The First Kingsport High Basketball Team

 

From the Dec. 29, 1957 Kingsport Times-News.

Note written on ball: KHS '17

(This is the oddest team picture I have even seen, in any sport, at any level, in any era.)

 

 "Some of the ‘old timers’ tell us that there were baseball and basketball teams in existence at the time Kingsport was chartered (1917).” – Kingsport Times News, Dec. 29, 1957.

 It was a cold winter’s night in January 2007 when Bruce Haney and I motored to Blountville in hopes of being in attendance when Dobyns-Bennett won its historic 2,000th basketball game. No high school in America had yet won that many games. D-B was victorious over Sullivan Central and history was made.

If Bruce and I had known, we wouldn’t have had to make the drive. D-B had actually won its 2,000th game two weeks earlier. But we didn’t know that. In fact nobody knew that…until today.

In my pandemic spare time I have been digging around on the newspaper archive website, newspapers.com. Since last I tried to find a few early victories for D-B, from the era before the school kept records, I was thwarted by the fact that the Kingsport Times was a weekly in those early years and sports coverage of Kingsport High was spotty at best.

But in the last few months newspapers.com has added archives of the Johnson City Press, the Johnson City Staff, the Bristol Herald Courier, the Greeneville Sun and other area papers and I have been able to piece together a number of games and scores from the 1917-1918 season and even one from 1916.

I believe Kingsport High boys should be credited with three more wins and three more losses.

 

The first mention I can find of a Kingsport High basketball game comes from the Nov. 30, 1916 edition of the Johnson City Staff: “Thanksgiving game to be played between boys of Kingsport High and boys of Fall Branch at Kingsport.” There is no follow-up story so we don’t know who won or even if the game was played.

The next reference is three months later in the Feb. 22, 1917 Bristol Herald Courier: “The B.M.I. basketball team played Kingsport high school on the latter’s court Thursday and won by a score of 22 to 4.”

So the first “recorded” game for Kingsport High was a loss, a bad loss.

The area newspapers are silent about Kingsport High’s basketball team for almost nine months.  

The Bristol Herald Courier reported on Dec. 9, 1917 that Kingsport had defeated Bluff City at Bluff City 12-4. “The game was played in two 20-minute halves with a 10-minute intermission. (Olin) Flora starred for Kingsport.”

And that is the first “official” win for Kingsport High’s boys.

We would know little more about that 1917-1918 team had not the Johnson City Staff reported two days later on a game between KHS and East Tennessee Normal School (now ETSU). The Dec. 11, 1917 story – actually more of a brief - begins by listing Kingsport High’s players: “Paul Warrick, Roy Barger, J. I. Cox, Olin Flora, Gladstone Smallwood, Chas. Coley, Scott Roller, composing the Kingsport basketball team, with substitutes, met the State Normal School quintet last night. The score was 56 to 10 in favor of the high brows.”

Ouch, even if the schoolboys were playing against college men.

But now we know the names of the seven players on the first team. And those names match up with the 1917 team photo that was published in the Kingsport Times News in 1957.

Here is a reconstructed roster that I compiled from a number of sources, including draft registration cards and obituaries:

 

1917-1918 Kingsport High School Boys Basketball Roster

Roy Barger, 17 years old, guard – home address: 494 Roller St.

Chas. Coley, 16, 5’6” 136 lbs. (from World War II Draft Registration card), forward – 213 Wanola Ave.

John I. Cox, 15, 5’10 ½” 162 lbs., center – 446 Wanola Ave.

Olin Flora, 17, 5’5” 117 lbs., forward – 617 Wanola Ave.

Scott Roller, 18, “short, medium build” (from World War I Draft Registration), guard – Bristol Highway

Gladstone (Stoney) Smallwood, 13, 5’8” 152 lbs., forward – Walnut St.

Paul Warrick, 17 – 510 Wanola Ave.

Note that four of the seven lived on Wanola!

 

I can find newspaper reports from four more games in that season, two wins and two losses.

Feb. 15, 1918 – “Bluff City campus was the scene of a peppery basketball game today in which Kingsport High lost out to the tune of 15 to 11.”

March 1, 1918 – Kingsport over Holston Institute at Holston 18-16. “The boys were chaperoned by Miss Georgia Hunt and the girls by Miss Laura King.” – Johnson City Staff. (Hunt taught sewing and was in charge of athletics; King taught History, Science and English.)

March 22, 1918 – “Kingsport High played the Church Hill team on the latter’s court, the score being 9-16 in favor of Church Hill.” (Bristol Herald Courier)

March 29, 1918 – Kingsport over Holston Institute at Kingsport 17-4 – Johnson City Staff.

The 1917-18 record, or what I can recover of it, was 3-3.

