New Comanche Gym Floor

By Matt Martinez
Dodge City Daily Globe
    The gym floor at the Comanche Intermediate Center is being replaced. The old floor is gone, save a few planks that a few Dodge City residents reclaimed from the dumpsters as crews threw out the aged wood piece by piece.
    The new wooden floor is in and will be an improvement on the timeworn slabs that were plagued with dead spots and had survived longer than perhaps they should have.
    It is scheduled to be sanded today and finished and painted for basketball by mid-July, said USD 443 maintenance head Chris Meyer.
    It remains unclear whether the floor that was torn out last month was the original gym surface that some of Dodge City's first high school basketball teams played on in the late '20s.
    Some former students and some of those formerly associated with the school's athletic programs say the floor must have been replaced once before the most recent restoration.
    "When I got there, I assumed it had been replaced once before," said J.C. Riekenberg, who served as the Dodge High football coach from 1964-1972 and as athletic director from 1972-1999.
    He added that termites and a leaky roof often caused problems in the gym during his tenure, and if those problems had been as bad before as they were during his time with the school district, the district would have had to replace the floor once before his arrival.
    Virginia Pennington, a 1948 graduate of DCHS and a retired teacher for USD 443, agreed. She said although she can't recall any specific reconstructive work being done on the floor during her time at the old high school, she assumed that it must have been replaced once before.
    Pennington is married to former Demon basketball player Chet Pennington, who was on the varsity team from 1945 to 1947.
    However, many of those who played ball on the court in the '40s and '50s say that the old floor indeed was the original dating back to the fall of 1928, when students first roamed the halls of the old Dodge City High School at the intersection of First Avenue and Comanche Street.
    "As far as I know, it was the original," said Rex Peterson, a guard on the 1951 and 1952 varsity teams. "I went to a lot of games that were on that same floor as a kid."
     Elwood Holtfrerich, a guard for then-coach Lawrence Stanton's 1945 and 1946 teams, also said that he believed the floor that was taken out in June was the original.
    According to Roy Piper, who was part of the 1955 and 1956 Demon squads, the north corners of the gym had dead spots in the wooden floor and even some warped planks when he played for Dodge High. Piper said he doubted that the gym floor would have showed those signs of deterioration had it been replaced after the original was put in only 27 years earlier.
    Whether the discarded floor was the original or not, the act of putting wood in a dumpster does not mean leaving behind the memories forged on that floor in the venerable fieldhouse, especially in a city with Dodge's basketball tradition.
   
Starting a tradition
    That tradition started in 1907, when the high school fielded its first team, whose business manager was Arthur Scates. His players had no coach and furnished their own equipment, wearing baseball pants for basketball shorts.
    Players Edmund Rhodes, Carl Fitzgerald, Homer Elder, Claude Riney, Fred Kilpatrick and Roy Bainbridge went 2-2 for Dodge City that year, including their win over the Dodge High alumni team. Even in the infancy of southwest Kansas basketball, there were tight games against and ill will toward the Garden City squad.
    Records for this early era of Dodge High basketball are scarce, but according to "Golden Jubilee of Football and Basketball in Dodge City High School," home games were played on the McCarty skating rink floor before the new high school, complete with a gymnasium, was built.
    The first team to play home games at the new gym at the intersection of First and Comanche was Charles "Hoodoo" Herzer's 1928 squad. Herzer was the athletic director as well as the coach of the basketball and football teams.
    The Demons tied Great Bend for the Santa Fe League title that year with a record of 14-7, but due to the Kansas Athletic Association's convoluted Class A and B tournament system, they were not invited to the state tournament. The system was scratched after the 1928 season.

Chasing state titles
    Team captain Dallas Hensley and players like Francis Sturgeon and Jack Monroe guided the Demons into the uncertainty of the '30s, having changed leagues. In 1930, the team won the Wheat Belt League with a regular-season record of 18-4. However, the Demons ultimately lost the consolation game of the state tournament in Topeka, 34-21 to El Dorado.
    That season, athletic director Frank Toalson introduced the tipless game to Dodge City in the second game of the season between the Demons and Cimarron. According to "Golden Jubilee," the game was not well received by spectators, who felt that without the tip-off, there was no thrill to the game.
    The game of basketball has certainly changed since the biggest thrill involved in a game was the starting center-court tip-off, but the displeasure of the crowd did not stop the basketball minds of Dodge City from trying to improve on a game that was still in its youth.
    In 1932, the Demons found themselves in the state tournament again after going 21-3 in the regular season under second-year head coach Ed Schmidt. After losing in the first round of the double-elimination affair, the Demons, led by captain Sam Stubbs, could not fight all the way back from the loser's bracket and were eliminated in their fourth game by Arkansas City.
    Dodge High was a fixture of the Kansas Athletic Association's state tournament throughout the '30s. Under coach Doral Grose, the Demons made state in 1934, 1935 and 1937.
    In 1939, Lawrence Stanton, who later formed the first Dodge City invitational basketball tournament (which later became the Tournament of Champions), took over coaching duties for Dodge High.
    In Stanton's first year, the team went 18-5, won the Southwest Kansas League championship and made it back to the state tourney. The Demons, who had switched to the league in 1935, still could not put it together in the state tournament and fell in the first round to Parsons 32-14.
    The Demons won the league championship in each of the 1941-1944 seasons. But during the latter half of the decade, as smaller schools came into the Southwest League, the race became more and more wide open. The Great Bend Panthers, an original league team, took the league title in the 1945-1947 seasons, but tiny Russell took it in 1948 and Larned won in 1949.
    Despite the struggles the Demons faced on the court during the last five years of Stanton's tenure as coach, he set a then-record of 11 years behind the bench as Dodge's head coach — and his players loved to play for him.
    "He was the greatest thing to happen to Dodge City basketball," said Chet Pennington, who played two seasons under Stanton.
    Stanton and Pennington became friends after Pennington graduated and started his college basketball career.
    "He respected me, trusted me," Pennington said. "He did things his way, but I was able to make him see the other side of the story."

Coming Saturday: The end of an era

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first part of a two-part series.