by Steve Beaven
Text copyright © 2020 by Steve Beaven
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Little A, New York
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ISBN-13: 9781503942226 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1503942228 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781503942202 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1503942201 (paperback)
Cover design by Angela Moody
First edition
To Ruth, Paul, and Thomas, always
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
PART I
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
PART II
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A NOTE ON SOURCES
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROLOGUE
A Purple Flood
THE TRAIN PULLED IN at precisely 4:22 p.m., on April 27, 1943, ten minutes early, with the shades drawn at the back of the last car. The visit was meant to be top secret, a matter of national security. No Evansville Press. No Evansville Courier. Nobody in this little corner of southwestern Indiana was allowed to know of the great man’s arrival until he had left town. Yet the rumors had swirled all day and now there was no doubt they were true.
A spring downpour had washed over the city, dropping nearly an inch of rain, and by the afternoon the air was warm and close, with a hailstorm on the way. Hundreds of people lined the railroad tracks downtown and crowded into Evansville’s Union Station. Some had been waiting since before noon, as military troops took their places along the L&N tracks, so they could see firsthand the Secret Service agents surrounding the train when it came huffing to a stop, with a familiar black Scottish terrier named Fala resting on a platform at the back, where the president of the United States often gave speeches. The crowd whispered. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had arrived.
As the train rolled past, a little girl ran alongside, trying to get a peek and shouting at a Secret Service agent.
“Is the president on there?” she said. “I don’t care if he is a military secret. I want to see him anyway.”
In the midst of a nationwide inspection of US military facilities, Roosevelt stopped in Evansville to meet with assembly-line workers who made the powerful P-47 Thunderbolt fighter planes at the Republic Aviation plant on the city’s north side. FDR arrived at the plant at 5:00 p.m. and toured the factory from the front of a big black convertible with the top drawn back. Indiana governor Henry F. Schricker sat directly behind FDR in a snappy white fedora, sharing the back seat with two Republic executives. Trailing Roosevelt’s car were eleven others that carried Secret Service agents, presidential aides, and newspaper reporters. The journalists had agreed to not report on the trip until Roosevelt returned to the White House on April 29. As the motorcade rolled slowly across the factory floor, past the red-white-and-blue bunting, the office staff cheered the president from behind a rope barrier and a wiseacre shouted, “Where’s Eleanor?” eliciting a grin from the president. Then, as he signed the factory’s guest register, a select few workers who had contributed suggestions to boost production were allowed to approach the president’s motorcade in pairs.
Mrs. Erma Drain, of 114 Mulberry Street, had been called to the personnel office at 2:00 p.m. and told that an unidentified honored guest would arrive soon. She was informed that she had been selected to give the guest a gift and ordered to then keep quiet and return to work in the radio department.
After a wait that seemed like an eternity, the chief tool engineer introduced Mrs. Drain to the president and she gave him a miniature replica of the P-47 as flashbulbs popped to capture the moment for the press. FDR had been briefed on the sacrifices Mrs. Drain’s family had made for the war effort. Like their neighbors and coworkers, the Drain family viewed the war as a righteous conflict between good and evil. Evansville was a wartime boomtown, utterly transformed, shaking off the effects of the Great Depression thanks to lucrative military contracts for ships, planes, and ammunition. Mr. Drain—Paul Sr.—served in the Army Air Service during World War I and now worked in the casting and forging department at Republic, not far from his wife. Their sons served in the Air Corps. Jack remained in training in the US, but twenty-two-year-old Paul Jr. had been captured by the Germans.
“How do you do, Mrs. Drain?” the president exclaimed, smiling and leaning close from the front seat. It was as if they were chatting by themselves and not surrounded by hundreds of people. “So your boy’s in Germany. Have you had official word that he was shot down?”
Mrs. Drain had so much to tell the president about Paul Jr., how his bomber had crashed seven months earlier near Amiens, France, how the impact had knocked out his teeth and cut both his shoulders, how Paul begged for letters from home, how he always asked for updates on his hometown pals. How he had written the family from a German hospital the previous December, explaining that he hoped to “use my legs” that day, without providing any details. He signed his letters, “Goodbye, Mom—See you soon” and reported he had been assigned to Stalag Luft I, a concentration camp for airmen.
