We Will Rise

by Steve Beaven

  It didn’t take much to convince the people of Evansville that the college would be a community asset. Support came from all corners. Mayor Benjamin Bosse and businessmen from his furniture company contributed $28,500. The Evansville Courier featured the college on the front page for eleven days in a row. The owner of the Hercules Buggy Company contributed $25,000. School kids donated dimes and quarters, and teachers from Fulton School handed over fifty bucks apiece. The Fulton janitor gave $25. A railroad brakeman walked seven miles to drop off $5 at the Courier. A giant thermometer constructed on the side of the Citizens Bank Building downtown provided a running tally of donations. The leaders of the campaign pulled up to the bank every day in a fire truck to update the steady progress toward the city’s goal.

  But on May 3, the last day of the campaign, Evansville came up $50,000 short. If the city didn’t meet its goal that day, the terms of the campaign called for all of the money to be returned to donors. Mayor Bosse, who coined the motto “When everybody boosts, everybody wins,” took the campaign into his own hands. He brought a rabbi, a Methodist bishop, the president of Moores Hill, and a minister to lobby a wealthy bank president named Francis Joseph Reitz, who promised to match last-minute donations up to $25,000. Fund-raisers pushed forward. Trinity Methodist Church chipped in another $10,000. Smaller donations trickled in. That night, more than one thousand people piled into the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Coliseum downtown, hoping for good news. Special telephones had been installed so fund-raisers could call in with progress reports. Anticipation swelled as the clock ticked toward midnight. Then, at 11:57 p.m., Bosse delivered the news: the city had raised $514,000.

  With matching funds from the Methodist Church, Evansville College opened in temporary quarters in September 1919 with 104 students. Three years later, the college moved to a permanent home on Lincoln Avenue, less than three miles east of the river. A large city block was cleared for the construction of the new administration building. The college’s fledgling athletic teams were known at first as the Pioneers and dressed in purple. But the school changed its nickname in the mid-1920s when a rival congratulated Evansville basketball coach John Harmon after a Pioneers victory: “You didn’t have four aces up your sleeve. You had five!” A local sports columnist convinced the college that Aces would be easier to fit in headlines than Pioneers, and the change was made.

  Compared to the wider world of higher education, the college operated in a vacuum in its first decades. It provided a basic post-secondary-school education for young men and women from Evansville and surrounding farm towns. The college, a private school that relied mostly on tuition and community support, struggled financially. As its fortunes faded, so too did the city’s grand visions for a center of intellectual and cultural uplift.

  But then the United States entered World War II and everything in Evansville changed.

  It happened so quickly, the transformation from drowsy industrial town to muscular military supplier. On January 4, 1942, less than a month after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Evansville awakened to news that the local Chrysler plant had been awarded a lucrative war contract. Soon after, the US Army Corps of Engineers took over the Chrysler facility as well as a Sunbeam Electric factory to create the Evansville Ordnance Plant, which churned out millions of tons of ammunition for machine guns, pistols, and rifles. But that was only the beginning of Evansville’s surging wartime economy. With well-equipped factories and a skilled labor pool, the city was ready-made to support the war effort. In a matter of months, new manufacturing plants were built, old ones were retrofitted, and workers were retrained.

  Then, on Valentine’s Day, 1942, a screaming two-deck headline in the Evansville Press announced the construction of a massive new moneymaker on the riverfront:

