Class of 2013
J.B. Thompson
James Browning Thompson knew football. He excelled at offensive and defensive tackle for his high school, college and in semi-pro, playing from his teen years until he was called away at age 24 to fly B29 bombers in World War II.
Those years at Mount Holly High School, North Carolina State and with the Charlotte Clippers defined him as an athlete.
“He played good, on three different levels. He was a football nut; that was his game,” said his son, Gene. “He loved that game.”
But off the field, there was more to tell about the late J.B. Thompson than his excellence as a 6-foot-2, 220-pound football star.
Gene, 66, who lives in Mount Holly with his wife, Libba, has a story about J.B., the daddy. It was the moment when Gene realized how much football meant to his father – football above all other sports – and how that father would take time to do something for his son.
It happened during 5th-period English class.
“It was 1965, the year I graduated. I played football in the fall and ran track in the spring, and he kept up with it; he was that kind of father, so he knew we were having our conference track meet,” Gene said. “We got up and ate breakfast, all of us, and he asked me, ‘Son, where’s your track meet today?’ And I said Bessemer City. And he asked what time. I told him 4 o’clock.
“You have to remember, football games were always at 7, when he got off work. So he had never been to a track meet, ever. He said, ‘You know, I might just take off and come see one. This is your last one.’ And I said, ‘Really? You can get off work? I was thrilled to death.”
J.B. worked 12-hour days, six or seven days a week, at the family business, Mount Holly Ice and Fuel, which sold ice for iceboxes and coal for heating. Later on, it sold tires and home heating oil. He supplied tires – for free – to the ambulances that waited on football sidelines on Friday nights.
But sitting in English class, looking out the window at the practice field, Gene Thompson discovered what football really meant to his daddy. “It just dawned on me, like a light bulb went off. How many times during football season did I look over across that field and see my daddy and other men watching practice? Practice, not a game. In the afternoons,” he said. “Man, he coulda got off (for track meets). I shoulda been mad, but I just looked out across that field and said, ‘Wait a minute…I’ve seen him out there, so he could have watched track.’ But he’s a football nut, and that kind of illustrates why he’s getting inducted (to the Hall of Fame). I just laughed. I wasn’t mad in the least.”
J.B. went to Gene’s conference track meet that day, and watched his boy win the 100- and 220-yard dash and place in the shot put and long jump.
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Sundays and Santa Claus
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J.B.’s wife, Martha, is 95. She has much to tell about football, about the day Pearl Harbor was hit, and about raising three babies. Like Gene, she has a story about family, and what it meant to J.B.
When J.B. Thompson had time away from work – usually Sunday mornings – he liked to hit the golf course. “Well, he did it until I made such a nuisance of myself trying to get him to go to church,” Martha said.
When their daughter Mickey was about 5, and Gene was about 3, they went to Sunday School and church with Martha.
“Mickey would follow her daddy around, and he’d be getting ready to go to the golf course, and she’d tell him, ‘Daddy, the Lord Jesus won’t love you if you don’t go to Sunday School.’ And Gene was about 22 months younger and he’d say, ‘Daddy, Santa Claus won’t love you if you don’t go to Sunday School,’” Martha said.
“So he started going to Sunday School, and when they built the new church, he became head of the building committee.”
That church is First United Methodist of Mount Holly, the one on Main Street with the steeple tall enough to see from the bridge over the Catawba River.
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The call of war
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The Charlotte Clippers were a professional football team in the Dixie League, which was founded in 1936 as part of the South Atlantic Football Association. There were six charter members: the Norfolk Shamrocks, Newport News Builders, Richmond Arrows, Portsmouth Cubs, Roanoke Travelers and Charlotte.
Martha, who lived in Lincolnton, had met J.B. through his aunt. “It was pretty much love at first sight,” she said.
She had a friend whose boyfriend played for the Clippers, and they’d go to home games together.
“I remember we were at a game in Charlotte when they stopped the game to announce the Pearl Harbor event, and they made the announcement for all the service men to report to their place of duty,” she said. “I can remember the stadium was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop. Everyone was spellbound. You could see the fellas all over the stadium getting up to go to where they were supposed to be. It was very scary to everybody there.”
