THE TRUTH ABOUT THE HARLEM GLOBETROTTERS

            When I was a kid just after WW2 the Trotters came to our town, Bellingham, Washington, every year. They were at the time, before being reduced to a dumb sideshow of clowns, the best basketball team in the world. They beat the NBA Champs, the Minneapolis Lakers 3 games to 2 at the end of the season. They were led by Goose Tatum, Marcus Haynes, and Ted Strong, and in addition to putting on a great “circus” of passing, dribbling, and scoring they almost always won. They racked up a scorecard of hundreds of wins versus very few losses, several of which came at the hands of our local pro-team the Bellingham Fircrest.

            Surprisingly, in those post-war years our town organized a professional basketball league in the Pacific Northwest around such cities as Bellingham, Vancouver, B.C., Seattle, Yakima-Tacoma, and Portland, Ore. The league lasted about five years and Bellingham won most of the championships, with our Bellingham Fircrest winning most of the championships. The Fircrest were led by Gale Bishop, a local guy who had been an All-American at Washington State University, who once scored 54 points in Madison Square Garden game. The team was sponsored by a local dairy firm owned by Dick Smith.

            The Trotters were invented before the war by Abe Saperstein with the showmen headquarters in Harlem, NYC. They trained themselves to be trickster showmen, but they also could play great basketball. They travelled all over the country, sometimes having to play their barnstorming games against small, local amateur teams, but almost always winning. Years ago there was a movie made about them, and it might still be available. The Trotters travelled the world, amazing every country with their antics.  

            Marcus Haynes was the world’s greatest dribbler, keeping the ball away from the opposition by lying on the floor and pretending to sleep while dribbling the ball at a seemingly impossible low height and speed. Their center, Goose Tatum played all sorts of tricks with the ball behind his back, etc., and was amazingly accurate at shooting the ball over his head and between his legs. He often scored his free-throws by bouncing the ball off of his head. Ted Strong could throw the ball the length of the court and I once saw him score a basket from 65 feet away while standing under his own basket.           

            One year when the Trotters came to town the ticket manager of the Fircrest asked me if I would like to be the waterboy for the Trotters at their next game. Duh!!! I got to sit on their bench and pass water and towels around to them. There were no Black people living in Bellingham at that time, so sitting on the bench next to the Trotters was as perplexing as it was honorific. I had never even been close to Negro before, so I was both honored and mystified thereby. Their black skin next to mine was a real eye-opening experience for a 12-year-old.

            Well, the game was a hard fought one, but our Fircrest team won yet a third time in a row, partly due to the presence of one Ziggy Marcel, who had chosen to play for our Fircrest team that year. Abe Saperstein himself showed up for the game and afterward described Bellingham as “the Flatbush of Basketball”, referring to the craziness for which the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team had become famous. It was not long, however, before the great Trotters were reduced to a kind of “side-show” outfit that provided basketball shows strictly for laughs. I, however, will always remember them not as the “Greatest Show on Earth”, but as the “Greatest Basketball Team in the World”.              

NUMBER ONE: WINSTON CHURCHILL’S ACCOUNT OF WORLD WAR TWO 

This set of six books, each over 500 pages, describes the main developments of The Second World War, and is appropriately titled just that. When I first read these books about ten years ago my main motive was to learn about the war which I lived through as a child. Now I am starting to re-read these volumes, mostly because I have found that I do not remember those events well at all. After re-reading them I would like to share with you a sort of “short” account of what Lord Churchill had to say. I had the privilege years ago of visiting Churchill’s grave next to the family’s Blenheim Palace near-bye to Oxford, England. You might like to know that Churchill wrote many books along with guiding England to victory in the Second World War.  

         1.

            The first volume published in this series of books, published in 1949, is entitled Their Finest Hour, and serves as an overview of the British people’s experience of the war during the four or five years of its continuance. It records how France fell to the Germans, how the British withstood the years of the “blitz” bombing of London by the Germans, and how the rise of Germany affected the surrounding world of the Mediterranean Sea, including North Africa. This book is meant to stand as a tribute to the British people for their courageous stand against Nazism. It is odd but this book reads as if it were a full account of World War Two, but it serves more as an introduction to the rest of the series, as a brief survey of some of its early developments.               

Actually, the set of books begins with Volume Two (first published in 1948) is entitled The Gathering Storm and describes the British struggle to take its place amidst the against several years of Nazi air attacks, especially on London. It gets its title from Churchill’s belief that the rise of Adolph Hitler was the source of the evil perpetrated upon the world in this war. The British public’s endurance and survival during the war was absolutely remarkable. They simply refused to give up to the Nazi warlords. Their homeland and major city, London, were almost completely demolished by the Nazi air-raids over a period of several years in what is known as “The Blitz”.  The Nazis forces forged their way across Western Europe, conquering France, as well as dominating the and chased the Brits fighting there to the sea at Dunkirk from whence hundreds of thousands were miraculously rescued by thousands of British ships of all sorts in the fog and taken back to England.

            Hitler soon conquered France and offered Britain a peace which they straight-way refused. France split into a minority government, which in order to save themselves from extinction surrendered to the Nazis plague, while others followed General De Gaulle and joined with the Brits. The Brits withstood several years of constant Germany air attacks and ultimately the Germans stopped their incessant bombing raids. Things remained terrible all around the Mediterranean region, including North Africa and the Egyptian desert. Fortunately, the conflict in the North African desert ended with a temporary victory for the British in 1941. But Hitler’s Germany continued to grow and threaten its surrounding countries.