Red Oak Basketball, the Nash-Yadkin Connection
I was Googling around the Internet the other day with the search terms of Jay Martin and Boonville. I wanted to see if anything newsworthy might have transpired related to my cousin Jay, who, like me, was born in 1943 and his home town. Boonville is a town about the size of Spring Hope in Yadkin County, which is one county west of Forsyth County where Winston-Salem is located. My parents are both from the smaller Hamptonville community, which is a little south of Boonville in the southwest corner of the county. Jay’s father Albert, a couple of years older than my father, Joseph, was the long-time principal of Boonville School. He had also been instrumental in getting my father his job as principal at Red Oak. Working as a tobacco hail insurance adjustor in the summer, he was sent to the farm of Theodore Faulkner. In conversation, they discovered a mutual interest in sports. Mr. Faulkner asked Albert if he would be interested in the vacant principal’s position at Red Oak. He said that he was happy at Boonville, but his younger brother was available, having given up his principal’s position at Lansing, NC, upon receiving his draft notice. The maximum draft age for fathers had since been lowered and the Lansing principal’s vacancy had been filled. So in 1944 as a one-year-old I had found myself in Red Oak.
Just about the first thing that the miracle of Google turned up was an excerpt from a book written a few years ago by Fred C. Hobson, the Lineberger Professor of Humanities at the University of North Carolina. It is entitled Off the Rim: Basketball and Other Religions in a Carolina Childhood.
In the excerpt, Hobson describes the defeat of his Yadkinville team by Boonville in their senior year, with Jay and he the star players on their respective teams. In the excerpt, he refers to Jay as his “old Dixie Classic companion.” He also talks about losing to another county rival, Jonesville, even though they had lost Howard Pardue to graduation, their star player from the previous year.
The references brought back a flood of memories. The Jonesville team with Pardue that Hobson speaks of is the one that we at Red Oak upset by one point in the semifinals of the A-classification state tournament in High Point my junior year. We lost to the undefeated defending state champions Beaufort the next night in the finals. The Boonville team led by cousin Jay lost to Beaufort in the finals in Durham the next year; we were eliminated by Beaufort in the semifinals the previous night.
But the stimulated memories go farther back. Jay wasn’t Hobson’s only old Dixie Classic companion. In the heyday of that great post-Christmas basketball tournament in the 1950s, my older brother Joseph, Jr. and I were companions as well for several years. Freddy’s (everyone called him by that name then) father, Fred, Sr., was superintendent of Yadkin County schools and a UNC graduate. Jay’s father and mine (and their three older brothers) were Wake Forest grads, and they were all extreme partisans for their respective colleges, as were their sons. In spite of their conflicting allegiances, to save on expense the Hobsons and the Martins would share a car when they drove down from Yadkin County for the tournament. Between the afternoon games and the night games, these male members of the three families would always eat supper together at the S & W cafeteria on Fayetteville Street. After the evening games concluded, Albert and Jay would come to Red Oak to spend the night with us while the Hobsons stayed at a hotel in Raleigh.
Just a few years ago I had discovered that Freddy had become an English professor at his cherished Carolina when I ran across an H.L. Mencken book that he had edited. He is a Mencken scholar and I am a big Mencken fan. Upon that discovery, I had emailed him and called his attention to an article I had written about the Gettysburg Address entitled “Mencken and More on Lincoln’s Speech.” I did not know—Jay had never told me—that Freddy had become a pretty good basketball player himself nor did I know that he had written a book about it.
I took this latest occasion to email him again. From just having read the book excerpt, I told him that he might have made his team’s defeats by Jonesville and Boonville not look all that bad if he had mentioned that Jonesville had made it to the semifinals in the extremely competitive A division his junior year and Boonville had gone to the finals his senior year. And by the way, I told him, it was us, little Red Oak, that had eliminated Jonesville and it was Red Oak again the next year that Beaufort had beaten before they beat Boonville for their third straight state championship.
Just as it was news to me that Freddy had blossomed into a star basketball player, it was news to him what the Red Oak team that I played on had done. He was also duly impressed with what I told him in a follow-up email, that is, that we had compiled a record of 61-4 over our last two years, never losing on another team’s home court. As it happened, the only three teams to beat us had names that started with “B” and wore green. They were Bailey at Red Oak my junior year, Bunn at Red Oak my senior year, and the two Beaufort defeats in the tournament.