The Clippers went 7-3 that year, 1941, and the Dixie League suspended play until 1946. It folded the following year.
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Football and so on…
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J.B. Thompson was born in Mount Holly and played for Mount Holly High School in the early 1930s under coach Seaton Holt, alongside Dick Thompson, his brother, who was inducted into the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame in 2009. He played three years, then won a ride to N.C. State, where he also played three seasons. He would have played a fourth, and graduated, but he was sidelined by a foot infection that forced a two-week stay in the school infirmary.
“He got behind on classes, and he just dropped out,” Gene Thompson said. “He said he’d go back the next semester, and he came home and intended to finish later, but he never went back. He had to run the family business. He was studying textiles, and he would have liked to have finished his degree.
“But his primary connection was sports. And him playing on three levels, it made him the football hero.”
The Clippers called, and J.B. signed up. Gene still has his dad’s contract from 1941 – he made $25 a game.
He married Martha, and she traveled with him to Florida where, she said, he went to school to learn radar. They then went to New Haven, Connecticut for training, where she got a secretarial job in the engineering department at Yale.
After the war, he returned to the family business and in many ways, contributed to the community of Mount Holly. Gene – also a 2009 Hall of Fame inductee, with the 1963 MHHS football team – played running back, and one of his fondest memories is the watermelons.
“There was a storage room down there at the ice plant, and it was about 40 degrees, and we sold hundreds and hundreds of watermelons we’d get from Pageland, S.C.,” he said. “One time a year, before summer practice in football, he’d show up and provide us with a bunch of watermelons.”
J.B. also helped build the community building on Highway 27 and was president of the Jaycees. He had three children – Mickey, Gene and Julie, born in 1960. Gene has a son Jay, and daughter Lea; Julie has a son and a daughter. A great-grandchild was due in May.
J.B. Thompson died in July 1980 from an aneurysm of his aorta. He was 63.
“He was wonderful, naturally. He was a great man, a good husband, a wonderful father and a hard worker,” Martha said.
Jay Thompson, Gene’s son, was born too late to have known J.B. “I heard all the stories about the teams he played for, and my dad told me hundreds of times that I would have love him, and he would have loved me,” Jay said. “I’m sure his values and morals and work ethic were passed down to my dad.”
“I’m proud of him for making the Hall of Fame,” Gene said. “He supported the community in a lot of ways, and he supported the schools. But it’s the football – ask anyone who remembers him, and they always remember the football.”
Charlie “Poss” Drumm
If it’s Wednesday, Charlie “Poss” Drumm is at the Tuckaseegee Recreation Center in Charlotte, playing the game that is his passion.
About two dozen men gather in the gymnasium, many in elastic knee or elbow braces, most with water jugs and towels stored on bleachers. There are heavy-set men and slender ones, quick shooters and fast talkers, bonded for the afternoon in the hot, stagnant air reasserting their reverence for basketball.
Two requirements regulate play in this clique – be 50 or older, and love the game.
At 80, Drumm is the eldest. He doesn’t wear a brace, doesn’t carry water, but his skills at this 4-on-4 ritual are compatible with the rest of these players who have been meeting at Tuckaseegee for more than a decade.
“For him to be out there, running around like we do, and still come back for another day, that’s incredible,” said Tony Huntley, 58, a Wednesday regular since he became eligible.
The men play for three hours, year-round, and compete in tournaments in May and December.
Barbara Drumm, Charlie’s wife of 53 years, understands the grip basketball can have on a player. “His love of basketball is like how we love to breathe fresh air. It just comes natural for him,” she said. “I think it was natural for him since he was a young child.”
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Drumm was born in Mount Holly and discovered sports early. “I was playing by the time I was 8 years old,” he said, “but it was just for fun.”
He played competitively in junior high, then added four years of basketball, and three years of golf, football and baseball at Mount Holly High School. His best friend, Harold Helton, started calling him “little Poss,” after Drumm’s father’s nickname, and it stuck.
Of all he did, the basketball of the 1948-49 and 1949-50 seasons was his favorite. Drumm, at 5-foot-10, played point guard, and led the 1950 MHHS team to the Little Eight conference tournament title.
