Hlas: In 1967, Jefferson’s stars were aligned

Fifty years ago can be difficult to describe to those who weren't alive then, especially kids.

You couldn't watch movies on your phone? Phones had their own booths in public places? And so on.

It's hard enough just to explain what the high school athletics experience was like in 1967 as compared to 2017. At Jefferson High in Cedar Rapids, it was an alignment of stars. The school was loaded with gifted athletes in a time when high school sports were the biggest show in town.

Memories of that era will run freely through the halls of Jefferson Friday when its inaugural Athletic Hall of Fame induction ceremonies are held. There are established Halls of Fame at Jefferson for some individual sports, but this one will be all-inclusive with males and females, athletes and coaches, representing 13 different programs.

The first group consists of 21 people, each a great story. Many were J-Hawks in the school's first decade after it opened in 1958. Three were all-state players on Jefferson's lone state-championship boys' basketball team, the 1967 squad that observes its 50th anniversary this year.

Each — Larry Baker, Larry Lawrence and BJ Trickey — also starred on the Jefferson football team that went 17-0-1 over their junior and senior seasons and was the mythical state champion their junior years. Baker died in 1980, Lawrence in 2012.

The talent and accomplishments of the three and all-state football lineman/track and field standout Layne McDowell were such that the four shared the school's Male Athlete of the Year award that year.

Baker was a 6-foot-7 center who was first-team all-state in basketball, and in football as an end. He had 35 rebounds in a game against Moline.

Lawrence went on to play quarterback at Iowa, and later for three seasons in the NFL. He told The Gazette something in 1992 that rings even clearer today.

'We were in an era of high school sports that will never come back again,' he said. 'There weren't TV sports every night of the week. We'd fill Kingston Stadium every weekend in football and you couldn't get a seat in basketball.

'It was almost as if you could take it in a freeze frame and say 'This is as good as it gets.' … Nothing I did after, not at Iowa or the pros, had the drama of that (basketball) season.'

In 2012, Cedar Rapids sportscasting legend Bob Brooks said Jefferson's 72-71 overtime Class 2A state-championship win over Ames was the most-memorable state tournament game he ever called.

Jefferson fell behind 10-0, trailed 35-23 at halftime, and was down by 15 points midway through the third quarter. But the J-Hawks rallied to force an overtime against an Ames team that had future five-year NBA player Dick Gibbs.

With Jefferson leading 70-69 in the overtime, Lawrence deftly dribbled the ball away from pursuing Ames players for almost 40 seconds before getting fouled and making two free throws with 12 seconds remaining.

I can speak for a 9-year-old in Cedar Rapids who watched the game on television that Saturday night and thought it was as thrilling as anything imaginable. His fellow citizens must have agreed, because a long caravan of cars met the team's bus near Williamsburg the next day and escorted it home.

A parade went from the Cedar Rapids airport to Jefferson, with players riding in convertibles while pelted by sleet. Lawrence said he spent the next four days in the hospital with bronchial pneumonia.

Trickey was a first-team all-state guard for that basketball team coached by Gay Dahn, as well as a football and baseball standout. He played basketball and baseball at Southern Illinois University before returning to Cedar Rapids to work in the family's bowling business. He has owned and operated Westdale Bowling Center since 1987.

Trickey said Cedar Rapids Mayor Robert M.L. Johnson spoke at the celebration at Jefferson and made good on his preseason promise to eat a cigar if the J-Hawks won the state title.

'The teams of the last 10, 20 years that win state-championships, it doesn't seem like people are making enough of a deal out of it,' Trickey said. 'Xavier won the state (boys' basketball) title last year and it didn't seem like that got enough attention.'

The opposite was true in 1967.

'There were no outside conflicts,' said Trickey. 'There were only three TV stations. There were no video games. There were no entertainment things to speak of. High school athletics were a big deal, not just in Cedar Rapids, but all over the country.

'Everybody on our team was focused and on the same page. We all kind of had tunnel vision. We had coaches who were tremendously motivated to win. The coaches were authoritarians. The parents were the same way. Our dads basically were World War II guys. They wouldn't take anything from anybody.

'In those days, if you got in trouble in school you were in more trouble when you went home.'

Also in those days, Trickey said, 'I think people respected us and acknowledged us.'

They still do. There was a recognition of the 1967 basketball team at Jefferson on Jan. 27. The 21 Athletic Hall of Fame inductees will be heralded Friday night between games of the Washington-Jefferson girls'/boys' basketball doubleheader, after the Hall of Fame program in the school cafeteria.

For many of the older people who will attend, a March Saturday night in Des Moines 50 years ago hasn't faded.

'I'm still asked about that team quite often,' Trickey said.

'Those years, it was like the stars came together at our school. The size, the athletic ability, the motivation ... it was staggering.'

Trickey starred on the state's best teams in two sports. His team won perhaps the most-memorable of all Iowa boys' basketball championship games. If you lived on Cedar Rapids' west side that night and heard happy hollering coming from your neighbors' homes, you knew why. It was a big darn deal.