In the meantime, I did what I should have done before I emailed Hobson in the first place. I got his book and read it. I found out that he did, indeed, mention Boonville and cousin Jay’s state tournament run though he had not mentioned Jonesville’s state tournament success. He did say that Jonesville’s star, Howard Pardue, the guy that our Floyd Smith held to 15 points, went on to become a member of Virginia Tech’s sports hall of fame. I also learned of a number of rather amazing parallels between Hobson’s and my years between ages 11 and 20, which I encapsulated in a follow-up email:
Now I have a quiz for you. Who is this person?
He regularly went to the cigarette smoke enveloped William Neal Reynolds Coliseum to see the Dixie Classic in the company of Jay Martin.
He attended Bones McKinney's basketball camp in Buies Creek, NC, in the summer of 1959 where Ray Respess of Pantego, NC, was the star, and he got his first look at the young Pete Maravich.
He was the first person in the history of his school who could dunk a basketball.
He did not develop the ability to dunk until his senior year, and by the latter part of the season could dunk regularly with two hands.
He tried out for the track team his freshman year in college and on his initial series of jumps made it up to 5' 8", but never made it any higher and also tried broad jumping but was handicapped by not being able to run fast enough, achieving a personal best of only 18' 11".
He worked in a pea cannery in Washington state the summers after his freshman and sophomore years in college.
He read Tom Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel that first summer in Walla Walla.
Yep, that was me, not you. Your two-handed dunks, as you write, were much rarer.
Check out my review of your book on Amazon.com. You will notice that I use the opportunity to get in a little subtle self-horn-tootery, something of which I am sure that you are incapable.
I also learned from the book that he had accomplished the rather daunting task of making the Carolina freshman team as a walk-on and had lasted on it longer than I had lasted on Davidson’s freshman team as a walk-on. A couple of his teammates were that basketball camp star, Ray Respess, and Beaufort’s Red Oak and Boonville slayer, Pud Hassell of Beaufort. The star of that team was the “Kangaroo Kid,” Billy Cunningham from Brooklyn. With Cunningham ineligible the second semester, they finally lost a game, which, Hobson tells us, was Hassell’s first defeat after 86 victories covering three years in high school and part of his freshman year in college.
Sharing my exchanges with Hobson with my younger brother Franklin, I was reminded by the latter that four years after Mr. Ennis had guided us to the state tournament in which Boonville also appeared, he took another team to the finals where they lost to Boonville. That sent me back to the Internet, where I found a record of North Carolina state championships. (Google 'Men's Basketball state championships won' ") Scrolling down to the last page, one can see that not only did Red Oak finish second in the state in 1965 to Boonville, but they did it again the next year, losing in the finals to Ayden. One might call these the first two years of the Tom Ennis era, when he started both as a freshman and a sophomore. Then Red Oak consolidated, becoming Northern Nash, and moving up into the AA division.
Backing up a page we see that North Surry won the AA championship the next year, 1967. What the source does not show is that Northern Nash had lost in the semifinals to the runner-up team, Erwin. The next year was the capper, both of Bill Ennis’s coaching career and son Tom’s high school playing career, when, with Tom as a senior Northern would go undefeated and blow out previously undefeated Fairmont in the final game, 71-50. Coach Ennis would have one last hurrah two years later as the coach of the now fully integrated Northern Nash, losing to West Columbus in the finals in 1970.
Surely no school of comparable size to Red Oak has ever had a run like we did over the 1960-66 period. There are 100 counties in North Carolina, and in those days before school consolidation, Nash with its eight high schools and Yadkin with its six high schools, were close to the norm. The A division was by far the largest category. As I recall, we had to win five consecutive regional tournament games to make it to the state tournament, consisting of eight teams. Over a period of seven years, Red Oak made the final four four times and played in the championship game twice.
To get some idea of the accomplishment, try typing the name of Hobson’s home school of Yadkinville into the PDF “Find” box and then the Nash County names that appear in my poem, “That’s Red Oak, I Said.” Yadkinville appears only once, having finished runner-up to Trenton in 1932. None of the Nash County schools besides Red Oak make an appearance.
It is also a remarkable achievement that two small schools like Red Oak and Boonville, with brothers as principals, would make the final four twice in a six year period and meet in the finals once.
