Will Higgins

will.higgins@indystar.com

If you were a basketball player in Indianapolis in the 1950s and 1960s, and if you were good, you would end up at 3208 E. Michigan St. in a shabby, pay-by-the-week hotel with a too-weird history.

The 10-story Dearborn Hotel, built in the 1920s by the Ku Klux Klan and later the scene of an unrelated African-American triumph, had few amenities. But it had, on the second floor, a basketball court with a wood floor and an electric scoreboard. Teams you've never heard of, like Collins Dry-Wall, Panke Machinery and Charlie's Liquor, played there.

On those teams' rosters, however, were some of the biggest names in Hoosier hoops. "Willie Gardner. Oscar Robertson. Big guy from Notre Dame — Walt Sahm. Wally Cox was very tough." Bill Hampton, an Indiana Basketball Hall of Famer who played with Robertson on Crispus Attucks' 1955 state championship team, was rattling off the names of some of the players he faced at the Dearborn. He could keep going, and did.

"It was very high-quality ball," Hampton said.

It was also under the radar. Their high school and college careers over, the Dearborn's players had left the sports pages and were in the work-a-day world. With few exceptions, they weren't good enough for the pros. But they were good. And back then there were few sporting outlets for grown-ups. Jogging wasn't yet a thing. Tennis was still country clubbish, and bicycling was limited to children and the French.

The basketball games at the Dearborn, strictly amateur, received no publicity other than having final scores published in the sports section's smallest type. Nobody kept statistics. Spectators could watch from a narrow balcony that ringed the court, but few did.

Jerry Harkness had not played before such sparse crowds since junior high in Harlem. Harkness led Loyola to the NCAA title in 1963, then played for the New York Knicks and later the Indiana Pacers. He left pro ball in 1969 at age 29 and the next year was suiting up for a Dearborn team. He can't remember the sponsor.

The level of play surprised Harkness. "A lot of people would talk about the Dearborn Gym," he said, "but even so, I couldn't believe how good the competition was. It wasn't nothing to fool around with." Harkness recounted some names of Dearborn guys: "Larry Humes. Boo Ellis. A guy named Russell, who was a guy who could shoot the eyes out — he stayed with the Pacers in '68 until the last cut. Could shoot the eyes out."

Anonymous players could be no less formidable than players you'd read about, said Jack Hogan, who in the 1960s starred at Broad Ripple High School and then at DePauw University (at the Dearborn he played for the Mousetrap Lounge, whose teams were the Rodents).

"You'd have some guys who'd never played organized ball. Maybe they had eligibility problems or didn't get along with the coach, or got in trouble as juvies. So you didn't know their names, but those guys had something to prove and could be very tough."

Tougher still were the cinder-block walls that surrounded the playing floor. The walls were just 3 feet beyond the out-of-bounds lines, so there was no room to slow down. "On a fast break," said Hogan, "you had to start your layup earlier than normal."

"Or else get your bell rung," said Eddie Bopp, whose Washington High School Continentals won the state championship in 1965.

Clarence Doninger, who played at Indiana University and later worked there as athletic director, remembered padding hanging on the walls, but that may have come later. Doninger's Dearborn career extended into the 1980s, longer than others.

A handful of players visited the old gym the other day for the first time in many years. They had changed. "You do shrink," observed Wally Foltz, a DePauw Hall of Famer. "I was 6-3, but I've lost an inch and a half, and that bugs me. I'm getting down to Hogan's size."

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Hogan, whom sports writers nicknamed the "pocket rocket" and "Jack the Giant Killer," was 5-6 and, he insisted, still is.

The Dearborn Hotel's second-floor gymnasium had not changed. The court was still short, just 75 feet long, 9 feet shorter than a regulation high school court and 19 feet shorter than courts used by college and professional teams.

The gym wasn't designed for grown men but for children of white bigots who didn't want their offspring mixing with "bad company."

The building was erected in 1922 by members of the Indiana chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. They called it Liberty Hall, and that name remains etched into the building's cornerstone. "Liberty was a real KKK-type word back then," said Joan Hostetler, an Indianapolis historian who has written about the building for the website HistoricIndianapolis.com. The aim of Liberty Hall's gym, according to a newspaper advertisement, was to keep members' children "off the streets" and "out of bad company."

