Hysterical research

The other day I was asked by a friend to find what I could about some early Lexington Senior High School football teams: specifically, the championship teams of 1933, 1934 and 1939. Apparently, this is for a project to honor those teams.

He was asking for a friend, a friend who works at the high school and who is actually a friend of mine in his own right. Yeah, I know. We're entering into the realm of the six degrees of Kevin Bacon here, which ultimately might find me biologically related to Abraham Lincoln (my birthday is February 12, after all) if I look too far.

But I digress.

My first friend in this story, the one who asked me if I could find anything on those teams, said his research was fruitless. Google, for once, turned up nothing and he wondered how he could go about researching this project.

Thinking out loud, I suggested he go to the library and check the microfilm machine, until I remembered we live in Covid World and the library is out of bounds right now. "Hmm. Let me look into it," I told him, more than wary of what I was getting into.

I worked as a sports writer for The Dispatch for 30 years, and I often turned to the paper's microfilm machine to research stories. Never mind that I've been retired almost 14 years and haven't touched a microfilm machine since 2006. But I'd give it a try.

So I went to the paper and I loaded the machine with the roll of film from 1933. Back in those days, The Dispatch was published only on Mondays and Thursdays, and in very small typeface. You can speed the advance of the microfilm in the machine to quickly find issues of the paper deep into the roll, but doing so can cause eye strain and headaches, so you have to be careful.

Anyway, I found the first football story of the season. There was no byline. In fact, there was no sports section. The story was on the front page of the paper, hidden among stories depicting school enrollment, the Volstead Act (I think Davidson County was dry in 1933), a scarlet fever outbreak and two men who were found dead by the railroad tracks.

The first problem I had was that the paper didn't publish first names of the players, even on first reference. A typical sentence might read, "Eanes then advanced the pigskin for 30 yards, evading a host of Spencer Railroaders."

Oh, my. Eanes who?

Stories never included season records. Or individual stats. It was horrible.

After about an hour, after checking each Monday publication for that Friday's game story, Lexington went 9-1 to win the South Piedmont Conference championship. Some of the players for coach Tom Young included quarterback Ralph Eanes (I eventually found his first name), twin brothers Hal and Frank Green, who were running backs, Lexington superstar fullback Bill Bailey, and players with last names like Johnson, Hill, Dry, Clodfelter, Myers, Bowers, Hinkle, Hedrick and Rogers.

I guess my friend, or my friend's friend (who also happens to be my friend) can check old Lexicon yearbooks for first names.

I also learned that Lexington wasn't the Yellow Jackets back then. They were the Indians. It makes sense, given Davidson County is the home of the indigenous Saponi Indian tribe. So there's that. I don't know when they became Yellow Jackets. It could be that Lexington was way ahead of the social curve toward racial sensitivity than ... nah. Never mind.

I went home, a little dizzy from the whizzing microfilm.

I remembered shortly after I arrived at The Dispatch in 1976, we published a special section heralding the big regular season-ending game between rivals Lexington and Thomasville. Both teams were undefeated. I remember doing the research for that issue. I used a microfilm machine, a clear example that my life is on an endless loop.

Anyway, I found the Lexington team records and results of every year from 1934 to 1975 and we put it in the special section. That made my current research a little easier.

The 1934 team finished 8-0-1. Bailey was a star. I wrote a story about him for the special section, and he gave me names of some teammates, including quarterback George Corn, with Ed Cross and John Myers at halfback. Leonard Craver was center, Whimpey Rogers was team captain and an end, with Allen Johnson and Oliver Briggs at the tackle slots.

The 1939 team went 11-0, and the microfilm gave me names like running back Ken Rhodes, halfback Everett "Shoe" Carlton, punter Spud Michael, center Ray Von Link, and a guy named Fat Price at guard. Fat Price was actually the venerable V.G. Price. I can't imagine any newspaper calling anybody Fat these days. It's like naming a team "Indians."

Lexington had a remarkable run, going 55-8-6 from 1933 to 1939.

There was one more thing I found. In 1939, there was something of a sports section then. The sports mast had a block in the right-hand corner stating that E.E. Witherspoon was the sports editor. A block on the left-hand side of the mast announced "The sports news, gathered here and there."

Oh, my.