We all remember where we were when Kennedy was shot. I was in Miss Hokanson's Geometry class as a junior. She kept teaching about postulates despite the bulletins on the intercom radio, but gave up when some girls started crying.
What were you doing?
Today I was thinking about the boys on the St. Louis Park basketball team. Never really thought about them at all until now as I chatted over lunch with Kathleen about our enduring memories of that day.
In 1962, St. Louis Park won the Minnesota State Basketball Championship. The Alexandria varsity basketball coach for 1963-64, Tom Connor, thought he had an excellent chance at the State Championship that season because he had five great players. The best was a skilled 6 foot 5 senior who could dominate any player in the state. So Coach Connor invited the St. Louis Park team to drive to Alexandria to play our 1963 opener, thus giving his potential championship team some good experience with a premium program.
Because it is a 130-mile drive to Alexandria, the St. Louis Park team must have started out early that Friday afternoon, driving in cars up old Highway 52 with plans to stop somewhere for a meal. The B squad stayed home.
So about the time Lee Harvey Oswald was loading his rifle, the boys were headed to Alexandria for a ball game, probably smug about missing some afternoon classes. Somewhere on the way, they must have heard the report on the radio. That has to be their permanent memory of that fateful day.
By the time they finally got to Alexandria, the country was in shock, no one knew what to do next, no one knew what was appropriate. They decided to play the game. It was an odd experience. Few fans filled what was ordinarily a packed gymnasium. Fewer joined the cheerleaders going through a minimum of mandatory chants. You could hear the ball bouncing sometimes in the quiet as it was brought up the floor, all making for an eerie night, oddly uncomfortable and distant.
I was a member of that potential State Championship team for which the town had such high hopes. I watched that entire evening from the bench as mostly the starting five defeated the St. Louis Park defending champs by a score of 61-58. I was in the locker room for the singing of the national anthem and for any remarks that P.A. announcer Marlin Madson may have made, but those stirring moments must be burned in his memories of the day.
It must have been a very long drive home for that St. Louis Park team. Fifty years later, it would be interesting to talk to a player to hear his enduring impressions of the day from his point of view.
For my part, it was one of the last games I watched from the bench. Shortly it was revealed that Alexandria's Greatest Hope got a classmate pregnant and the ensuing scandal resulted in a skinny junior class substitute replacing him in the starting lineup.