“That was the big one, when we won the championship,” he said. “We were tied, and we won by one point against Stanley High School.”
Drumm played for Lees-McRae College in Banner Elk on scholarship and acquired a degree in Physical Education, before the Navy took him overseas during the Korean War.
When he returned, Drumm reacquainted himself with his first love – sports – and found another love, Barbara, on a dance floor in Myrtle Beach.
His affection for sports led to 20 years of competition in the Senior Games.
“Sports is a hobby for most people. But for Charlie, it’s an obsession,” said Barbara who, with Charlie, has a son, grandson and two great-grandsons. “I learned from a very young age in our marriage, that if I was going to live with this man, I can’t come between him and his sports.”
He said in all his years as an athlete, he only can recall one injury – a broken wrist, playing football in high school. When basketball season came, he played anyway.
Barbara laughs a lot when she talks about Charlie, like they’re best friends. After Korea, Charlie and his buddies would go to Myrtle Beach, to the dance halls, where shag dancing and beach music ruled. Barbara and her friends did the same, and the two became dance partners. “We became friends before he became a boyfriend,” she said. “One night, I was dancing by and Charlie grabbed my arm and pulled me into his lap, and I told my girlfriend, ‘I think he likes me!’”
They married in 1959.
Charlie saw a mention in the newspaper about Senior Games, and signed up. It became the Drumms’ ticket to travel.
“We’ve been to New Orleans and New York, New Jersey, St. Louis,” she said. “He was into all kinds of sports – basketball was just one of them. Up until a few years ago, we went all over the United States with the Senior Games.”
“I played golf, basketball, snookers, went fishing…,” Charlie said. “I guess I got about 40 medals and trophies.”
At their home in Mount Holly, the Drumms have a room for the trophies, and recently took the medals, which hang from ribbons, from the Senior Games and sorted them on the dining room table. Some are intact, some have missing labels, some bring vivid memories.
Among their finds:
* 23 medals from the Senior Games
* Mecklenburg County Parks and Recreation 3-on-3 basketball tournament championship trophy, 2004
* Age-group gold medal for golf, St. Louis, 1989. The back of the medal reads “Fitness and Excellence through Competition. U.S. National Senior Olympics”
* Trophy for 2nd place team, March of Dimes golf tournament, 1989
* Age-group gold medal, Hoechst Celanese state golf tournament, 1986
* Lees-McRae alumni golf tournament, flight champion trophy, 1978
* Lees-McRae alumni golf tournament championship trophy, 1976
“There are just too many to display. We have a whole room where there’s just trophies,” Barbara said.
Charlie said he still plays a little golf. Shoots in the 70s. He even has a golf trophy from the ocean, in the early 1970s.
“We went on a cruise, and they had a recreation department on the ship and a thing that, when you hit a golf ball, it measures how far you hit it out in the water,” Barbara said. “He hit it farther than anyone.”
How far? “Hit it 270 yards,” said Charlie, who also has recorded a hole-in-one, on a par-3 at Green Meadows Golf Club in Mount Holly.
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Pete DeMao, 76, is a regular at Tuckaseegee on Wednesdays. He’s been shooting hoops with Charlie Drumm for 12 years, and was on the National Senior Games team with him in 2003 in Hampton Roads, Va. There were about 35 basketball teams competing that year, he said.
“We won six in a row, and lost by two points to Pennsylvania, which was the silver medallist,” DeMao said.
On a recent Wednesday, DeMao watched from the side as Drumm grabbed a rebound, saving the ball from going out of bounds and passed to a teammate, who sank a three-pointer.
“Charlie, he’s a great guy, playing out here at 80 years old. He’s everybody’s objective,” DeMao said. “But he doesn’t have the record yet. Had two guys who played at 82.
But Charlie, he’ll pass that and be here at 83.”
Shane Trull
When Shane Trull was in fourth grade, his friend Robert Seward handed him a basketball. Robert’s house had a goal, when most other kids’ didn’t. “And he had a paved driveway,” Trull said, “when everyone else had dirt. We’d play 2-on-1, and he was just a lot better than everybody else, and that certainly drove me to be better than him.