Bad company, to a Klansman, meant blacks, Jews and foreigners, among others. There was a gym not far from Liberty Hall at St. Philip Neri Catholic Church, 550 N. Rural St., but that wouldn't do because Catholics also were bad company. That such an openly racist organization could swing a 10-story building may seem odd, but in Indiana in the early 1920s, the KKK had standing. More than one in four white Hoosier men joined up, according to the Encyclopedia of Indianapolis. Women joined the Women of the Ku Klux Klan auxiliary. Politicians backed by the Klan won elections, including the 1924 race for governor.

But the Klan's heyday was short-lived. The group fizzled after its leader, D.C. Stephenson, was convicted in 1925 of murdering a young woman. Liberty Hall was sold, and by the early 1930s it was under new ownership as the Dearborn Hotel. Harold G. Englehardt was hired to manage the hotel, and it was Englehardt who started the basketball leagues. Over the next four decades, he and his wife, Dee, turned the pint-sized gym into a Hoosier hoops mecca.

Later, on the hotel's 10th floor, a bit of Indianapolis history was made.

In 1961 a group of Lilly chemists rented space and launched Indianapolis' first classical music radio station, WAIV-FM. The station was sold in February 1968 to a local group that changed the call letters to WTLC and reformatted it: WTLC became the first radio station in Indianapolis geared to African-Americans.

The station played soul and gospel music and carried the syndicated talk show "Night Call," which had among its guests such African-American counter-culture icons as James Baldwin and H. Rap Brown. The station was an instant success, the Star's media critic noting WTLC's "phenomenal rise" just six months after it went on the air.

As WTLC was rising, the Dearborn was beginning its slide. Englehardt sold the building in 1972. Always shabby (several of the old ballplayers remembered not wanting to place their feet on the locker room floor), the Dearborn had become even shabbier by 1991 when it was sold to Wheeler Mission Ministries. Wheeler, which serves the homeless, rehabbed the place and made it into a shelter for homeless women and children.

The old ballplayers said the Dearborn looks better now than it did back in the day. It was a Tuesday in February when they returned to their old haunt. They used the handrails to climb the wide staircase to the second floor, pushed through a heavy metal door, and there was the gym. Same floor, same balcony, same backboards, same scoreboard.

One thing was different: Arranged on the hardwood were about a dozen fold-out cots. Cold temperatures the night before had triggered the Wheeler Mission's "winter contingency" plan, where doors are thrown open to all comers even if the facility is full, every bed taken.

Overflow guests are accommodated in the gym on cots. They are women and children with nothing, and nowhere else to go.

Contact IndyStar reporter Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter: @WillRHiggins.



KNOW YOUR DEARBORN GYM BALLPLAYERS

Eddie Bopp: 1965 state championship Washington High School team; Trester Award winner.

Wally Cox: Broad Ripple High 1951-54; Butler University 1954-58, set freshman scoring record, named to "all-decade" team.

Clarence Doninger: Evansville Central High School 1950-53; Indiana University 1953-55, IU athletic director 1991-2001.

Richard "Boo" Ellis: Crispus Attucks 1958-61; University of New Mexico1962-65.

Wally Foltz: Park School 1954-58; DePauw University 1959-62.

Willie Gardner: Attucks 1951-54; Harlem Globetrotters 1954-57; New York Knicks 1957.

Bill Hampton: 1955 Crispus Attucks state championship team; played two years at Indiana Central (now University of Indianapolis); Indiana High School Basketball Hall of Fame inductee.

Jerry Harkness: DeWitt Clinton High School, New York 1957-60; Loyola University 1960-63; New York Knicks 1963-64; Indiana Pacers 1967-69.

Jack Hogan: Broad Ripple High School 1960-63; DePauw University 1963-67

Larry Humes: Madison High School 1959-62 (Mr. Basketball 1962); University of Evansville 1962-66 (All-American).

Bob Marshall: Arsenal Tech 1957-60.

Mike Noone: Sacred Heart High School 1957-58; Marian College 1960-63.

Ken Pennington: Warren Central High School 1953-56; Butler University 1956-60.

Walt Sahm: Cathedral High School 1958-61; University of Notre Dame 1961-65.

Carl Short: Manual High School 1955-58; Newberry College 1959-61; drafted by NBA Cincinnati Royals.

Herb Spier: North Central High School 1956-58; DePauw University 1958-62.