 

And that may be the complete record. The next season, the first that is part of the school’s official record, was composed of only 11 games – that team finished 5-6.

For comparison’s sake, the Bristol Herald Courier reported that Tennessee High played 10 games during the 1917-1918 season, winning 7 and losing 3. Three of the seven wins were against crosstown rival Virginia High. Kingsport had no crosstown rival, no easy two-mile trips for a game.

Factor in road conditions in 1917 – few roads were paved – and add wintry conditions to those crummy roads and you can see why teams played so few games.

Then add in yet another factor: all the games were played outdoors!

That’s right: The Kingsport High team played all its games in the 1917 - 1918 season on an outdoor court! John I. Cox told the Kingsport Times News in 1988, when he submitted a photo of the 1918-1919 team, that 1918 was the first time KHS played indoors. That’s because it was the first year in the new Central High School building – later Washington Elementary. When the school was located on Church Circle, about where First Presbyterian Church is now, it had only an outdoor court.

 

I struggled to discover the identity of the opponent in that first recorded game.

B.M.I.? Never heard of it.

I tried all manner of combinations from Bristol Military Institute to Bristol Mechanical Institution before stumbling across the real name.

B.M.I. was Blountville Masonic Institute, located on what is now Franklin Drive, just off Tennessee Route 394. The school, founded in 1855, was one of many Masonic schools scattered across the country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In fact B.M.I. began its life as Blountville Female Masonic Institute.  

The school educated “girls and young ladies” in grammar school through high school. I found a remembrance in the old Bristol Evening News by B.L. Dulaney who became Female Institute principal in 1878. He said he added boys a year later. Textbooks used at the time included “Geography of the Heavens,” “Milton’s Paradise Lost” and “Compend of Chemistry, Logic, Mental Philosophy and Familiar Science.”

The school closed and the building was demolished in 1919.

Blountville Masonic Institute

 

What Happened To The 7 Players on the 1917-1918 KHS Basketball Team?

One died tragically at age 39. Another lived to be 104.

One became a sportswriter, another a civil servant.

Two played basketball for KHS for two more years.

Not a single obituary mentioned that the deceased had played on that first team.

 

Roy Kyle Barger (1900-1977)

Roy was salutatorian of his high school class, the first graduating class of KHS in 1919. There were only three members of the class. Still he delivered a salutatory address.

He went to UT College of Agriculture for a year but by the next year he was back in Kingsport working as enumerator for the 1920 census.

Roy worked for the post office for most of his life, first in the Kingsport office before transferring to Nashville where he retired.

He came from a well-known Kingsport family. His father George was Kingsport’s first chief of police. His brother Ray was a longtime Sullivan County magistrate. His other brother Fred was founder of Skoby’s restaurant.

Roy had one other famous relative. His nephew was Fred “Pal” Barger Jr., founder of Pal’s, Home of Sudden Service.

 

Charles Lester Coley (1901-1954)

Out of high school Charles began working as a soda fountain dispenser (soda jerk) at Kingsport Drug. After three years apprenticing at various positions in the store, he took off to Macon, Ga. for a three-month cram course at the Max Morris School of Pharmacy (now part of Mercer University). The Morris School’s intensive program – 12-hours a day, six days a week for 13 weeks - was designed for non-college students, to prep them to go back home and take their local state exam. And that’s what he did, returning to Kingsport Drug. 

 

In 1934 Charles bought Vogue Dry Cleaners at 108 W. Market. Nine months later the new Charles Store took over his building, forcing Vogue out of business and Coley back to Kingsport Drug once more.

But there was an uptick, however brief, in his life. He married Catherine Kistner of Fordtown on Oct. 7, 1935. By the time of the 1940 census he was working as a deliveryman at Kingsport Drug, earning $729 a year. But soon after the census was taken Catherine sought a divorce.

In ’42 Coley made the newspaper when he was found guilty of public drunkenness and fined $2.

His divorce wasn’t finalized until 1943, which could explain the public drunkenness in 1942.

He disappeared from the newspaper until his death in 1954.

He died at 213 East Wanola, the house he grew up in. His obituary said he had been a pharmacist by trade.

 

(From 1920 KHS yearbook)

John Isaac Cox (1902-1993)

If the number of nicknames is a reflection of a player’s popularity, then John I. was the King of Kingsport High. According to his senior yearbook he was called “Commodore,” “Heart-breaker,” “Cigarette-fiend,” “Isaac,” “Soda Jerker” and “Hamburger.” Whew!

After high school graduation, he spent a year at Draughon Business College in Knoxville. It was there that he met Virgie Lowe. They married on Christmas Day 1923. After a year working in Knoxville, the young couple and their newborn son John I. Jr. returned to Kingsport when he accepted a job at Mead. In the thirties he was hired away to work in the Yarn Plant at Eastman.