“We played every day after school, and he taught me how to shoot, and everything else.”
The lessons worked.
Trull, 43, of Mount Holly, is a married father of three, but he still holds the East Gaston High School record for most points scored in a career (1,685). And he’s eighth on Belmont Abbey’s all-time scoring list with 1,743 points (1988-92), even though he essentially played out of position as a senior.
“It’s pretty amazing that the record’s stood (at East Gaston) since 1988, because I only had three years of playing. We could only play in 10th, 11th and 12th grade, and kids today get four years,” he said. “I try to go back to watch a couple of times a year. My jersey’s retired, so my kids enjoy seeing it there.”
Trull is the son of Ty and Sandra Trull, who still live off Highway 27 in Mount Holly, in the same home as when Shane was born. “My mom was a stay-at-home mom, and she took me a lot of places and sacrificed a lot, for me to follow my dreams,” he said. “I appreciate that. I still talk to my parents every day. We’re close.”
Trull’s first basketball challenge came at Mount Holly Junior High, when there were 12 boys on the roster but only 10 uniforms. “The other two guys had to wear girl uniforms,” he said, “and I told myself I’d never be in that predicament.”
At East Gaston, playing shooting guard and small forward, Trull set the record of most points in a season, with 750, and averaged 30 points per game as a senior. His highest game was 48 points against South Point in 1987 – in three quarters. “They played a box-and-one on me and it didn’t work,” he said. “That was a big rivalry.”
He has a story or two about his late coach, Jim Turpin, whom he greatly admired.
His 10th-grade season, East Gaston was playing a tournament at Cherryville. “A guy jumped on me and broke my tooth, and it came out,” he said. “I went over to the side and handed it to Jim and said, ‘Hold this; I might need it later.’ And kept on playing.”
When Trull played his last game, he said, Turpin hugged him at the end. “He said ‘thank you.’ He hugged me and just said ‘thank you,’” Trull said. “And after that, he never coached again.”
Interest came from Tennessee, Wake Forest, UNCC and Xavier, as well as Belmont Abbey.
Trull averaged about 16 points as a freshman under coach Kevin Eastman, now a Boston Celtics assistant, and 20 as a sophomore and junior, before switching to center as a senior. He scored 597 points in 1989-90, and 481 in 1990-91, including 36 points at Kennesaw State that November, and, following Eastman, played for Rick Scruggs (1989-91) and Joe Gallagher (1991-92, and later with the Philadelphia 76ers).“I was playing the 5-spot most of the time (as a senior), going up against guys about 6-10. But I don’t’ regret going to Abbey. It’s a great school, and I got a great education,” said Trull, who’s 6-7. “The stands were always full. I had grown up going to all their camps and stuff, and I was a homebody so I had the best of both worlds. I was on a full ride, but I was 10 minutes from the house.”
He had a chance to play pro ball overseas, but Trull went to work for Parkdale Mills in 1993 – and still works for them, in sales. He and his wife, Connie, have twin 13-year-old daughters, Laura and Lexi, who play basketball, softball and volleyball, and a son Drake, 9, who Trull said is “just getting into sports. We’re a sports family.” He coaches them, some.
“I think they’re more excited than I am about the Hall of Fame,” he said. “Sports teaches you a lot about life in general. It was a lot of dedication, and a lot of hard work.”
Doug Smith
When a coach can lead his team into an arena, and the other schools’ competitors become silent and stare in awe as the team walks by, the program must be successful.
“And that’s what they’d do,” said former East Gaston wrestling coach Doug Smith. “We’d walk into a locker room, and there would be 18 other teams there, and they’d just stop… and part… in silence as we walked by. Then they’d whisper, like, ‘There they are…’”
Smith saw it during the 13 seasons he coached East Gaston, from 1978 to 1991. He molded his athletes to be the best they could be. Come tournament time, as one newspaper columnist wrote, “He’d turn them lose to terrorize the rest of the state.”
“There are probably 30 or 40 tournaments we won all through there (from 1978 to’91). We had a lot of kids that did a real good job for us,” Smith said.
