This is a portrait of girls high school basketball in the 1940s:

Forwards played at one end of the court, guards at the other. They did not cross the center line.

If a player was fouled, she only got one shot.

Uniforms were two-piece, a satin-like material, and had short shorts. “All the way up to the crotch, with elastic. Like baby diapers, or the bottom of two-piece pajamas,” said Mount Holly High School guard Rachel Wilson Jackson, 82.

Gyms weren’t air-conditioned.

Teams had six players – three on offense, three on defense.

 “Oh, but we enjoyed it. We had a good comaraderie with the girls on the team, and we got to meet people in other schools,” said guard Faye Roberts Stroupe, 83.

“Growing up and playing in Mount Holly, it was like the show ‘Happy Days,’” said Lois Herring Parker, 84, a 5-foot-9 forward. “It was special back then.”

“That’s the only sport we had,” said Edith Jenkins Moose, 85, who played guard in 1944-45, “or I would have played every sport. I loved sports. But that’s the only team that the high school had. Basketball was my life.”

The Mount Holly High School Hawkettes of 1944-45, 1945-46 and 1946-47 had a combined record of 40-9-4, played for three different coaches, shared the Little Eight Conference Championship in ’46 and won it outright in ’47.

It was a time when boys’ minds were on the war, roads weren’t always paved and Charlie’s Drug & Sundries on West Central Avenue, then as now, was the after-school hangout.

“I look back and I think, Lord have mercy, I don’t know if I could run the whole court like they do now,” Jackson said. “But we had some exciting games.”

Edith Moose played one season for Mount Holly High and graduated in 1945, after 11 years of schooling. It wasn’t until the following year that students stayed for a 12th grade.

She was a 5-foot-6 guard for Coach L.C. Ward’s Hawkettes team that went 13-5-1. She made All-State, but said it was more of a title, than anything else. “I remember the coach came into the junior-senior prom and announced it,” she said. “That was pretty much it.”

She went to work for the telephone company after graduation, married the late William Moose in 1959 and had three daughters and a son.

Today, Edith Moose lives in a nearby pocket of Gaston County. “We have a Gastonia address, the telephone is Stanley, but we go to Mount Holly for everything,” she said.

There is a story she tells about basketball, reluctantly at times, because “the memory I have is not good.”

One night, she had a bit of a conflict with a referee from Cramerton. “He fouled me, and I got angry and threw the ball at him and knocked his glasses off,” Moose said. “He started yelling to Coach Ward, ‘Get her off of here! Get her off of here!’ And I had to leave the game. But the next game he was refereeing, he called me over and put his arm around me and said, ‘Let’s you and me be friends.’”

Score one for happy endings.

Rachel Wilson Jackson played three years, on the 1946-47, ’47-’48 and ’48-’49 teams. “We had lots of fun back then. I always loved sports; I’d try to play baseball with the boys. But I started playing basketball, and Lois Herring and I became good friends, and Faye Roberts,” she said. “We practiced every day after school. Our gym was one of the best gyms in the states. It was new, and the flooring was top-notch.”

As a 5-foot-7 ¾ guard, Jackson’s job was to get the ball and pass to the forwards. “We had some exciting games. We didn’t run the court, like they do now. The guards’ job was to get the ball and keep them from scoring, then we could run to half-court and throw it to our forwards,” she said. “If you got fouled, you’d only get one free throw. So the guards could never score.”

She said the girls teams attracted good-sized crowds. And, like Edith Moose, she has a story about a ref.

“There was one game, we had one of the worst officials I have ever seen in my life. It got so bad that the police were called and they escorted him out of the game,” she said. “There were no blows struck, but tempers really flared. He made bad calls. I don’t think he was really qualified. I don’t remember who we were playing, or the result, but I remember that particular thing.”

She married James Jackson on Easter Sunday, 1953, and moved to Charlotte, where they lived until moving to Pineville in 1964. There, they had two girls and a boy, and watched the city grow up around them, from a country road to what is now country clubs and the Ballantyne neighborhoods.

She still plays, occasionally. “There’s a goal we have out there, and if the kids were playing, I’d go out,” she said. “But I never was a shooter. I enjoy watching the games now.” She became a North Carolina fan, and a fan of former coach Dean Smith. “I have the most respect for the man,” she said.

“I’m grateful that I got to go to Mount Holly High School. I’m excited about this (Hall of Fame). I thoroughly enjoyed basketball.”

Faye Roberts Stroupe graduated in 1947, the year the Hawkettes won the Little Eight conference title. The conference consisted of Mount Holly, Belmont, Stanley, Dallas, Bessemer City, Tryon, Cramerton and Lowell. As a guard, her role was to keep the opposition’s forwards from scoring. “I tell my grandson that now, and he says, ‘You couldn’t cross the line?’ And I tell him, no, we’d get fouled,” she said.

“We had a really good team the year we won it all. We were rivals with Stanley, so if Stanley was playing somebody else, we’d root for the somebody else.”

Lois Herring was captain of that ’47 team. “She was the spark; she helped motivate the rest of us,” Stroupe said. “She was an inspiration for us to do our best, and if she found a way, she could shoot.”

Stroupe said she got interested in basketball as something to do. “Never real crazy about it, just went out for it and stayed with it,” she said. “But it was worth it, when they won the conference and each team member received a trophy.”

Stroupe married the late Carl Stroupe, a 1945 graduate, in 1951 and went to work in a downtown bank while he was in the Navy. They later ran a Texaco station and adjoining laundry in Mount Holly. Their daughter, Kelly, lives in Cramer Mountain and her son, Josh, lives in an apartment on Faye’s property.

“I really enjoyed having that time to play on that team,” said Stroupe, who also was in the high school’s shorthand club. “So many of them are gone now, and it breaks my heart. But I think this (Hall of Fame) is wonderful.”

Lois Herring Parker was tall, at 5-9, and a team captain, and people say it was her enthusiasm that led the Hawkettes to much of their success.

“She was the reason we were so dedicated,” Stroupe said.

But, Parker, who played from 8th grade through her senior year, said she did it mostly for fun. Ask how many points she scored, and she doesn’t recall. “After we graduated, I found out I was the second-highest scorer in the conference as a senior, the year we won the tournament,” she said. “But I don’t know how many it was.”

She went on to play for teams called the Queen City Trailways in Charlotte and the AAU team in Winston-Salem sponsored by Hanes Hosiery, which won three AAU national championships in the early 1950s. She then played for teams in the Senior Olympics, until age 68.

Of all the games, it’s one in high school that stands out – the Little Eight Conference tournament final from 1947. “I was fouled at the very last minute. Of course, back then, all the spectators started hollering, and it was so loud that the ref took the ball out of my hands,” she said. “I didn’t know what he was going to do, but he put his fingers up to his lips and turned to the spectators to quiet them, and you could have heard a pin drop. I made the free throw, and we won the game.”

She was named Most Valuable Player for the tournament.

“There is a picture of us, there were six of us, and we had trophies,” she said. “We were very close. We loved each other.”

She has been married for 55 years to Edward Parker, who owns an engraving company in Raleigh, where they moved in 1961.

“Basketball was one of the best parts of my life,” she said. “It was all so special, and the town supported us. There’s a lot of things that make me laugh when I think about it. But it’s been a blessing.”