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Remember the Bulldogs

See my extended entry to read an article I wrote for Black History Month. I'm getting great feedback from townsfolk on it.

Page News and Courier
Thursday, February 19, 2004

Remember the Bulldogs

Luray High School’s first championship team came after integration

By John Collins
Staff Writer

The decade of the 1960s was a turbulent time for race relations in the U.S. Integration, busing and overturning systems of segregation in the South became a revolution that is today looked back on as the civil rights movement.

The movement aimed to rid the country of discrimination based on skin color — a segregation of races sanctioned by laws and ordinances in locales from Virginia to Alabama. One of the most contentious battles in the fight for equality grew from school integration.

Outbreaks of violence and radical racism flared as blacks enrolled at previously all-white schools in the mid 1960s. But the kind of hatred and vehemence that scarred communities elsewhere never really surfaced in Page County.

In fact, the late 1960s became a golden era for the town of Luray, a time when the local high school basketball team stormed to a state title and took the entire community along for the ride.
It was a time when black and white athletes came together on a basketball court and provided a compelling example for the promise of integration — a belief that by joining forces, both races excel.

The story of Luray High School’s first championship team in 1967 resurfaces today with an insight into how this squad — with its five blacks and six whites — helped ease the community into integration.

It is a viewpoint that was rarely addressed publicly 37 years ago. But today, with the hindsight of maturity, the kids that made up the ’67 team understand the role they played. And the team is still setting an example for others to live up to.

The team
Two years after integration, the Luray High School Bulldogs surprised nearly everyone by winning the state Group A title, the school’s first ever team championship.

The 1966-67 squad was basically the combination of two unsuccessful teams — white players from Luray High School and black players from West Luray High School. The combination produced the chemistry needed to win.

"It was the first championship for the school, and it was two groups of losers that did it," recalled team member Anthony Tutt. "I think that sports is a universal language that brings people together."

The 1967 team was coached by then-assistant principal Mason C. Lockridge Jr. He led a squad with five blacks (Norman Harris, Milton "Grady" Arrington, Charles "Butch" Carter, Anthony Tutt and Russell Allen) and six whites (Charles "Eddie" Hall, Charles Collin, Sam Price, Charles Black, Eddie Bailey, Thomas Campbell, C.L. "Charlie" Campbell and Cletus "Pete" Griffith).

Carter started in a guard slot as a co-captain. Arrington and Tutt started at center and forward, respectively. Harris played guard. Allen started at forward during the team’s postseason run.

Co-captain Tommy Campbell started in the other guard position. And Charlie Campbell — now the Commissioner of Revenue in Page County — split time with Allen at forward.

Bailey, Griffith and Price were available off the bench to play forward. Black and Collin filled in as guards.

Integration
Until the summer of 1964, black students in Page County attended West Luray High School, an all-black school located where the county school board office now stands.

The Page News and Courier carried a notice on June 18, 1964, that six students from West Luray applied to Luray High School. The students were admitted without incident.

Black parents had prepared their children to face ridicule when they joined the white kids. At the time, news reports carried disturbing stories of violence and hatred.

To the north, Warren County struggled with integration. Whites angered by the policy started an all-white school. Violence erupted in other parts of the country.

The process of integration had already begun in Luray without trouble. That transition might be traced back to basketball.

For some time before integration, young men from both races had been playing pickup basketball on the outdoor court at West Luray.

"Most of us played together," said Allen. "We just didn’t go to school together."

"We were just a bunch of kids who enjoyed each other and had fun," Tutt said. "It was just like we knew each other all our lives."

Tommy Campbell was one of the white kids who would go to West Luray for pickup games.
"I know [integration] was on a lot of people’s minds," he said. "We didn’t think about such things. We had fun. I’m not sugar-coating it either."

The integration of sports at Luray High School helped the overall process. Black and white boys met in the football season, then went on to play basketball together.

"It was a very easy transition. There was no hatred that I can remember," said Arrington. "We had always played together."

Carter said that while Luray was a segregated community, it wasn’t a "nasty segregation."