As members of the SouthWestern 3A Conference from 1978-79 through 1984-85, the Warriors won five conference titles and were co-champions twice. In 1980-81, they were 10-2 overall and 7-0 in the conference, and were undefeated – at 14-0 overall – in 1981-82.
East Gaston joined the Tri-County 4A Conference in 1985-86 and was co-champion its first year. The team won the conference title every year afterward, until joining the MEGA 7 4A in 1993-94.
Smith’s teams went undefeated in conference matches in ’87, ’88 and ’91, and went 20-0 overall in 1990-91.
“The best memories from those years are probably our state championship teams, but there were some really great years for the wrestling program,” Smith said. “We had great people; great individuals.”
Two of them, Eric Helms and Shad Ellis, recorded more than 100 wins.
Smith, 57, is from the Riverbend area of Mount Holly, a neighborhood that produced Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame members Bruce and Wayne Bolick (2011, baseball, football) and Larry Hartsell (2012, baseball, football). He played football for two years at Mount Holly High School, and was defensive player of the year as a sophomore, before changing sports at East Gaston, which opened in 1972. “Those of us who are small, we just migrated toward wrestling,” he said.
Steve Williams coached the Warriors’ first team, in 1973, and won two conference titles before leaving in 1976.
Wrestling was a developing sport at the time. The team practiced on folding panel mats. There were only about six other teams in the conference. Smith competed one year in, he said, at 155 pounds in maybe 11 matches. “The sport was still growing, to be honest with you,” he said.
He wrestled intramurals in college – he received his bachelor’s in education from Western Carolina in 1978 and has a degree in physical education and certification in social studies from UNC-Charlotte.
In the fall of 1978, he took his talents back to East Gaston, to coach – and teach social studies.
His greatest influence, he said, was his former football coach at Mount Holly High, the late Delmer Wiles.
“He set me in motion quite a bit, with the things he did, as far as teaching me what you need to do to excel,” Smith said.
Smith left coaching in 1991, and retired from teaching in 1998. He owns Awards Express, in the Shuffletown area of Charlotte, and has a dozen employees working to make trophies, plaques, t-shirts and other items for sports teams. An assistant coach, Kirk Wells, had a business and Smith joined in as a hobby, “And it blossomed from there,” he said.
He and his wife, Toni, have two boys, ages 11 and 5, and a girl, 7. He coaches the five-year-old in t-ball.
But in his office, behind all the business agendas and work essentials, is a pile of clippings from newspapers, some yellowed with age. He has a copy of the Flaming Arrow, the East Gaston student paper, from April 1990. The whole front page is wrestling, the state championship matches from that February at the Greensboro Coliseum.
“I’ve been to every Hall of Fame banquet except maybe one or two over the years,” Smith said. “I’m very honored now to be a part of it.”
1940’s MHHS Hawkettes basketball
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 centerline.
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 camaraderie 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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
1960’s MHHS Hawkettes Basketball
Joe Spears had a theory about girls high school basketball. The Mount Holly High School coach didn’t compromise his training regimen just because the 20 or so athletes who practiced every afternoon happened to be female.
“I treat ‘em like boys,” he said. “We built pride in playing and being on the team. They worked hard to get on the team, and they worked hard to get in the ballgame. So I just treated ‘em like ballplayers. If you treat ‘em like girls, they’d play like girls.”
Spears guided the 1966-67 and 1967-68 Hawkettes to a combined 35-7 record and back-to-back Little Seven Conference regular-season titles. The 1967 team was the school’s first unbeaten team in league play. For that, those two teams’ members join Spears – a 2010 inductee – in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame.
“That group, they built up a pride in winning, and the younger girls would look to the older ones and pick up on it and carry it on,” said Spears, who also taught 8th grade. “I won their respect, I think. They knew I’d look after them.”
The girls remember his work ethic, but also his kindness, even though he ran his girls through the same drills as his boys teams. He made them stronger; made them faster.
“I’m telling you, we ran. I remember a lot of running,” said Ronda Martin Barker, who played for Spears four years before graduating in 1968 as team MVP. “He kept us in shape, but I think it was because he was so committed. He would make you run the bleachers until you felt you would fall over, but he was a wonderful coach.”
