Chapters from "TIME TRIALS"
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New Era Begins
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Track and field, along with EHS sports in general, was transformed. As part of this change, baseballers Riese and the Van boys, as we were called, joined with shot putter Bill Ward to create a formidable 4x220-yard relay, win the conference and sectional events handily while qualifying for the state Class B finals in Madison. There the foursome tied for 2nd place with Sturgeon Bay, a school in northern Door County. Both teams were just .3 seconds behind winner Menasha, a Fox River Valley school, linked geographically to its sister city Neenah and just south of Appleton.
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Wilmot, with less than 300 students then, competed in the Class C division. (Elkhorn with 345 was over the threshold in Class B.) The Panthers placed second overall in this class led by Ray Arndt, who won the high hurdles. Their 880-yard sprint relay (4x220-yards) also ran second as did football halfback Don Timmer in the 100-yard dash. The elder Timmer brother had beaten me two weeks earlier in the SLC finals. The Elks’ time in the relay event was a full second faster than the Panthers’, as it had been in our conference meet two weeks earlier.
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Elkhorn and Wilmot, along with the other SLC schools, these days have much larger enrollments: All compete with larger schools now. The three track and field classes (A, B and C) since the 1990s are referred to as divisions (1,2, and 3). During the 1950s, football, basketball, baseball competition involved just one class. This changed a couple decades later with basketball eventually becoming five divisions. Football now has seven divisions and began a playoff system in 1976 with four divisions and 16 schools that has gradually expanded over the years. Without much exaggeration, the shift from “letters” to “numbers” in sports’ competition is an example of attempting to protect a kid’s fragile egos. Letters, after all, might be perceived as a hierarchy connoting quality or worth.
Sophomore Roger showed why SLC football teams found it difficult to corral the elusive sprinter, who raced to victory with a Class B record 22.5 seconds in the 220-yard dash finals. He had won the sprint in record time at the Fort Atkinson sectional a week earlier, but I missed qualifying for the state meet in the 100-yard dash earlier that day with a third-place finish. We also missed qualifying in the broad jump (later referred to as long jump), although Roger had one of the state’s top leaps with 21 feet three and one-half inches earlier that spring. In retrospect, I regret not working on the long jump more intently, as I had untapped leaping ability, but the training was minimal. Roger did establish the Class B record two years later but had dropped baseball his senior year, and Coach Fruth attended more to his jumping.
Roger Van "Sprinter"
1957 Undefeated 4 X 220-yard Relay Team
Our oldest brother Bob, EHS ’46, had graduated from Marquette University the spring before and assumed a position as sports editor with the weekly Elkhorn Independent for a year. It was an interim position for him before moving on the Rockford (Illinois) Morning Star, a bigger stage. During that year, he took photographs of our sports’ teams that graced the pages of my book Thinclads.
This was nearly two decades before Title IX of the 1972 federal law requiring equal opportunity for young women to play interscholastic and intercollegiate sports. It was the innocent 1950s and relatively uneventful political times, but all this would change in a few years.
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The Southern Lakes Conference, one of the oldest in Wisconsin, has a fascinating history. It began in 1953-54 with eight teams: Burlington, Delavan, Elkhorn, Lake Geneva and Whitewater along with three interlopers—East Troy, Mukwonago, and Wilmot. During the 1960s, the configuration began to change when Big Foot High (a blend of Walworth and Sharon) plus Salem Central (later named Westosha Central) were added.
Prior to its inaugural season, the core schools—Burlington, Delavan, Elkhorn, Lake Geneva, and Whitewater—were joined by Harvard, Marengo, and McHenry, three Illinois schools across the state line. This two-state amalgam took the fanciful name of SWANI for “Southern Wisconsin and Northern Illinois” that spanned seven years from 1946 to 1953. Complications having two state governing bodies led to its demise.
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Before 1946, the five core schools simply were called the Southern State Conference. This prompted teams to schedule several non-conference football games each season. I asked Bob, “Why did the Elks have a losing football season in the fall of 1945?” He explained that they played four conference champions—Lake Geneva plus Oconomowoc, Harvard (Illinois) and Lake Mills, a school near Madison, quarterbacked by Bob Petruska, who went on to star for the Badgers.
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Southern Lakes Conference members have ebbed and flowed during seven decades with only Delavan-Darien (who consolidated in 1957-58) and Elkhorn staying put. As its school enrollments have grown over the years from about 280-430 students in the 1950s to 1000 plus, Delavan-Darien remains the smallest, hovering around 700 students. DDHS’s competitiveness has waned in recent years. In 2022, it moved to the Rock Valley Conference (RVC) for football. In its place, Beloit Memorial will join the Southern Lakes Conference. DDHS is planning to move in total to the RVC.
