As a wee lad--about the same time I was knocking on the door of puberty and pondering the magnetism engendered by the opposite sex--a small school in southern Indiana was capturing the basketball imagination of kids my age all over the state.  I, like the others, was drawn quickly to the sport and became a round ball junkie.  Thoughts about minor matters such as girls were properly put on hold, at least until the basketball season was concluded.  This season was 1949-50.

AP and UPI news articles reporting the dominance of the Winslow Eskimos over their scheduled opponents seemed to grow in length every week that the 1949-50 season wore on.  Only one loss had been registered by the end of the regular schedule, that one being to archrival and 1949 state champ Jasper, by a margin of nine points.  The previous year of 1948-49, Winslow had bounded through its entire regular season without a single defeat before Jasper knocked them out in sectional play by that same margin of nine points.

My family resided in Howard County , a good 160 miles northeast of Winslow, as the crow flies.  Nevertheless, once the 1950 tournament regional had begun and Winslow was still in it, I feigned illness and stayed home from school to listen to the afternoon and night games of this exciting single-class tournament.  The Eskimos were decidedly my favorite that year.  I planted myself firmly in front of the console radio at night in our living room, straining my ears to catch the faint play-by-play audio signals coming in from a distant Evansville transmitting tower.  I followed those Eskimos as best I could to the very end.  This time they got by Jasper in the sectional with a convincing score of 64-49.  They then advanced on through the regional and ultimately arrived at the final eight of the IHSAA tournament.  A powerful New Albany contingent, led by 6-5 Bob Clayton and 6-1 Paul Poff, finally got the better of them, 48-39.  But it had been a great season.  Once this tourney was over, for me it was back to school work and maybe even to girls.

In the Fall 2006 issue of the Indiana Basketball History Magazine, Roger Dickinson, a former executive director for the Basketball Hall of Fame at New Castle , wrote a good article about the boy’s basketball history at Winslow.  However, I really don’t think enough has been written about those Winslow Eskimos of the 1948-51 timeframe.  I’ve had difficulty finding very much in print.  Certainly little exists on microfilm at the Indiana State Library where I do most of my work.  Hoosier hysteria researchers might have been coming up essentially empty there during searches for detailed material.  They may have simply given up.  However, I was fortunate enough to recall reading another article in the 2008 summer issue of the Hall Of Fame History Magazine recounting the exploits of Dick Kinder, one of the key Winslow squad members.  That article was authored by Ken Lindsay, an 86 year old gentleman who graduated from Winslow High in 1942 and then continued on as a fervent booster of the basketball team, year after year.  Sadly, Mr. Lindsay passed away on July 23, 2010.  So I could not speak with him at the time of this writing, without the help of a medium. 

But as good luck would have it, I was able to come across one of the best formatted and organized high school & alumni websites I’ve ever seen.  It just happened to be for Winslow High School .  You can find this site easily on the internet by keying in “ Winslow Indiana High School ” on Google or any other popular search engine.  When you click the mouse to open it up, be sure to have your computer speakers turned on.  You’ll be greeted on the Home Page with the soft notes and flowing melody from the song “You Light Up My Life”.  That’s for the alums, I assume.  Next, by clicking on the “Eskimos” block you’ll hear the faster-paced and bouncy music of the school’s fight song.  And I’d guess that’s for the former athletes.  All the while, you can spot a cute old-timer in the upper right hand corner pounding away in staccato rhythm on his keyboard to all the music.  A trip to this website is really worth your while.  The Founder and Webmaster is John Dedman who, like Ken Lindsay, graduated from Winslow, although in 1954, twelve years later than Ken (1942).  John is closely connected with the early 1950s basketball teams, having served as the student manager, under the guiding eye of former coach Kern McGlothlin.  John and I have dialoged several times by e-mail.  Therefore, much of the material I’m using in this article is derived either from those discussions or from the website itself.  It is supplemented by the few articles I was able to find on microfilm originally printed by mid-century newspaper publishers in and around Pike County .