These are some of the girls who shared the experience:
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Ronda Barker, a 5-foot-4 rover/point guard, started on the varsity as a freshman, in the era when girls still played six-on-six, with only two players allowed to go full court, across the center line. Spears had a deep bench, so when Barker found herself in a game once against Dallas, it didn’t seem unusual. The team was on a mission to avenge a previous loss, Barker said, and she brought the ball down court and looked to the sidelines for advice. “He just shrugged his shoulders,” she said, “and I thought, if the guards don’t come out, I’m supposed to shoot.” She said she remembers being at half-court, the pressure on, and launched the ball. It went in.
“I don’t think that was what I was supposed to do,” she said. “He about fell over.”Barker, 63, attended Gaston College, then married Benny Barker in 1973 and had three sons and a daughter. The children all were high school athletes, and her daughter also became a cheerleader for the Charlotte Hornets and Bobcats.
Barker said her years with high school basketball taught her more than how to play a game. “Coach Spears expected everybody to be the best they could be. Everyone loved him dearly,” she said. “He would teach morals, too. It was so much more than basketball.
“In my life, he is one of the finest examples of a man, in every aspect of his life, that I have ever known.”
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Jan Williams McKellar, 64, practiced with the varsity as an 8th-grader, then played four years before graduating in 1967. “Basketball was my love,” she said. “I grew up playing outside – back when children played outside, instead of on computers – and I played in the neighborhood, with the boys, so I didn’t get under the goal much. I learned to shoot from the outside.”
McKellar, a 5-foot-4 ½ rover/forward, was voted Most Athletic in her senior class.
“Coach Spears was wonderful, but he was tough. After practice, we had to run up and down the bleachers. I didn’t appreciate it then, but what great shape we were in,” she said. “Sometimes, I still dream about playing.”
McKellar went to Columbia College (“It was a girls’ school. They didn’t even have a gym.”) then became a stewardess for Delta Airlines, based in New Orleans, before moving to Columbia. She worked as a lobbyist for the South Carolina Medical Association and married Henry McKellar, an attorney and former circuit judge. They have a daughter, who lives in Florida.
She has a stack of pictures from her Hawkettes days, and newspaper clippings from Little Seven Conference games.
And she found that her connections to those times can be closer than expected.
Once at a work conference, with South Carolina Adjutant General Stan Spears, she mentioned she had played high school ball in Mount Holly, for a guy named Joe Spears.
“He called him up,” she said. “It was his brother.”*
Lynne Williams Jessen, 62, Jan McKellar’s sister, played for Mount Holly from 1966 to 1969. She remembers the toughness of Spears, but also the camaraderie of the girls and the fun they had.
“Oh, my gosh, it was fun. He was a great coach, and there were a lot of rivalries we played, but we were just kids…we had so much school spirit,” she said. “Coach Spears made it fun. He’d get after you, but if he got after you it just meant he cared about you. He didn’t treat us like a bunch of little sissy girls, not at all.”
Jessen, who works at a boutique in Mount Holly, was a back-up rover behind Ronda Martin, then played first string her last two years. What Spears may not have known is that Jessen combined being an athlete with dating the man who is, literally, the love of her life.
She and Richard Jessen “started talking” in fifth grade. They went steady in seventh grade and got married right out of college (he was a walk-on basketball player at Gardner-Webb; she attended Central Piedmont Community College). They had three children and have been married 41 years.
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Starr Dowdle McCorkle, 62, a 5-foot-7 ½ forward who graduated in 1968, said her fondest memories of those times was the fun, the sisterhood of the girls. “It was just a fun time, getting on the bus and riding to the games,” she said, “and everyone got along, it didn’t matter if you were a 10th or 11th or 12th-grader or one of the younger ones.”
She remembers one particular game at Dallas, when the Dallas team hung a paper banner on the gym wall proclaiming “We’re No. 1.” Mount Holly won the game, and the Hawkettes side started tearing the paper off the wall. “You could just hear the noise, from the people at Dallas. I think they had to escort the ballplayers to the bus,” she said. “What got me was that we were usually the calmest ones, but that game they had to escort us out.”
It also was against Dallas that McCorkle had her career high – 10 points.