"It wasn’t like other places in the Deep South," he said. "In my time at Luray High School, I never experienced any nastiness."

The main problem of the integrated sports was some minor fallout by the white athletes who were cut when fresh talent that came in.

"As a matter of fact, the sort of problems we had, you would have had regardless of integration," Tutt said.

"What was fairly befuddling was to sit back and watch [integration] unfold on TV," Tutt added. "We were fairly in awe about why the rest of the world was out of kilter."

Champions
The 1966-67 basketball season was the second year of integrated basketball at LHS. Before that, the town had two unsuccessful teams.

Over at West Luray, the school made do with an outdoor court. The white team at Luray High played inside a gym.

Some of the guys, such as Arrington, believe that the championship story starts at that outdoor court. The former West Luray athletes credit their coach, Edward Boyden, with instilling a love for basketball.

"He knew that it was a diversion from the realities of being short-changed," said Tutt.

The West Luray boys all recall Boyden getting them on the court in all kinds of weather, even snow.

"We’d shovel the courts to play basketball," Tutt said. "It didn’t matter how cold it was."

The squad rarely won, playing all their games on the road against other black schools.

"We got slaughtered everywhere. But we had fun," remembered Carter. "After a year or two of humiliation, we went to Luray High School."

Magic Season
At Luray High School, the teams combined for success. The team boasted a 10-7 record in the first year of integration. Then in the 1966-67 season, the team ended the regular season with a 19-4 record.

They lost to Page County High School twice, plus once each to Turner Ashby and Warren County. They finished third in the district in the regular season.

"As the season started going, confidence started building," said Black. That confidence carried over into the postseason.

Both Turner Ashby and Page County High School got upset in the district tournament. That meant LHS had the chance to advance.

"Actually, that year I thought Page had the best team," said Allen.

But Luray, one of the smallest schools in its district, headed to the state tournament in Charlottesville. The squad was the first team from District 10 to go to the state championship.

"Anything we did at that point hadn’t been done before, so we were enjoying life," Black said.

"Luray — as far as people can remember — had been the league doormat," Collin said. "Nobody expected us to do what we did. I’m not sure we expected to do what we did."

In the first round of the state tourney, the Bulldogs donned their $7 Chuck Taylor All-Stars to face a much taller team in Greensville County. After squeaking past Greensville 40-38, Tommy Campbell felt the Bulldogs had a chance at the title.

"I think we said, ‘We couldn’t go out again and play that awful,’ " Tommy Campbell remembered.

In the next round, LHS faced Amherst County, where Tommy Campbell’s brother was principal.

The Bulldogs moved on to the final with a 66-50 win.

The final was set for Saturday afternoon against Thomas Walker High School, but a few of the LHS players had to play in a band competition in Winchester. They made it back just in time to dress out for the game.

After jumping to an early lead, LHS dropped behind in the second quarter. Then Tutt hit a jumper to go up 18-17, and LHS would keep the lead for the rest of the game.

At half time, they led 28-21.

In the bowels of University Hall in Charlottesville, coach Lockridge had little to say to his boys. But what he did say sticks in the minds of his boys today.

On a chalkboard, Lockridge drew two images. One was big, representing the state trophy. The smaller image stood for the runner-up trophy.

Lockridge told the team that they hadn’t come all that way to get the small trophy.

"It was too late to coach," Lockridge remembered. "I knew it was going to come down to who would want it more."

The Bulldogs went back on the court, and finished off Thomas Walker 56-49.

Allen, a sophomore who started in the tournament in place of Charlie Campbell, led the scoring with 15 points and nine rebounds. Arrington, another sophomore, grabbed nine rebounds and scored 14 points.

Town goes crazy
The more wins the Bulldogs put up, the more people came to see them. The Daily News-Record began following the team, as well as other newspapers.

"When we were successful, it was a real rallying point," Collin said.

"Those fans were some of the most dedicated I’ve ever seen in any sport," recalls Carter.

The fans would line up in the afternoon to secure tickets for the evening games, according to Carter. Sleet and snow didn’t hinder the fans waiting outside the LHS gym — the same gym in which the Bulldogs still play.