In the 1940 census he reported he was earning $1,900 a year at Eastman, the highest salary of any of his teammates. (Scott Roller, who lived on the family farm in Highland and owned a wholesale fruit and ice company, reported $0 income on the census.)

 

(From 1920 KHS yearbook)

Olin Conrad Flora (1900-2004!)

“Peanut” Flora was apparently the star of that first team. He is the only player mentioned as “starring” in any newspaper account.

Olin became a bookkeeper. In the 1930 census he was working at J. Fred Johnson department store. By the 1940 census he was at Mason Dixon Federal Credit Union, earning $1,000 a year.

In 1947 he operated a tax preparation firm with Sam Bray. The next year he became an insurance adjuster, retiring in 1969.

Olin was active in politics, frequently noted in the newspaper as an election judge in west Kingsport.

He lived to be 104, dying in Greeneville where he had moved in retirement to be near his daughter Mary Jayne Blevins, who was a school librarian. His wife Jane died the next year at age 102.

 

Scott Herren Roller (1899-1992)

After high school Scott went to Roanoke College in Salem, Va. where he was the “star end” on the football team, according to a 1923 note in the Kingsport Times.

Right out of college, Scott got into the coal and ice business, at a time when every household needed coal for the furnace and ice for the icebox.

He was also quite the dashing young man about town, active in the Kingsport Cotillion Club and Rotary Club. If there was a dance in town, you could find Scott’s name in the Times’ Social Notes as a participant.

He was also a well-known businessman, first with Kingsport Coal and Ice and in later years with Holston Coal Company and Kingsport Fruit and Ice.

In 1944 he married Volla Matheny.

They had met in 1929 at a Cotillion Club dance for new teachers in the Kingsport school system. (The new teachers’ dance was an annual event.)

Volla and her sister Ruth had been recruited out of Missouri by Ross N. Robinson to teach English at the new Dobyns-Bennett High School. They were later joined by a third sister, Helen, who worked as a stenographer at Eastman (and, according to the 1940 census, earned $1,352 a year, $100 more than either of her college-educated teacher-sisters.)

Volla Roller was principal of Kingsport Junior High when in 1948 she was coaxed into becoming Kingsport’s first Juvenile Court Judge, a position she held for twenty years.

 

William Gladstone Smallwood (1904-1965)

“Stoney” went almost straight from playing sports to writing about sports. He was hired as a sportswriter by the Kingsport Times in 1921, a year after graduating from KHS, and continued through 1936, when he became publicity director for the Southeastern Conference. He also promoted wrestling matches before switching to education – on the side he had earned a bachelor’s degree at Milligan and a masters at ETSC - and finished his career as the principal at Brookside Elementary.

His most controversial column for the newspaper was in 1936 wherein he compared the legendary Bobby Dodd to then D-B football star Bobby Peters, coming down on the side of Peters as the better high school player, casually noting “having played with Dodd and having watched Peters.”

 

John Paul Warrick (1900-1939)

Paul was the tragic figure of that first team. In 1939 he and five friends were on a fishing trip to Lake Lure, N.C. when a storm blew in. The boat with Paul, Roy Prator and Carl Ingram overturned. Paul and Prator were left clinging to the hull while Ingram, the only one of the three who could swim, paddled to shore. By the time help could get out into the lake, the boat had sunk and both men had drowned.

At the time Paul was used car manager at Brashear Motors. It was owner Russ Brashear who had organized the trip as a reward for his employees. Brashear was in a separate boat at the other end of the lake and didn’t know about the accident until after the storm.

Warrick had spent most of his young life clerking at Kingsport drug stores, beginning out of high school at family-owned Hall & Warrick on Main Street. (It later became Square Drugs.) In ’25 he was at Holston Drug before opening the Merry Garden in 1927 – it advertised “patent medicines, sodas, sandwiches, cosmetics, cigars, cigarettes, ice cream, pie and cake.”

His family was one of Kingsport’s founding families, moving to town in 1907. Brother Tom was Kingsport’s first fire chief.   

No 1917-1918 Girls Basketball Team

Girls basketball didn’t get going at Kingsport High until the 1918-1919 season. This item comes from the spring 1918 edition of the Kingsport Central Echo, the student newspaper:

“The girls have played two (basketball) games, one with the Grammar School and one with the Faculty. In both games our girls showed excellent team work, and we feel confident that with a little more practice they will be able to meet an outside team.

"In the game with the Grammar School, Helen Rhodes and Lillian Breeding starred for the High School, and Irene Edwards for the Grades."

Rhodes would be the valedictorian of the class of 1919, the very first graduating class of Kingsport High.

The first girls basketball team at Kingsport High will have to be a project for another day, or week.