When Cuba Conquered Kentucky
   Marianne Walker
  1999 Rutledge Hill Press, Nashville TN USA
   ISBN: 1558537457


The triumphant basketball story of a tiny rural high school team, the Cuba Cubs, achieved the American Dream & the state championship of the 1952 season.

Cast your mind back to a time in our country, just after the Second World War when indoor plumbing, shoes & electricity were rarities & basketballs were played with until their skins were so thin they had to be wound about with rags & glue & a hoop with netting was only a memory.

At the high school of Cuba, Kentucky, an isolated rural town around which three rivers poured & flooded, a group of rambunctious 8th grade boys became inspired by Coach Jack Story's dream of winning the state basketball championship. Basketball was a passion in Kentucky & every high school, no matter its size, organized a team to play game after game, traveling over miles of rural roads in all sorts of vehicles & weather.

It took Coach Story almost four years to form the winning team & back then, things were very different. By the time some of the team members were seniors they were already married & not because they had to! That simply was the way it was - especially when you realize some of them were close to 20 years of age by the time they got to the championship!

For the girls in school, their relevance was less, however, Barbara Harper, Carolyn Work & Martha(Casey)Webb formed a cheer leading troupe & are featured in their long skirts & neck high Peter Pan collared blouses. Ann Dick Hainline was Cuba's 1951-52 Senior Basketball Queen & Jackie Saxon was Junior Basketball Queen - all added their enthusiasm to the fever pitch.

In a state whose heroes where the Kentucky Wildcats with their coach Adolph Rupp, imagine the affect of watching a reel-to-reel movie of the Harlem Globetrotters in action! The Cuba Cubs, not yet a fluid team, took on some of the innovative & mind-boggling playfulness of those fabled players & became a team that mesmerized their opponents!

The illustrious dream team of 1951-52 Kentucky State High School Basketball Champions were: Paul Simpson, Jimmy Brown, Doodle Floyd, Howie Crittendon, Joe Buddy Warren, Drennon Bagwell, Jimmie Webb, Jimmy Sims, Ted Bradley, Raymon McClure, Bill Pollack, Harold Roberts. With Coach Jack Story, assistant coach Joe McPherson & managers Robert Peters, Rex Story & Bobby McClain.

Marianne Walker has told their stories with enthusiasm including insights from a time before over-the-counter medicines, when most everyone raised their own food, many were share-croppers & there were no funded school programs, school bussing & television. In a time when radio was king, not everyone had telephones & sports writers were the revered messengers of the marathon games for which just about every person would turn out.

I am no basketball fan although I did play netball at school & was quite good until injuries ousted me. I did, however, thoroughly enjoy this author's authentic & absorbing details of the life & times of this magical group of boys from an era of American life that had one foot in the past & the other hurtling into the future. Definitely for basketball lovers as well as those who enjoy seeing how our parents & grandparents lived when they were young!

Marianne Walker, a native of Monroe, Louisiana, is a professor of English & philosophy at Henderson (Kentucky) Community College. She is the author of Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh: The Love Story Behind Gone With the Wind & has written for the New York Times Book Review & the Louisville Courier-Journal Sunday Magazine.
(02/11/01)

Rebecca