Scottie

Last night as I was watching Game 6 of the World Series and rooting on my favorite team, The St. Louis Cardinals, I couldn't help but think of my maternal grandfather, Scottie.  He was a serious Cardinals fan.  He was an all-around sports fan really.  He began his career after his military service as a high school teacher and coach, went on to become a superintendent, and in his retirement, a crop-insurance adjuster.  I want to tell you a little bit about my grandpa, Scottie, and his earlier years.  These are just a few of my favorite stories told to me, of course, and I may not have all the facts and details exactly right but here goes.

The stories that I love to hear about are his early days when he and grandma and their children (my mom and my aunts) were living in southern Illinois.   He was a high school teacher and basketball coach for a tiny little town by the name of Tamms.  This was down south and at a time when there were still problems with race and segregation.  The high school burnt sometime around 1953 and to conduct basketball practice, my grandpa and his Tamms Eagles had to move these temporary classrooms off the gym floor...each and every day...and then return the temporary classrooms back onto the gym floor. 

That alone takes quite a commitment and dedication.  I have no idea what all these temporary classrooms consisted of, but I'm assuming at the least, they had temporary walls, a teacher's desk and student desks, not to mention classroom supplies which had to be around somewhere.  So for two to three months during at least one basketball season, this is how the coach and his team began and ended each practice.  Could be considered a warm-up and cool-down perhaps, but what a pain in the rear.

The real kicker to this is that because my grandpa allowed black boys to play on his team, no one would schedule games with their team.  And if my memory is correct, the year that they did all this moving and rearranging for practices, there were either no regularly scheduled basketball games or very few games for them to play in.  My grandpa persisted and continued to hold practices, continued to rearrange the gym each day...and the team kept showing up...knowing no one would want to play them and they probably wouldn't have any, or many, games.

The few games they got to play, and I can't remember if it was that same year or the year after, if the game was away and the team had to stop and eat, the restaurants would not allow the black players to come in with the rest of the team.  They were told they had to eat outside or on the bus...so my grandpa required everyone to stay on the bus with the team and eat together as a team.

I don't know if they ever won any major awards, but they did have some regional and sectional wins and fairly decent records during my grandpa's tenure there.  I can only assume that some of the boys on my grandpa's team learned a few life lessons from him and hopefully never forgot about Coach Lynch.  One of my grandpa's former players, Charlie "Chico" Vaughn, played basketball for SIU at Carbondale and went on to play professional basketball for the St. Louis Hawks and the Detroit Pistons for five seasons before joining the ABA.  He was, and I think still is, the highest scorer in Illinois Basketball History. 

When my grandpa died in 2005, he was to be buried down south with my grandma in a tiny little town they grew up around, Ullin, Illinois, in a cemetery that was, and still is to some extent, segregated by a tree.  It was mostly the immediate family who made the trip down for the burial so there weren't a lot of people there.  Just after the ceremony began, I was honored to see a very tall, thin, black man walk from a car and join us as we gathered around my grandparent's plot...it was Chico Vaughn.

My grandpa was often a difficult man to please.  He didn't like us kids making a lot of noise and wasn't the cuddly type either, but I loved and respected him a great deal.  He taught me about making wise financial decisions and definitely about keeping track of spending habits.  Towards the end of his life when he and grandma were brought back to live in Martinsville is when I really started to get to know him best.  I was older and wiser and so was he;)  I wish I had heard these stories from him instead of from others, but often times that's just how it goes, isn't it?