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Unless the WIAA revises conference alignments the SLC will consist of Badger (Lake Geneva-Genoa City), Beloit Memorial, Burlington, Elkhorn, Westosha Central, and Wilmot Union along with Waterford and Union Grove, both near the Milwaukee-Racine metro area. Delavan-Darien and Elkhorn have been the only continuous Southern Lakes members since its founding in 1953.
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East Troy and Whitewater with about 600 students each are members of the RVC, while smaller Big Foot joined the Capitol Conference. Mukwonago, on the outskirts of Milwaukee, has grown to over 1600 students and joined the Classic Eight suburban conference several years ago.
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In the spring of 2019, I attended the annual World Affairs Conference at the University of Colorado—Boulder. One session titled “Reaching the Top of Your Game” featured sport standouts Chris Borland, All-American linebacker at Wisconsin, who left the San Francisco 49ers after his successful rookie season given the potential trauma of head injuries from football.
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The other panelists that afternoon included Irish Olympian skier, Conor Lyne; Christopher Thumforde, former basketball player, Lutheran minister, and college president; and U.S. Olympian goalkeeper, Hope Solo. In their remarks all lamented the state of organized youth sports nowadays with emphasis for girls and boys to specialize one sport year-around, so as to improve chances of making the varsity team, earning a college scholarship, and even playing professionally. They made the point that one’s athletic skills suffer in the absence of multi-sport participation as children and adolescents.
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This hit home and reinforced my understanding that as youngsters we lacked the training, nutrition, equipment, facilities, groomed ballfields, and all-weather tracks that exist today. Yet, we were more versatile and likely less stressed athletes. In the process, we gained a deeper appreciation for a variety of sports. In my case, this understanding led to seeing the multifaceted nature of sports, including what makes it a social issue—money, academic distraction, excessive emphasis, injuries, and extravagant entertainment that skews our culture and distorts values.
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School plays were an inviting extracurricular activity for upper-class students. For our junior class performance, I had the lead male role in Time Out for Ginger. Ginger was a mischievous teenager, and I was her exasperated father.
Cast of Time Out for Ginger
(left to right) Charlie Kvool, Nancy Martin, Dan Morrow, Gail Pett, Peggy Kemp, RVS, Linda Lawrence, Dave Fink, Barb Leffers, Dave Bartleson
Our senior year, we performed The Solid Gold Cadillac, based on a comedy romance movie that had opened earlier in 1956. Pat Tripp played the lead role that starred Judy Holliday, as an aristocratic but troublesome new stockholder, who owned 10 shares. I had the dubious role of supercilious John T. Blessington on the company’s board of directors. As years passed, I’ve regretted not doing more with my nascent acting ability.
Having foolishly ended my relationship with Ms. Tripp, I dated several girls over the last year and half of high school that included Diana Hull, Karen Wenger, the aforementioned Ms. Froehlke, (Helen) and Burlington’s Joan Moore. I had the disposition of an adolescent caught up in the social environment of his formative years.
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Being the mature person between the two of us, Pat held no ill-will towards me, and we were two kids with fond memories. This would hardly be the end of my misadventures with women. In temperament, I might be likened in name to the 1975 Kentucky Derby winning colt, Foolish Pleasure.
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Near the end of each junior year, the high school selects two boys for an immersion week in state government at Badger Boys State on the campus of Ripon College. I attended along with classmate Paul Paddock. During the week, I acquired new friends from across the state. Among them were eventual college teammates Frank McClellan (Delavan), Jerry Chase (Milton), and Jon Parvin (Port Edwards). Jerry was a tenacious defensive back; Jon and I ran one-two in the 100-yard dash at Boys State; and I served as Frank’s best man at his wedding in New Orleans six years later.
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Another new friend was Fort Atkinson’s star athlete, Jim Corrigan, with whom I shared backcourt duties on our basketball team. Jim, along with teammate Ed Sandvold, also a Boys State delegate, would help lead the Blackhawks to the state basketball finals in Madison that winter. Corrigan was in the Ripon Red Hawks' backfield when we clashed in college.
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Blackhawks, Red Hawks—actually the transition wasn’t unsettling, as both school colors were a shade of crimson.
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Elkhorn High selected one girl to attend Badger Girls State in Madison that summer. Inequality continues into the extracurricular, but that young woman was the gifted Pat Tripp.
The following year Roger was selected to attend Boys State. There he met a popular kid from Milwaukee’s Lincoln High, Alwin Lopez Jarreau, who went on to be a famous R&B, soul, and jazz singer. Al Jarreau was elected governor at Boys State and Roger joined the state supreme court. Al would earn a bachelor’s degree in psychology at Ripon College, where he sang in a group called The Indigos.
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Al Jarreau was the fifth of six children. His father was a Seventh-Day Adventist minister and singer and his mother a church pianist. Roger and he would become longtime friends in California—Los Angeles and San Francisco respectively. Al died at age 76, and our nation lost a great voice and musical entertainer.