Winslow High School had exceptional basketball teams on a regular basis for many years prior to 1948.  The school was located in a hotbed of basketball activity that was continually steaming up the Pike, Dubois, Daviess, and Gibson County areas during the winter months.  Even the very tiny schools therein could field teams that would invariably give the larger schools a run for their money, come tournament time.  But the competition among Winslow, Jasper, Huntingburg, Princeton, and Washington was probably the fiercest of all.  In the 1940s and 50s one or more of those schools was usually slugging it out for high honors in the statewide AP polls, during regular season play.  Jasper, coached by Cabby O’Neill, and Washington, under Marion Crawley, even won state championships in the 40s as you undoubtedly know.

But in the early fall of 1948, after the southern tree leaves had turned to those beautiful shades of yellow, crimson, and light green that always adorned the arrival of a new basketball season, excitement began to mount in the community of Winslow.  The team’s 1947-48 season had been only mildly successful in the W-L column, ending with a 12-10 record.  However, most of the team members were youthful and scrawny underclassmen that had nevertheless shown phenomenal promise for the future.  Their chief attribute seemed to be some uncanny eyes for accuracy in FG shooting.  But size and heft were also budding, and self-confidence had never been in short supply.  Richard Farley, the team’s center, had grown overnight into a robust 6-4 monopolist of backboard retrieving and could shoot the eyes out of the basket as well.  Dick Kinder, about 5-9 at this juncture, had become one of the most accurate long range shooters that newly-appointed coach Kern McGlothlin had seen in his fifteen years of coaching experience.  And he’d been blessed with a good many of them on former teams, notably during an earlier four-year stint at Winslow.

McGlothlin’s heralded re-arrival was an additional cause for local jubilation since he was already an established icon.  He had posted an overall run of 77 wins against only 16 losses during those earlier years at the helm in 1941-44.  Three of those seasons exceeded 20 wins each.  He had coached at various other high schools since 1935 too, with mild success, including Stendal, Cynthiana, Bloomfield, and Greencastle. 

By February 1949, it became clear that the Eskimos had a good chance to finish the regular season with an unblemished record.  And they did, by winning 23 straight games!  Now, they seemed poised to be a distinct threat in the single class state tournament, if only they could get past Jasper in the sectional.  But alas, that didn’t happen, as the Eskimos were scratched up thoroughly by the Wildcats in the final round, 48-39.  OK, but as youth invariably dictates, there is always the next year.

And, yes, as one would routinely expect, next year finally did arrive, albeit at a considerably slower pace than many boosters would have liked.  Once again, the whole community was aflame in the fall of 1949 with anticipation of yet another great season.  The Jasper Wildcats were bound to have their fur trimmed this year, with nearly all those returning Eskimo boys handling the clippers!  The main graduation loss was Warren Hurt, a three year veteran guard, who would definitely be missed.  But Farley and Kinder, along with other stalwarts like Gene Northerner, Sammy Nelson, Richard Wood, and Gary Alley, were extremely accurate shooters and accomplished ball handlers by now.  Farley, Alley, and Wood handled most of rebounding chores.  All the boys were physically stronger by one year, and all were returning.  Wow!   Did things ever look good for the new season at hand.

Once the 1949-50 season opened, the Eskimos left no doubt in anyone’s mind that they were a team to be reckoned with.  They crushed each of their first six scheduled opponents successively, with an average win margin of 32.3 points per game, while ringing up a scoring average of 73 ppg in the process.  This team was chewing up its opponents on the hardwood like a thrashing machine operating in a wheatfield.

