Cat Tales: A beer a day
(This is excerpt #10 from the book currently being written by Greg Eckerle called “Cat Tales: Jasper Sports Stories.” Eckerle can be reached at gregeckerle@twc.com.)
A long-forgotten anecdote about Jasper’s 1934 Final Four basketball team were the refreshments that were available at the season-ending banquet in Kundek Hall. A copy of the banquet program displayed at the Dubois County Museum sports exhibit reveals that among the donations were cigarettes and cigars from the Queen City Lunch Room, and beer from Sterling Brewers, Inc.
A 1994 Herald article stated: “The banquet for the 1934 Wildcats was a little out of the ordinary given today’s standards. Said Cy Birge (a 1934 player), ‘Prohibition went out right around the time of our basketball banquet. We all had a few beers with our dinner. You can’t get away with that anymore.’” (Indiana didn’t establish the legal drinking age at 21 until 1935.)
Furthermore, a 1934 Herald article about the banquet listed some out-of-town guests. One was a coach from Epsom High School that was so little-known that his name was spelled as “Gabby” O’Neal. But honestly, even long after Cabby O’Neill became a Jasper legend, his name is still misspelled by some today.
When Jerry Birge was sports editor of The Herald, he often was accompanied on road games by Cabby. Birge said Cabby told him when he walked into the 1934 banquet the place was packed and right in front of the stage was a long table where the team was seated. On each end of the table was a barrel of beer. “Cabby said ballplayers, and students, would walk up there, draw themselves a beer, sit there, and drink beer,” said Jerry to me in 2019. “Cabby said, I’ll be dang, what is this town? He said nobody thought a thing of it, and he told me here I ended up coaching here.”
Maybe, just maybe, Cabby had that memory in mind when he imparted some advice to Wildcat senior player Bob Sakel before the 1945 basketball season. Sakel told me a few years ago that Cabby called him into his office in the fall of 1944. Sakel was a great shooter, but he said he only weighed about 120. Cabby told him he needed to gain weight, and asked him if he could drink beer at home. Sakel, bewildered by the question, hesitated, and finally said yes. Cabby then told him to drink a beer a day. (You obviously can’t get away with that anymore, either). In finishing the story, Sakel just gave me a devilish grin and said, “So I drank seven on Saturday night.”
That 1945 Jasper team finished the regular season ranked number one in the state, but lost in the semi-state to eventual state champion Evansville Bosse. After serving in the U.S. Navy for two years, Sakel played basketball for Evansville College for four years. He grew from 5’11” to 6’3” and gained over 40 pounds, to 167. He was named Honorable Mention All-American as a senior in 1951, and was drafted by the NBA’s Milwaukee Hawks. Because of the league’s low pay at the time, Bob instead became a high school basketball coach and got married.
(In the next “Cat Tales” excerpt, we will begin our look at three Jasper baseball players who very well could have made the major leagues if World War II hadn’t intervened.)