Mrs. Drain’s encounter with the president happened so quickly that later she couldn’t remember all that she had said. But she did recall that he took her hand in his and assured her that the Germans were friendlier to American soldiers than the brutes running Japanese prison camps.
“I think he’ll be all right,” the president told her.
Before he left, the big black convertible rolled through the plant exit and outside, where FDR was treated to an impressive display of American air power. One fighter plane fired eight .50-caliber guns. Three Thunderbolts descending at more than four hundred miles an hour abruptly changed direction and sped away into the darkening sky.
Roosevelt left the plant at 7:00 p.m. and headed for Kentucky, another stop on his trek across America. In all, he visited twenty states and traversed 7,652 miles in seventeen days, appearing before cheering crowds at a marine base in Parris Island, South Carolina, an ammunition plant in Denver, and a bomber plant in Omaha. He made stops in Colorado Springs, Corpus Christi, and Fort Knox, rallying Americans with his booming optimism, urging them to keep up the fight, and lauding their dedication to the war effort. All the newspapers covered his trip once it was over, and the stop in Evansville conferred a special status on an otherwise-sleepy outpost along the Ohio River. Roosevelt’s visit to the Republic plant confirmed the deepest convictions of everyone in Evansville, that their contributions to support the war effort were crucial to an Allied victory. The people of Evansville have always been eager to prove their worth to the rest of the country. World War II was our finest hour.
Twenty-two years later, in early 1965, an ambitious young writer from Sports Illustrated sat down at his typewriter to tell the story of a southern Indiana factory town and its basketball team. In a few thousand words, Frank Deford hoped to capture the madness that had enveloped the Purple Aces of Evansville College. Deford was a Princeton man, just twenty-six, a dashing figure standing nearly six feet, five inches, with jet-black hair, patrician good looks, and a grandiloqu
ent writing style that would be his hallmark over the next half century.
The four-page spread appeared in the February 15, 1965, issue, following a profile of a young boxer who had only recently given up his “slave name” and rechristened himself Muhammad Ali. The central character in Deford’s story could not have been more different than the loquacious heavyweight champ. In addition to coaching basketball, Arad McCutchan was a math professor. He came to class wearing a dark suit, a white shirt, and a tie, lecturing in front of equations scribbled like hieroglyphics on a blackboard. Nearly everyone in town called the coach Mac. He was fifty-two, with thinning hair and thick black glasses. He had already led the Purple Aces to three small-college national championships, and his program provided a perfect hook for a national magazine story: the homespun tale of a hometown team that routinely beat the big-time schools. It was classic David versus Goliath stuff. The Aces played in the College Division, a group of small schools that took long bus trips all winter to play regional rivals. Each year, Evansville crossed the Ohio River to play Kentucky Wesleyan and traveled north on Highway 41 to face Indiana State. But the Aces also took on the heavyweights from the University Division, big schools like UCLA and Iowa.
These games made for lively winter evenings in Evansville, and the entire town was crazy for its basketball team, indulging in tribal traditions foreign and confusing to fans from other cities. Officially, the team was known as the Purple Aces. But for many years Roberts Stadium, Evansville’s gargantuan arena, was awash in red, all because the buttoned-down McCutchan wore red-and-black socks to a game in 1959. The Aces won that night, and suddenly thousands of fans started showing up at the stadium decked out in crimson: socks, sweaters, vests. The coach wore red ties and, now and then, a screaming red suit.
Roberts Stadium held nearly thirteen thousand fans. But good seats were coveted and scarce. Couples haggled over them in divorce proceedings. Deford recounted a well-worn story about the time a season-ticket holder died one night, prompting the man who owned the seats to his left to show up at the athletic department at 8:30 a.m. the next day, asking if he could buy the deceased fellow’s season pass. But he was too late. The gentleman who owned the tickets to the right of the dead man’s seat had shown up at 6:15 a.m.