Their seventh foe, Silver Creek, was a really rough customer.  The Creekers had an outstanding basketball program those years and though it was a relatively small high school (roughly 280 enrolled), it was normally capable of defeating Ohio River area schools and others that were much larger within a 100 mile radius of Clark County .  Their team, up until this season, had piled up eleven straight winning campaigns that dated back to 1938.  The school’s schedule was always loaded with big-time competition.  This year it included little Winslow, with a somewhat equal enrollment of about 300.  The Creekers, under veteran coach Don Saylor, decided to slow down the pace (a.k.a. semi-stall) in order to prevent the Eskimos from employing its usual powerhouse scoring game.  The result was still a win for the Eskimos, 38-32, but that was 35 points under its normal scoring average.  This game was probably a good learning experience for McGlothlin’s team.

The very next scheduled and pre-Christmas game, on Friday, December 21, was with the dreaded Jasper Wildcats at Jasper’s home arena.  Like Winslow, Jasper was undefeated up to this time and, as earlier stated, had been crowned state champ in 1949.  At the conclusion of the game, the unusually cold Eskimos were sent back home with frozen tears by Cabby O’Neill’s squad, 47-38.  The Cats remained undefeated.  For the Eskimos, it was the first and only loss they would suffer for the rest of the regular campaign.  They subsequently rang up a dozen straight wins, often by 20 points or more and finished the regular schedule with a 20-1 record going into the sectional.  During that streak they had dispatched such perennially strong teams as Evansville Central, Bosse, Memorial, and Washington Catholic, just to name a few.

As the sectional neared, coach McGlothlin really had his team humming.  The first few tournament games bore that out as they readily disposed of the Ireland Spuds and the Huntingburg Hunters.  In the final game of the sectional, they were up against—well, guess who?  The Wildcats of Jasper were once again on the prowl and preparing for another state championship.  For this game, Cabby O’Neill figured his team could probably run with the Eskimos as they had season after season, game after game, so he decided to use his regular game plan which had always worked so well.  That turned out to be a mistake of gigantic proportions.  The Eskimos were off like a freight train from the opening tip-off and scored an astounding victory, 69-47.  It might have been even worse if coach McGlothlin had not chosen to go to his bench to finish up.  But he knew what he was doing.  Playing time might pay off later from using able substitutes like Jack Bechtel, Richard Wood, Bob Norrington, Richard McQueen, and Grayson Richardson.

Directly after that sectional win over Jasper, things got a bit easier for the Eskimos.  Their regional victories surprised no one as Loogootee was blown away 68-52, and then Vincennes fell 74-63.  In the afternoon game of the semi-finals Winslow slaughtered a very strong Evansville Bosse five by the score of 75-55.  But by now we’ve come full circle to the beginning of my story.  Powerful New Albany , also with just a single loss all season, finally disposed of the fatally fatigued Eskimos that night while on their way to the final four, 52-36.  But it had been quite a run.

The Kern McGlothlin era did not end in 1950.  Those polished substitutes he used in 1950 came back in 1951, along with regulars Kinder, Alley, and Wood, to score 23 wins against only 3 losses.  That team was supported by newcomers Dale Northerner, Don Nelson, Lou Beck, Bill Morris, Gene Goodwin, and a few other promising performers.  Once more, they took out Jasper in the sectional and reached the semi-finals, only to be flattened again by New Albany .  But this time the score was much closer, ending at 55-53.  All totaled, from 1948 through 1951, the Eskimos W-L record stood at 70 wins against only 6 losses.  McGlothlin’s teams continued on through 1956, piling up other impressive season records.  In 1954, they had powered their way into the semi-finals for a third time under his tutelage.

This has been a somewhat lengthy, yet in a different way too brief, account of the exploits of one very fine small school basketball team in the early 1950s called the Winslow Eskimos.

As an epilog, I was advised that most of those talented Winslow ballplayers from the early 50s are now deceased.  Dick Farley, one of the standouts and a shining star later with Indiana University’s 1953 NCAA champs and then afterwards an NBA player for four years, died from cancer in 1969 at Fort Wayne at the far too tender age of 37.  We wish all of those fellows could still be alive today to personally recount for us their fabulous on-court accomplishments.  THE END

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