Willow Leaves November 8

Batten Down for Winter With a nip of frost in the air, Hoosiers are battening down the hatches for a hard winter. This is just as true in Willow Mills as anywhere else. The Memorial Fountain has been drained and dried. This year for the first time, a water-tight canopy has been installed over the pool portion of the fountain in hopes of minimizing damage that could be done by thawing and freezig of rain water in the tank. During a particularly harsh winter some years ago, the tank sustained some damage when a hard freeze came before the October 31 draining of the fountain. Heaters were brought in to melt the ice, but were too late to avert damage. This year the draining went without a problem though it was cold work for the crew. The new canopy is designed to keep water out during forecast heavy rains before a Thanksgiving freeze. Having a hard time with drought this year, many farmers are still having difficulty getting late harvests in from low-lying bean fields where mud from last month’s rains continues to bog down the combines. But overnight frosts have left the ground solid enough at dawn to support heavy machinery. So the scramble to get crops into storage is taxing many locals. Roofers are reported to be in short supply with average waits for reputable contractors estimated at eight weeks if the weather holds. This has led to a virtual invasion of fly-by-night tar-haulers offering to skim-coat flat roofs before winter. Businesses are warned to thoroughly investigate contractors before hiring them and to insist on completion of the job before payment is made.

Sweet Sixteen

It was the end of an era. In November of 1967 the good citizens of Willow Township approved a resolution to unite with theNorth Manchester School District along with its neighbor Laketon. That meant that the elementary school would continue operations but the Junior and Senior High School students would bus into the bigger schools in North Manchester. The Class of ’68 would be the last to graduate from Willow Mills High School. The class emblem showed the white bull breating red tinged smoke with the numbers 68 emblazoned in Gold against a Burgundy field.

It also happened to be the year that the Anglin broghers, Arnold and Ronald, moved to town. The twins had gotten in some trouble in Chicago where they lived. Not to serious, but their father decided to pick them up and move to the country. He took a job at Ford Meter in Wabash and moved into a nice home in Willow Woods. In the fall, the boys started their senior year in a new school with no friends and a “city attitude” about small towns.

But the boys were awkward—some would say downright clumsy—having experienced a late growth spurt over the summer. They crammed themselves into their desks the first day of school at a gangling 6'6" tall. Now in Indiana, and Willow Mills, especially, a 6'6" tall boy could only mean one thing—basketball. And two 6'6" boys could mean a winning season or even a sectional championship.

The mere fact that the boys had never played basketball was no obstacle. Coach Phelps let them know the first day of school that if they showed up, they’d make the team.

Now Coach Phelps was no great gift to basketball. He was even a pretty mediocre math teacher and was looking forward to retiring when the schools unified. His idea of coaching was pretty much to follow the drills in the book he bought about the subject, and to referee scrimmages, which was most of what basketball practice was all about at WMHS. Let's face it: Willow Mills didn’t exactly attract Big Ten quality coaches. But win or lose, the stands were always full at home games.

With the Anglin boys on his team, he had four seniors, five juniors, three sophomores, and a freshman. Almost every boy in the school played basketball. But Frank Lapinski chose the Junior Varsity team at random each week from the intramural squads who played on Wednesdays after school. That way, pretty much everybody got a chance to play.

Well, Coach Phelps watched the first few scrimmages of the season and saw right away that being 6'6" tall was no guarantee that there was any talent for basketball. What’s worse, the other members of the team seemed to expect even more from the big guys than he did. They expected the two to work as a team, to get the rebounds, and to be able to dunk the ball. Well, things weren’t exactly working out the way folks expected when the first game came and went with a pounding loss. It almost looked like the pick of the week intramural team could have beaten the varsity squad they fielded that night.

It was a sad week in Willow Mills as they approached their second game, and they were soundly tromped by Warsaw to no one’s great surprise. Then Coach Phelps wandered into Josephine’s on Saturday morning for a cup of coffee and a piece of Devlin Pie. He joined a group of men who were sitting in the corner for their usual. Most of these guys were farmers, with a few businessmen from town thrown in. The greetings started out pretty much the same as they had the week before when Ogden Filmore spoke up.

“You know, Coach,” he said slowly, “you can’t expect to win a basketball game if you only play with half your team.” The words fell on the table with that kind of almost profound thud that indicates that no one got the point. “Well,” continued Ogden, “think of it. You got a thirteen member team and the only ones that shoot are the Anglin boys. As soon as they get the ball down the court, somebody passes to Arnie or Ronnie and expects them to score. Now granted, they are getting better, and their height gives them a certain advantage, but they can’t be expected to win games by themselves. They just barely know the rules. Spread the work around a little.”

The comment got a good long discussion going about teams that the guys had known over the years. What made one team good and another poor? How did coaches manage their assets? What was the best thing Willow Mills had going for it? Coach Phelps left Josephine’s with his head buzzing. But the idea had been planted.

Coach started rotating players more. Sometimes he didn’t have either brother on the floor. The team had to start thinking like a team with many players. And they started to improve. They even started to win. When Sectionals came around in March, they approached it with a winning season and it was with great satisfaction that they beat North Manchester in the last game of the Sectionals to move on to Regionals. The North Manchester coach was heard to remark that he was glad Coach Phelps was retiring or he'd be out of a job next year.

In Regional play, the little team from Willow Mills astounded everybody by taking the first game from Plymouth. Then they came to the very team that had so humiliated them at the beginning of the season: Warsaw. Coach Phelps sat down with the boys during as the third and fourth place finishers were being decided on the court that Saturday night. I won’t go into all the details of his pep talk: how they were the finest team Willow Mills had ever seen; they were a real team; they were like family to him. But the main thing that he said was that they’d gotten further than anybody expected them to get and they were playing a team that out-classed them by a huge margin. There were rumors that one of the players already had a scholarship offer from IU in Bloomington. So they were going to approach this game as if it were the last game of a great season, which it probably would be. And the principle that they would follow was “Everybody Plays.” He’d rotate the whole crew into the game so everyone had a chance to play in the Regional Finals. It would be just like one of the rotating scrimmages in practice. Everybody’s family was out there in the stands, all the students from the school, and they all had favorites among the team players. Coach Phelps was going to make sure that everyone got a chance to see their favorites play. How they played was up to the boys.

Well, maybe it was Phelps’ pep talk, or maybe the planets were aligned right. But at the end of that night, eight of the thirteen varsity players were in double digits and Arnie Anglin slam-dunked the winning basket with just three seconds left on the clock. Willow Mills High School was in the Sweet Sixteen.

When they went up against Elkhart in the first game of the State Semi-Finals the next weekend, it was obvious that they were outgunned and outclassed. But they played a scrapping game of basketball and everyone went home proud of the home team. There were no tears in Willow Mills that night and on Sunday there was an impromptu ceremony at the school in which the Seniors cut the nets down out of the gym and held up their Sectional and Regional trophies and fourth place State Semi-Final trophy. Out of respect for the Baptists in town, the school didn’t usually hold dances on Sundays, but this one was spontaneous. Young and old kicked off their shoes and had a sock hop on the gym floor. Mrs. Sullivan brought the record player from the band room and Everett Thompson showed up with his collection of 45s. They spun every song from Benny Goodman to The Beattles. It was the night that the whole town turned Sweet Sixteen.

And the Anglin boys got their act together as well. Wearing their letter jackets with the white bull on the sleeve to the recruiter’s office, they joined the army together and after a tour in Viet Nam, applied for officer’s school. They made the army a career and travelled around the world. Last we heard from them, they were both retired after 25 years service, had families, and were living in Wyoming, just a couple miles from each other.