“I can’t think of anything that drew more people to one building than what Aces basketball did,” says Robbie Kent, a longtime booster whose father helped build support for construction of the stadium. “It was almost a cult.”
Because enrollment at Evansville College was less than three thousand, most Aces fans at Roberts Stadium were older and not all of them were alumni. Bleacher seats were a few bucks and popcorn was cheap. Mac’s basketball program was a citywide phenomenon. Each winter, Aces games dotted the social calendar. Business leaders, politicos, and alumni bought season tickets so they could see and be seen. Restaurants, bars, and country clubs chartered buses to transport their tipsy patrons to and from Roberts Stadium. Fans threw house parties before and after games. Sometimes before Saturday night games, Jerry Purdie and his wife headed to a downtown club called Central Turners, a weekend hot spot for Catholics from Evansville’s east side. An eight-ounce steak and a salad cost a buck and a quarter. Purdie graduated from Evansville College in ’59. He was not Catholic but had been president of Central Turners and always knew he’d see old friends there. They’d have a Jack and Coke or a twenty-five-cent bottle of local beer—Sterling or Falls City—and board the bus for the trip to the stadium.
Deford touched down in Evansville in the midst of the Aces’ greatest season, and one of the best in college basketball history. Mac’s boys were the defending national champs in the College Division and were on their way to a 29–0 season and a fourth title.
Deford, however, seemed more interested in the town’s devotion to the team than the team itself. The Aces, he wrote, were the biggest phenomenon to hit Evansville since the Ohio River overflowed its banks and flooded the city in 1937.
“Of late, though, memories of the past are not needed in Evansville because the present is sufficiently special—the city has the best small-college basketball team in the country, the Evansville College Purple Aces. Everyone talks about the Purple Aces. They are fun, but more than that, they bring the city distinction. The people are thrilled. The Purple Aces are like a benign flood that has come to Evansville.”
It was true: Purple Aces basketball brought my hometown the national renown that had otherwise eluded us since the end of the war. Evansville didn’t boast mountains, tourist attractions, or Fortune 500 companies. The B-list entertainers born in Evansville—silent-film stars and one-hit wonders—had long since moved away or died. Evansville didn’t even have a memorable nickname. It was the River City, the Pocket City, the Crescent City, or Stop Light City. Some people called it the Barbecue Capital of the World. But nothing really stuck, and by the late 1950s, when the Purple Aces ascended to the top of the small-college ranks, Evansville was struggling. The economy was in a shambles and the city’s reputation as a brawny military supplier had faded. Several big employers—including Chrysler—moved out of town. The boom-and-bust cycles of the industrial economy left a cloud of uncertainty over the city.
For solace, Evansville turned to the Purple Aces.
I was born in 1967—the year the college changed its name to the University of Evansville—and grew up just two blocks from UE’s leafy campus. No one in my family graduated from the University of Evansville, and yet it was central to my childhood in so many ways. In the summer, I lifted weights at the campus rec center, straining to add muscle to my hummingbird frame. On snowy winter days, all the neighborhood kids went sledding on the gently sloping hill across from campus. On Saturday nights in January and February, my father drove the two of us the mile or so from our house to the giant blacktop parking lot at Roberts Stadium. Dad always bought us tickets for the hard wooden bleachers that encircled the concourse, hovering over the seats with chair backs that were closer to the court and thus out of our price range. My father, Paul E. Beaven Jr., was a frugal man, a devout Catholic who went to seminary for two years of high school so that he could study to be a priest, but decided it wasn’t for him. On his car salesman’s salary, my parents paid Catholic school tuition for all five of their children and still managed to drop a check in the collection basket each Sunday. Aces games were affordable luxuries for us.