Gerald Judd of Luray, who followed the team as a reporter for the Page News and Courier 37 years ago, remembers standing room only at home games.

This was in the days before the fire marshal limited gym capacity, so fans lined up all the way around the court — sometimes making it difficult for players to throw the ball in bounds.

The last time the Bulldogs hosted PCHS in the 1966-67 season, Judd said that the police were called in to remove fans who were on the gym roof trying to see through the windows.

Road games were similar. Lockridge talked about playing an evening game against Turner Ashby in the district tournament at Bridgewater College.

At 2 p.m., Lockridge got a call from a school official saying that the LHS crowd was too large. The gym was closed off after it filled.

When the state final rolled around, a huge convoy of townsfolk drove to Charlottesville. It seemed like half of Luray was at the championship game, according to Collin.

"They closed the whole town down," said Tutt.

Dynasty forms
The Bulldogs of ’67 began a 10-year run of domination in Group A basketball. From 1967 to 1976, LHS went to the state tournament six times. Four of the times – ’67, ’70, ’71 and’76 – the squad won the championship. Once they took the runner-up trophy.

Aside from the thrill of the first championship in 1967, the highlight of the run was a two-year undefeated streak.

In the 1969-70 season, the team went 24-0 under coach Chick Crawford. The next season, the streak continued, but this time under coach Vincent "Buddy" Comer. Comer’s squad finished 25-0 that year.

The incredible 55-game winning streak still stands among the best in Virginia High School League history.

The members of the 1967 team hold fond memories of LHS’s first championship season.

"It wasn’t just a high school thing, it was a community thing," Charlie Campbell said. "It blended everything. The community at that time was probably as close as it could get."

"It was a grand time for the city," Arrington said. "It went a long way to bringing the two groups together."

The whole season, the LHS boys were underdogs – one paper called them a "dark horse." And nobody expected the championship title.

"Luray had never gotten much recognition," Tommy Campbell recalled. "It was really a special time for a community that had maybe been looking at this as a fantasy."

Coach Lockridge agreed, pointing out the storybook characteristics of the team.

"You couldn’t have played this picture out on paper," he said.

It’s a script similar to the the 2000 Disney movie "Remember the Titans," about T.C. Williams High School’s 1971 football championship which came on the heels of integration.

The team today
The success of the ’67 Luray High basketball team seemed to follow its players. Thirty-seven years later, team members are doctors, lawyers, military men and political officeholders (see graphic, page B1).

Some of the players still get together informally. The last time most of the team met was during a 1999 reunion.

"I’m proud of their success in life," said Lockridge.

The player that seems to personify this success most is Milton "Grady" Arrington.

Arrington began a career as a park ranger at Shenandoah National Park. He was transferred to California. In 1990, while working at Joshua Tree National Park, Arrington was in an automobile crash that left him a paraplegic.

When he was playing basketball for LHS, Arrington was known for what players described as his "unnatural" jumping ability.

Arrington — standing at about 6 foot, 3 inches — would hit his head on the backboard going up for rebounds, teammates said. In rebounding drills, he could grab the ball with two hands at a height of 11 and a half feet.

Despite the accident that put him in a wheelchair, Arrington remains positive and proud. He says he is still making an impact in society.

Arrington works as the supervising park ranger of the visitor center at Mammoth Cave’s in Kentucky.

"I like to give praise to my family, my wife in particular. She stuck by me 100 percent," he said. "I think the thing is that team work is what made me successful."

This kind of outlook and attitude is the bedrock of the story of LHS’s 1967 championship team. The players came together in a turbulent time to help a community see the benefits of cooperation and caring, regardless of race.

"If people thought there were going to be problems, they were wrong," said Charlie Campbell. "If people thought people were different, they were wrong."

And in the end, the whole was truly greater than the sum of its parts.

"We weren’t the best team. And I wasn’t the best coach," Lockridge said. "But things just came together."

Images

Tournament starters

Team portrait

State trophy

Starters now

Posted by JRC at February 19, 2004 05:29 PM