Basketball Memories Make Novels Memorable #Memories #Basketball #Small Towns

Want to bring your novels alive? Use your memories.

 

I recently watched the movie, "Hoosiers" on TV. Again. I laughed. I cheered. I cried.
Why? I lived this story decades before the heartwarming film came out in 1986.



My love for hometown basketball began in high school in Darrington, Washington. I was 12 years old for my first month as a Freshman in 1948. Living in a western Washington community that was known for lots of winter snow, basketball was King. Townspeople flocked to games home and away, no matter how far or how bad the weather. They simply loaded up those who wanted to go and went.

 One snowy day after school, one of the starting five's father hollered at me on Main Street and asked if I was going to the game in Skykomish, 90 miles away. I said no, the school wasn't taking a rooters' bus. "You can go with us," he and his wife said. I really wanted to go, but shook my head. They would have to take me three miles out in the country when we got home. 

"No problem. Get in," they urged. I can't remember if our Loggers won; just the kindness of a family who knew a loyal teen girl needed a ride.

In the spring of 1951 our scoffed-at, underdog but scrappy Loggers upset a much- larger school who held a long winning streak. We won the Class B District Tournament. Seattle newspapers already had headlines congratulating the expected winners ready to go. They were forced to scramble to feature the breaking news.

1955 will never be forgotten. We not only won District Tournament but took State! A final winning basket in the last few seconds of the game did the trick.

The Loggers also won District in 1957. The town emptied. The Everett Herald carrier who brought us the newspapers found so few people home that he headed for Tacoma, site of the Class B tournament, and delivered the papers there!

I was at that game. Relatives of our school cook took me (the school secretary by then) our principal's daughter, and two friends in. Despite one of our star players breaking a leg during the game, we won--and went on to win State.

I left Darrington in 1970 for Vancouver, WA and moved to Auburn in 1978. Whenever the Darrington Loggers played schools in our area, my brother and I attended the games now being played by kids and later grand-kids of the early teams. In 2003, forty-six years after the 1957 win, Darrington took State for the third time. 

So what does pride in my hometown have to do with bringing novels alive? Those heart-stopping wins and losses, the shots from the center line when all was considered lost, and the solid backing of a small town proud of its team crept its way into several of my books.  I'd been there. Done that. The scenes were real although peopled by fictional characters.

First, It's Okay, Mom, a high-interest-low-reading level title.

Next Everlasting Melody, a career-romance, fiction but set in my home town under a different name.

Finally, Homespun Christmas. Prologue is true story of my great-grandparents. They  built the first church in Darrington in the early 1900s when "Pioneer" had one grocery store, a two-room school, and seven saloons. Rest of book is contemporary and shows a town struggling to survive--as Darrington is, due to logging restrictions. 

Thomas Wolfe said, "You can't go home again." As long as these books are on my shelf and I have "Hoosiers" to watch over and over, I relive those long-ago days, smile, and give thanks.

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