  NAVY TO BUILD SHIPS

  AT 45-ACRE YARD HERE

  300-Foot, Diesel-Powered Craft to Come from

  New Industry, City’s Contribution

  to All-Out War

  Amid huge cranes and row after row of scaffolding, the first ship was launched eight months later. The yard eventually grew into the largest employer in Evansville history, with nineteen thousand workers. In April of that year, construction began on the Republic Aviation plant along US Highway 41, next to the airport. Republic was based in Farmingdale, New York, but chose Evansville as the site for a $16 million fighter plane factory because the president of the company had a business connection in Evansville and figured a plant in Indiana would be safer than one on the East Coast if there was another attack. The first fighter planes rolled off the line at the Republic plant on September 20, 1942. At its peak, more than five thousand people worked at Republic, producing two dozen planes a day. The Servel factory, which had made gas-absorption refrigerators before the war, was redesigned to manufacture parts for the fighter jets. Other plants made portable bridges, earth-moving equipment, airplane parts, and military uniforms. As the draft depleted the ranks of skilled workers, the unemployed came from hundreds of miles away to take their places on assembly lines. Because the Klan’s influence had waned, prewar employment restrictions were eased and classified ads sought “white or colored” job applicants. Black workers and women got jobs that had previously been off-limits. The workforce doubled after the war began, and doubled again before it ended.

  The patriotic fervor that swept across the United States in the early 1940s lifted Evansville up and carried it along. No longer was Evansville a free-floating factory town, disconnected from the rest of the world. Evansville took its place among midwestern manufacturing cities, where the automobile industry had been largely set aside in favor of lucrative military production.

  The growth of jobs and wages, and the need for workers with new skills, brought new life to Evansville College. The war helped launch the school’s expansion, boosted revenue during lean times, and strengthened its relationship with the most important institutions in the city. The college offered pilot training as part of a contract with the Civil Aviation Authority. A separate program for US Navy pilots included two months of preparation on the ground and forty hours in a plane. The college also trained local factory workers for plants with government contracts, including Republic Aviation and Servel. Radio communication and first aid classes were added, as were new classes in physics and math. When the war ended, hundreds of returning veterans registered for classes on the GI Bill. By 1947, enrollment had grown from four hundred to more than seventeen hundred. That year, local bankers launched a fund-raising campaign that netted $1.2 million. By the early 1950s, an engineering building and a new union building were completed. Classroom space was added and a new library was constructed. In only a few years, the college had finally achieved financial stability. The growth and good fortune extended beyond the classrooms, the library, and the circular drive that marked the campus entrance.

  From a cramped concrete building on the back side of campus, a modest mathematician named Arad McCutchan built the greatest small-college basketball program in history.

  FOUR

  Wild Ass

  ARAD MCCUTCHAN’S INTRODUCTION TO basketball sounds, a century later, like a rural fable. Born on the Fourth of July in 1912, McCutchan grew up in a family of subsistence farmers about ten miles north of Evansville. He was the youngest of six children, spoiled rotten and bossed around by his siblings, two brothers and three sisters. He milked the cows, worked in the fields, and went to a one-room country school, where he was the only student in his graduating class and liked to say he had been chosen class president and most likely to succeed. He also liked to joke that his first name was a biblical term that meant “wild ass.”

  He learned the game on the farm, where his brothers attached a homemade metal ring to the side of the barn. No one had a proper ball, so they stitched one together out of scrap leather with an inflated pig’s bladder inside. Crude, yes. But functional. McCutchan went to Bosse High School, not far from the college, where he played well enough to draw interest from schools as far aw
ay as Montana State. But he chose his hometown team, where he studied math and physical education, played football, and served as president of his freshman class. He also played basketball for four years, led the Aces in scoring, and was named team captain as a junior. The LinC, the 1933 yearbook, said McCutchan was “one of the best basketball men in the state and was high point man on the team. He could place the ball through the hoops from any angle of the floor and his style of play was the joy of his teammates. He leads his team through his own example of fine sportsmanship on the floor, rather than evident discipline.”

  Once McCutchan graduated in 1934, the seasonal certainties of his rural youth were replaced by a peripatetic work life. He coached high school ball in Alabama, traveled to New York in the summers to earn a master’s degree in math at Columbia University, and returned to Evansville to coach at Bosse High School. He also taught a full load of classes. His annual salary was $500. McCutchan married Virginia Robinson in 1940 and took stock of his life. It wouldn’t be easy to raise a family on a coach’s salary. Maybe it was time to consider a new career. Before he had a chance to decide his long-term future, McCutchan entered the navy a few months after the attack on Pearl Harbor and moved his family to Pensacola, Florida, where he served as a flight instructor. In early 1946, with McCutchan’s discharge from the navy looming, Evansville College president Lincoln Hale sent him a letter offering the head-coaching job at his alma mater. By this time, McCutchan was thirty-four years old, the father of two toddlers, and unsure whether he wanted to commit his life to basketball. He wrote back, rejecting the offer. But he regretted his decision immediately and called Hale to accept the job before his letter crossed the president’s desk.