Gary David Martin
May 30, 2012
I was Googling around the Internet the other day with the search terms of Jay Martin and Boonville. I wanted to see if anything newsworthy might have transpired related to my cousin Jay, who, like me, was born in 1943 and his home town. Boonville is a town about the size of Spring Hope in Yadkin County, which is one county west of Forsyth County where Winston-Salem is located. My parents are both from the smaller Hamptonville community, which is a little south of Boonville in the southwest corner of the county. Jay’s father Albert, a couple of years older than my father, Joseph, was the long-time principal of Boonville School. He had also been instrumental in getting my father his job as principal at Red Oak. Working as a tobacco hail insurance adjustor in the summer, he was sent to the farm of Theodore Faulkner. In conversation, they discovered a mutual interest in sports. Mr. Faulkner asked Albert if he would be interested in the vacant principal’s position at Red Oak. He said that he was happy at Boonville, but his younger brother was available, having given up his principal’s position at Lansing, NC, upon receiving his draft notice. The maximum draft age for fathers had since been lowered and the Lansing principal’s vacancy had been filled. So in 1944 as a one-year-old I had found myself in Red Oak.
Just about the first thing that the miracle of Google turned up was an excerpt from a book written a few years ago by Fred C. Hobson, the Lineberger Professor of Humanities at the University of North Carolina. It is entitled Off the Rim: Basketball and Other Religions in a Carolina Childhood.
In the excerpt, Hobson describes the defeat of his Yadkinville team by Boonville in their senior year, with Jay and he the star players on their respective teams. In the excerpt, he refers to Jay as his “old Dixie Classic companion.” He also talks about losing to another county rival, Jonesville, even though they had lost Howard Pardue to graduation, their star player from the previous year.
The references brought back a flood of memories. The Jonesville team with Pardue that Hobson speaks of is the one that we at Red Oak upset by one point in the semifinals of the A-classification state tournament in High Point my junior year. We lost to the undefeated defending state champions Beaufort the next night in the finals. The Boonville team led by cousin Jay lost to Beaufort in the finals in Durham the next year; we were eliminated by Beaufort in the semifinals the previous night.
But the stimulated memories go farther back. Jay wasn’t Hobson’s only old Dixie Classic companion. In the heyday of that great post-Christmas basketball tournament in the 1950s, my older brother Joseph, Jr. and I were companions as well for several years. Freddy’s (everyone called him by that name then) father, Fred, Sr., was superintendent of Yadkin County schools and a UNC graduate. Jay’s father and mine (and their three older brothers) were Wake Forest grads, and they were all extreme partisans for their respective colleges, as were their sons. In spite of their conflicting allegiances, to save on expense the Hobsons and the Martins would share a car when they drove down from Yadkin County for the tournament. Between the afternoon games and the night games, these male members of the three families would always eat supper together at the S & W cafeteria on Fayetteville Street. After the evening games concluded, Albert and Jay would come to Red Oak to spend the night with us while the Hobsons stayed at a hotel in Raleigh.
Just a few years ago I had discovered that Freddy had become an English professor at his cherished Carolina when I ran across an H.L. Mencken book that he had edited. He is a Mencken scholar and I am a big Mencken fan. Upon that discovery, I had emailed him and called his attention to an article I had written about the Gettysburg Address entitled “Mencken and More on Lincoln’s Speech.” I did not know—Jay had never told me—that Freddy had become a pretty good basketball player himself nor did I know that he had written a book about it.
I took this latest occasion to email him again. From just having read the book excerpt, I told him that he might have made his team’s defeats by Jonesville and Boonville not look all that bad if he had mentioned that Jonesville had made it to the semifinals in the extremely competitive A division his junior year and Boonville had gone to the finals his senior year. And by the way, I told him, it was us, little Red Oak, that had eliminated Jonesville and it was Red Oak again the next year that Beaufort had beaten before they beat Boonville for their third straight state championship.
Just as it was news to me that Freddy had blossomed into a star basketball player, it was news to him what the Red Oak team that I played on had done. He was also duly impressed with what I told him in a follow-up email, that is, that we had compiled a record of 61-4 over our last two years, never losing on another team’s home court. As it happened, the only three teams to beat us had names that started with “B” and wore green. They were Bailey at Red Oak my junior year, Bunn at Red Oak my senior year, and the two Beaufort defeats in the tournament.
