1960s is no more and like
the PPG factory; they are not coming back, ever. But, the glory of those times
need not be forgotten. Cook and Freese intend to see it is not.
Freese has spent hours documenting the history of Hornet
athletics. “Once I start, I just can’t quit,” he observed of his time on the
computer searching for past nuggets to archive for future generations. “I have
so many projects going right now I doubt I can live long enough to finish them
all, and heck, when I do go, the kids will probably just throw it all out in
the trash anyway,” he says with a laugh. “But this is too important to just let
it die. People need to know not only what a great football team we had at one
time, but what a great town we had, as well.”
High school football is special. It just is - a unique slice
of Americana. There is nothing like a small town coming together each fall to
celebrate its Friday night heroes. High school football has its limits, but to
a young man in the throes of its adulation, the consequences seem boundless,
the opportunities endless. The glory heaped upon the few blessed becomes
intoxicating, but often painfully fleeting.
From their football inception in 1926, the Hornets were
winners. It was the town’s team, fortified with a cradle-to-grave interest in
football. When depression-era golden boy La Presta sprinted away from the helpless
opposition, flying down the far sideline in his leather helmet on the way to
another touchdown, he was lustily cheered on by a group of evening shift “lunch
break” factory hands perched on the bordering railroad tracks, the fitting image
of a blue collar town’s defiant pride. The
roar of the faithful, they say, sounded as though Lindbergh had landed in
Paris.
Tradition spawned a win ethic as pervasive as the cold
November night winds that whipped through the packed stadium, the town throwing
its collective support around the team like a cozy blanket. In its post war
glory days, the close-knit community of Crystal City was from a slower, warmer
time, a place where being a good neighbor meant something, not exactly
Mayberry, but close, and high school football was the social glue that bound it
all together.
From the beginning, the town’s backing for the Hornets raged
uninhibited, crossing all social barriers. Black and white, rich and poor, old
and young, all seated side by side on Friday night in support of, “our boys.”
For those who lived the glory days: Dick Cook, Bob Freese,
Rodney Mills, and surely many others now growing long in the tooth, Crystal
City Hornet football remains a roaring flame that burns deep in the gut. To
dismiss their passion as a mere dalliance of age would be shortsighted.
Instead, appreciate that with the inexorable passing of the so called “Greatest
Generation,” it is imperative that in our quest to understand who we are that our
history become paramount in our search. It must be garnered and shared, handed
down from father to son, perhaps, in a metaphorical sort of way. For, if Ray
Kinsella and his father had bonded through football instead of baseball, the
setting for the movie “Field of Dreams” might not have been misplaced in some
mythical Iowa cornfield. But, instead, duly planted in the hallowed 100 yards
of a very real Crystal City, Missouri river bottom football field, where
suspended in time like Peter Pan, the patron saint of our eternal youth; the
Benny La Prestas, the Danny LaRoses and the Randy Cacyes still play on, always
forever young.
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