I can’t remember all these years later the first time we went to Roberts Stadium together. But I remember 1977, when Bobby Watson came to Evansville after Arad McCutchan announced his retirement. College basketball was changing. Instead of the College and University Divisions, there was now Division II and Division I. Within a few years, cable television stations would carry games nearly every night. The postseason tournament was expanding. Corporate money was flooding the game. Watson swept into town with the charismatic confidence to lead the Aces from Division II to Division I and recapture the hysteria of Mac’s championship years. For a few brief and exhilarating months, it seemed as if he would do just that. Watson inspired hope and optimism and renewed our love for UE basketball after several disappointing seasons at the end of McCutchan’s career. When the Evansville Courier published a photo of the team posed in the empty parking lot at Roberts Stadium, with Watson sitting front and center, I clipped it out and taped it to my bedroom wall. I was an Indiana kid, and the Aces fit squarely within Indiana’s storied basketball tradition, from Bob Knight at Indiana to Larry Bird at Indiana State, all the way back to John Wooden’s all-American playing career at Purdue. Basketball defined us, perhaps nowhere more so than in Evansville.
Frank Deford returned to southern Indiana for another story about Evansville and its basketball team in late 1978. What he found this time was not the euphoric pride that had filled the city thirteen years prior. Instead he found grief and absence. Bobby Watson and his promising young team—Mike Duff, John Ed Washington, and their teammates—had been gone for less than a year, taken from us in an explosive plane
crash that forever stained the school and the city. On this trip, Deford remembered the men lost to us on a foggy December night in a muddy field at the Evansville airport and bore witness to our first tentative steps into a new era.
By November 1978, we were still finding our way, with a team of strangers whose names and hometowns and vital statistics—height, weight, et cetera—meant little to us. Dick Walters was the boy-coach, a classic antihero with rough edges and perfect hair. We didn’t know him or the kids he’d recruited. But they played for us; they were our team, and we embraced them with a hunger and desperation they were too young and callow to understand.
Deford understood. UE basketball was no longer the benign flood of 1965. It had grown even more important to Evansville, even more vital to our civic pride. In the seasons to come, we would gather again and the great loss we’d suffered would fade with each victory. My father and I watched those teams. We shared the city’s passion for those new players—Brad Leaf, Theren Bullock, and all of the rest. My father tried to temper my expectations, gently elaborating on all the reasons why the Aces could never compete with Kentucky and North Carolina and Indiana, the giants of college basketball. But I was eleven years old and I believed, without reservation, that they would. As the years passed, the rest of my hometown believed it, too. We filled Roberts Stadium again, for one last championship run.
“Teams play and programs carry on,” Deford wrote later, “but the tradition that Evansville possesses is the greater thing, because it has a life all its own.”
PART I
ACES ARE HIGH IN EVANSVILLE
ONE
The Natural
THE HELICOPTER DESCENDS FROM the winter sky and settles on the football field’s frozen turf, bare trees standing at attention like sentries guarding a head of state. With rotors whipping overhead, the chopper door opens and out he steps, unmistakable in his clunky glasses, with a helmet of thick brown hair framing his round face, not a strand out of place. College basketball royalty: Joe Beasman Hall, head coach of the Kentucky Wildcats. He looks just now like a country preacher dropping into a small southern Illinois town for a tent revival. He shakes hands with the local luminaries who’ve come to meet the helicopter and follows them across Saline Avenue to the gym, a subterranean fortress, low-slung and redbrick, that looks as if it’s been dropped into a hole in the middle of town. Entering at court level, Hall climbs the steps and takes a seat a few rows up from the scorer’s table, not far from the band, holding a rolled-up program in one hand, like a maestro’s baton. Beneath the harsh lights and unceasing racket, a low hum courses through the crowd like an electrical current, from one row to the next: parents, teachers, students, cheerleaders, water boys, every sentient being, standing shoulder to shoulder, gawking. The junior varsity players hurry from the locker room after their game to get a good look at the famous coach, and a couple of the band kids run out to the football field before tip-off to eyeball the chopper up close. No one in Eldorado, an isolated farm town of 4,757, has seen an entrance so grand since Harry Truman rolled through three decades before, railing against the Republicans in a noontime campaign rally.