After high school, she attended Gaston College for two years and took an office job in Gastonia. She and Gary McCorkle married in 1970 and had two sons – Steven and Casey – who, like them, live in Denver. They have three grandchildren.
“Basketball was about the only sport girls had to play back then,” she said. “I remember Coach Spears worked us hard, but he was a good coach. We had some good times.”
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Janet Rick Pate, a 5-foot-6 guard, was one of the younger ones. She graduated in 1969 and was team captain her senior year. She still can name most of the girls on the team, and the fun they had. But she also remembers the pranks – mostly at games with Dallas.
“They and Cramerton were the toughest teams,” said Pate, who turns 62 in August.
After the girls games, the team would return to the locker room to change, then go back to the gym to watch the boys play. “Playing Dallas, we’d beat them, and they’d go down and put our uniforms in the toilet,” she said. “Sometimes, we’d have to walk out (after the games) with protection (from security guards) because we beat them all the time. Those were the good ol’ days.
“We’d always have fun on the bus rides, and we always said a prayer before we played. We played as a team and helped each other, whether we won or lost.”
She said Spears was tough, but it was worth it.
“He had a stick, and he’d tell us, ‘You have to jump this high,’ and he made sure we hit our foul shots. And if we missed, we’d better grab that ball,” she said.
Pate went to nursing school after graduation, married, and lived several years near Myrtle Beach, where she and her husband had a real estate company. She lives in Belmont now, and takes care of her mom. She has one son, and a grandson.
“The basketball years, those were good years. We had a lot of fun,” she said. “We all looked after each other. It was a close-knit family.”
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Spears, 82, and his wife Marie, have two children and four grandchildren. He still follows basketball – he likes Duke, and Mike Krzyzewski.
“I had a philosophy,” Spears said, “that if the 9th-graders and the junior varsity worked hard, they could get on the team. I’d dress out 18 every game. Once they got to playing, they just had a certain spirit about them. There were a lot of good things about it.
“Do I miss it? Yes, I do. But I enjoyed it, though. That’s why I taught school. I love kids.”
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Members of the 1966-67 and 1967-68 teams (courtesy of Ronda Barker):
1966-67: Karen Estridge, Jan Williams, Debbie Haverty, Nancy Sexton, Etta Helton, Jo Ann Cochran, Dianne Moore, Ronda Martin, Barbara Moore, Rachel Helms, Wanda Adams, Starr Dowdle, Phyllis Terry, Teresa Huitt, Debbie Priest, Carol Hart, Debbie Baker, Lynne Williams.
1967-68: Lynne Williams, Starr Dowdle, Dianne Moore, Barbara Moore, Ronda Martin, Wanda Adams, Teresa Huitt, Rachel Helms, Phyllis Terry, Debbie Shehan, Nancy Fuller, Judy Moore, Nancy Duckworth, Mary Cox, Marilyn Helton, Debbie Pruitt, Debbie Baker, Carol Hart, Etta Helton, Debbie Grier, Debra Little, Janet Rick, Carolyn Helms.
2012 Community Spirit Award Sarah Nixon
If the mother ever did sleep, her youngest daughter didn’t see it. There always was too much for Sarah Nixon to do, with her newspaper writing and volunteer work, raising four children and hand-sewing their clothes.
“She would go to sleep after she put us to bed, and she would get up before we got up,” Murray Nixon, 55, said. “My mother was never sick, never had a headache. You never saw her on the couch dozing during the day. She was in the kitchen a lot, and always cooked from scratch for us.”
Sarah Nixon, 90, spent a lifetime doing for others. Her resume lists nearly five decades of composing newspaper stories about people and events that shaped Mount Holly, and nearly seven decades of volunteer service to help shape the world.
She still belongs to two circles at her church, drives her own car, and can repair anything that will succumb to a hammer and Phillips head screwdriver. She lives in the same home she and her husband, Roy, built 60 years ago, just over the county line from Stanley.
“When I look back, my mom was very frugal. She could stretch a dime,” Murray Nixon said. “She gave awards to the high school, sent lunches to people at my dad’s office who couldn’t afford it … she just did it. She didn’t want attention or glory; she just felt it was her gift that the Lord put her here to do. She is a very loving friend and mother.”