In the meantime, I did what I should have done before I emailed Hobson in the first place. I got his book and read it. I found out that he did, indeed, mention Boonville and cousin Jay’s state tournament run though he had not mentioned Jonesville’s state tournament success. He did say that Jonesville’s star, Howard Pardue, the guy that our Floyd Smith held to 15 points, went on to become a member of Virginia Tech’s sports hall of fame. I also learned of a number of rather amazing parallels between Hobson’s and my years between ages 11 and 20, which I encapsulated in a follow-up email:
Now I have a quiz for you. Who is this person?
He regularly went to the cigarette smoke enveloped William Neal Reynolds Coliseum to see the Dixie Classic in the company of Jay Martin.
He attended Bones McKinney's basketball camp in Buies Creek, NC, in the summer of 1959 where Ray Respess of Pantego, NC, was the star, and he got his first look at the young Pete Maravich.
He was the first person in the history of his school who could dunk a basketball.
He did not develop the ability to dunk until his senior year, and by the latter part of the season could dunk regularly with two hands.
He tried out for the track team his freshman year in college and on his initial series of jumps made it up to 5' 8", but never made it any higher and also tried broad jumping but was handicapped by not being able to run fast enough, achieving a personal best of only 18' 11".
He worked in a pea cannery in Washington state the summers after his freshman and sophomore years in college.
He read Tom Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel that first summer in Walla Walla.
Yep, that was me, not you. Your two-handed dunks, as you write, were much rarer.
Check out my review of your book on Amazon.com. You will notice that I use the opportunity to get in a little subtle self-horn-tootery, something of which I am sure that you are incapable.
I also learned from the book that he had accomplished the rather daunting task of making the Carolina freshman team as a walk-on and had lasted on it longer than I had lasted on Davidson’s freshman team as a walk-on. A couple of his teammates were that basketball camp star, Ray Respess, and Beaufort’s Red Oak and Boonville slayer, Pud Hassell of Beaufort. The star of that team was the “Kangaroo Kid,” Billy Cunningham from Brooklyn. With Cunningham ineligible the second semester, they finally lost a game, which, Hobson tells us, was Hassell’s first defeat after 86 victories covering three years in high school and part of his freshman year in college.
Sharing my exchanges with Hobson with my younger brother Franklin, I was reminded by the latter that four years after Mr. Ennis had guided us to the state tournament in which Boonville also appeared, he took another team to the finals where they lost to Boonville. That sent me back to the Internet, where I found a record of North Carolina state championships. (Google 'Men's Basketball state championships won' ") Scrolling down to the last page, one can see that not only did Red Oak finish second in the state in 1965 to Boonville, but they did it again the next year, losing in the finals to Ayden. One might call these the first two years of the Tom Ennis era, when he started both as a freshman and a sophomore. Then Red Oak consolidated, becoming Northern Nash, and moving up into the AA division.
Backing up a page we see that North Surry won the AA championship the next year, 1967. What the source does not show is that Northern Nash had lost in the semifinals to the runner-up team, Erwin. The next year was the capper, both of Bill Ennis’s coaching career and son Tom’s high school playing career, when, with Tom as a senior Northern would go undefeated and blow out previously undefeated Fairmont in the final game, 71-50. Coach Ennis would have one last hurrah two years later as the coach of the now fully integrated Northern Nash, losing to West Columbus in the finals in 1970.
Surely no school of comparable size to Red Oak has ever had a run like we did over the 1960-66 period. There are 100 counties in North Carolina, and in those days before school consolidation, Nash with its eight high schools and Yadkin with its six high schools, were close to the norm. The A division was by far the largest category. As I recall, we had to win five consecutive regional tournament games to make it to the state tournament, consisting of eight teams. Over a period of seven years, Red Oak made the final four four times and played in the championship game twice.
To get some idea of the accomplishment, try typing the name of Hobson’s home school of Yadkinville into the PDF “Find” box and then the Nash County names that appear in my poem, “That’s Red Oak, I Said.” Yadkinville appears only once, having finished runner-up to Trenton in 1932. None of the Nash County schools besides Red Oak make an appearance.
It is also a remarkable achievement that two small schools like Red Oak and Boonville, with brothers as principals, would make the final four twice in a six year period and meet in the finals once.
Gary David Martin
May 30, 2012