  McCutchan moved his family back to Indiana and never left again. This was Arad McCutchan’s great gift to his hometown: every time he left, he came back. The athletic director from Michigan State called in 1965, after the Aces won their fourth national championship. “But by that point,” McCutchan said, “it didn’t seem practical to leave for a bigger school.” So he stayed in Evansville, refereed high school football games, officiated at track meets, and ran a youth baseball league on the city’s east side. He coached golf, served as the athletic director, and spent sixteen years as an assistant football coach. Everyone called him Mac. He earned the devotion of local basketball fans with a gentlemanly demeanor and a self-deprecating wit. He opened the Aces locker room to fans after games and adopted a no-cut policy: any boy who tried out for the team, worked hard, and maintained good grades could dress for home games. Although he was known to stomp the floor in moments of frustration, he didn’t berate referees or yell at his players. He kept emotional displays to a minimum.

  “In his own way, he showed his love and affection,” says Bob Clayton, who played for Evansville in the early 1970s. “He wouldn’t come up and hug you. He’d tell a story to whoever was standing around to build you up in some way, something you wouldn’t even think he’d remember.”

  When McCutchan promised parents he’d look after their sons, he wasn’t talking about keeping an eye on them at games and practices. He tutored his players in math at his kitchen table while Virginia helped them with English papers. A local barber offered players haircuts in McCutchan’s basement every few weeks. They played badminton in his backyard when the weather was good. These visits helped players maintain their grades and the clean-cut look their coach preferred. It also provided them with a sense of community in those first, uncertain years of adulthood.

  Mac stood for all the values his neighbors in Evansville hoped to see in themselves, and all of the values they hoped the rest of the world saw in them: modesty, faith in God, belief in family, stoic bravery in times of war. He was also a hometown boy in a town deeply suspicious of outsiders.

  For nearly twenty years, starting in the late 1930s, Evansville College played its home games at the National Guard Armory, which was adjacent to campus. The armory, an imposing brick-and-concrete field house constructed on a gently sloping hill, included seating for roughly two thousand. Here, businessmen in starched shirts and neckties squeezed in next to each other beneath the dim lights, their cigarette smoke hanging over the playing floor like a poisonous smog.

  In the mid-1940s, when Ron Brand was eleven, he convinced a sympathetic adult at the armory that he’d be an excellent soda salesman during Aces games. He’d bum a ride to the armory from his elementary school basketball coach, watch the first half from the balcony, and then hustle down to the floor to peddle popcorn and Cokes. He made decent money at those games, as much as twenty bucks on a good night. But the cash was a bonus, the cherry on top. Ron loved basketball and he loved the Purple Aces most of all. Back in those days, when Ron was selling soft drinks, the Aces were truly something to see, with standing-room-only crowds pressing forward for a better view of the court. Some nights, when one of Evansville’s rivals came to town and the armory was loud and full, it felt like the Aces were playing real big-time basketball.

  But for years, local politicians and civic leaders had debated the merits of building a bigger venue for concerts, games, and other gatherings. Concert promoters were especially eager for a bigger hall. When big-name bandleaders like Tommy Dorsey toured the Midwest, they bypassed Evansville for cities with bigger venues. Promoters could make a tidy profit at a sold-out show at Louisville’s National Guard Armory, which seated ten thousand. There was nothing in Evansville even half that size. But it was basketball—along with a bit of community envy—that sparked the development of the new arena on Evansville’s east side. Friday night high school games already drew thousands of fans at local gyms, and stray tickets to Aces games at the armory were scarce. Evansville also wanted to keep up with its neighbor across the river. Owensboro, Kentucky, was just forty miles southeast of Evansville and the home to Kentucky Wesleyan College, perhaps the Aces’ greatest rival in the 1950s. Owensboro was also about a quarter of the size of Evansville, and when the town opened an arena that seated six thousand in 1949, Evansville would not be outdone. Enter Henry O. Roberts.