Sarah Nixon is most known for the newspaper part, the one role in her life that caught her by surprise.
After graduating from Mount Holly High School in 1940, she found work on third shift at Stowe Thread Mill, during World War II. She married Roy Nixon in 1947, on her 24th birthday, and the couple had four children – Clifton (1950), Susan (1952), Kathy (1955) and Miriam, a.k.a. Murray (1958).
She always liked newspapers and subscribed to the old Charlotte News and Mount Holly News and read them front to back.
When Sarah Nixon was 34, a gentleman named Guy Leedy came to call.
Leedy was publisher of the Lincoln Times and Lincoln County News, and he was looking for a writer. “He had been to the old Lowe’s hardware store, and someone suggested he come talk to me. I don’t know why they told him that,” Nixon said. “Maybe because I was active in the community.”
It was 1957, and Leedy sat on Nixon’s couch and talked about community correspondence. “When he came to call that morning, he gave me a stack of paper, and he said to use all I needed and to write clearly and to print the names,” she said. “I wrote by hand. He said he had plenty of that paper. That’s how I started. I didn’t have a typewriter or anything.”
She called Mason Rodden, editor of the Mount Holly News, and asked him to use her stories in his paper, if she included Lucia and Riverbend news. It was the start of 44 years with the News. On Nixon’s birthday that year, 1959, she wrote her first-ever feature story – a piece on the police chief’s wife.
“If you talk to anyone about me, they’ll remember the ‘Personally Mentioned’ column, but I ended up as news editor and did the whole paper between editors. I did everything,” she said, “sports, city council, everything for years and years, until I retired about five years ago.”
Among Nixon’s accomplishments:
* Forty-four years with the Mount Holly News, as Society Editor, then Women’s Editor, and 42 years as author of the ‘Personally Mentioned’ column;
* General News reporter, covering civic organizations, clubs, schools, sports, church news, and 30 years of City Council meetings. (“It was like watching the city’s history unfold,” she said.)
* Worked four years as a writer for the Mountain Island Monitor;
* Was president of the North Carolina Press Women’s Association, which met annually at the Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill;
* Joined a Home Demonstration Club (now Extension and Community Association) in Gaston County in April 1947, starting a 64-year span of volunteer work to help women, children and families in cooperation with the North Carolina Family and Consumer Sciences Department and U.S. Department of Agriculture. She traveled as a delegate to conferences in Africa, the Netherlands, Tasmania and Australia;
* Helped organize the Mount Holly Extension and Community Association Club, which won a Mount Holly Community Service Award in 2008;
* Was editor of TarHeel Homemaker, a statewide newspaper for the Extension and Community Association, for 20 years;
* Was a 4-H leader, and involved her four children in 4-H activities. She also took her daughters to dance and piano lessons.
Nixon bought herself a manual typewriter and taught herself to use it. For her 75th birthday, her children bought her a computer.
“Momma worked from home a lot and went into the office maybe one day a week, and she would take us with her in the summers,” Murray Nixon said. “So, she was always there. Between her and my dad, when it came to us kids, they were always there.”
Roy Nixon, who died in 2002, worked for McClure Lumber Company until he retired in 1980. “They loved retirement,” Murray Nixon said. “They gardened, and mom canned and froze. And to this day, she still crochets a lot. She makes baby afghans for all the nieces and nephews.”
Her favorite part about the newspaper business, Sarah Nixon said, was doing feature stories about people, fascinating people. “That’s the main thing I enjoyed, giving a little bit of credit to the ones who are behind the winners, the ones who may have missed out on the top awards,” she said. “I think that may be why people liked what I was writing. If you’re interested in life around you, you’ll be fine.”
But if you ask Sarah Nixon about her greatest accomplishment, she doesn’t mention anything about a job, or writing, or traveling, or organizing.
“I guess my four children and my marriage are my greatest accomplishment,” she said. “If you talk about ‘smother love,’ I get it. I guess the good Lord walked with me every day of my life. I had a good, supportive husband. He never complained. We worked together. We had a lot of fun in our family. If you’re doing for others, you’ll do all right.”