  In 1951, Hank Roberts campaigned for the mayor’s office in Evansville, promising the city he’d build an arena big enough to meet the growing demand for Aces tickets. The stadium project faced opposition from some who felt it would turn out to be a white elephant. One sports columnist referred to it as “Hank’s Tank.” But businessmen, civic leaders, and the city council favored Roberts’s proposal, and in 1956, Roberts Municipal Stadium was completed on fifty-five acres of farmland about a mile east of the college. The price tag was $2 million.

  The stadium was palatial and cavernous, with seventy-four hundred permanent seats and temporary bleachers that seated another four thousand, making it one of the largest college arenas in the country, even bigger than the field house where Indiana played its home games in Bloomington. The big bands now had a suitable venue: a year after the stadium opened, Lawrence Welk performed there for 13,780 fans. But from the very beginning, everyone knew the stadium belonged to the Purple Aces. Evansville College played its first game at Roberts Stadium on December 1, 1956, drawing nearly nine thousand to see McCutchan’s team lose to Purdue on a layup with four seconds left.

  In the coming years, Louisville, UCLA, Iowa, and a parade of other major schools agreed to play Evansville at the stadium. Envious coaches from big schools arrived in Evansville several times each year with their empty hands outstretched; a road game at Roberts Stadium was always a generous payday. At the armory, visiting schools might take home $300. But with the new arena, top-tier teams were willing to risk losing to a small College Division program in the middle of nowhere because ticket revenue enabled Evansville to pay visitors as much as $5,000 for their trouble. This, as much as McCutchan’s genius for the fast break, is what built the Aces basketball program. The best teams came to Roberts Stadium, drawing sold-out crowds, which in turn attracted good local players who might otherwise have chosen Indiana, Purdue, or Illinois.

  It’s no coincidence that Evansvi
lle College won its first national championship in 1959, less than three years after moving into Roberts Stadium. Something fundamental had changed in Evansville. Roberts Stadium became a national landmark for college coaches and their teams, an enormous arena for a small school, deafening and packed for nearly every game.

  John Wooden brought his weary UCLA squad to Roberts Stadium four days before Christmas in 1957. The Bruins had sprinted out to a promising start that season, winning four straight at one point to climb to number thirteen in the Associated Press poll. But UCLA’s annual swing through the Midwest teetered on disaster when the Bruins limped into Evansville, following consecutive losses to Wichita and Bradley. If UCLA fans hoped that playing a tiny College Division team in the snowy wilds of the Great Midwest would provide some measure of relief, they were disappointed. On December 21, the Bruins lost to the Aces, 83–76. John Wooden had been at UCLA for a decade, but he was not yet the “Wizard of Westwood.”

  Still, the game was a chance for Wooden and McCutchan to reconnect and renew their friendly rivalry. They’d known each other for at least a decade, and their lives had unfolded as mirror images nearly every step of the way. Their Indiana boyhoods, their collegiate playing careers, and their coaching achievements seemed to overlap almost from the day they were born. They shared the same dry sense of humor, moral rectitude, and understated coaching style. In the mid-1960s, they were the two greatest college basketball coaches on the planet, and they had the hardware to prove it. They weren’t close friends, but rather kindred spirits whose paths crossed often through the years, even after they both retired.

  But their differences were stark, too. One left Indiana and lived life on the national stage, on the covers of magazines, on network television, feted always as the humble small-town genius from the Midwest, prim and proper, demanding the game be played “the right way.” He disdained dunking, referred to his most famous player as Lewis even after the young man changed his name to Kareem, ordered his big redheaded center to get a haircut, and made his faith and his marriage appealing characters in the drama of his own life.