The other night at the Inland Lounge, I got into a conversation with a couple of Wallace High School grads about the Wallace/Kellogg rivalry. How did you experience this rivalry back in high school? The people I talked to Friday night thought the rivalry had weakened over the years. Had it started to weaken when we were in high school in the 1970s and 1980s? Or did you experience things that were evidence of the rivalry being very much alive when we were in high school?Here is Christy's post. Carol's is here.
Maybe it was all overblown. I don't even know where these stories came from. I heard them in grade school and junior high. Two lines of guys. They'd agreed on some field up Moon Gulch or Bumblebee or, who knows, maybe Terror Gulch. Wallace guys in a line faced off against Kellogg guys in the other line. Armed with knives and chains. And then, so I heard, they'd rumble.
Because Wallace and Kellogg hated each other.
Whoever told these stories always bemoaned, when they told them, at least fifty years ago, "It ain't that way anymore. There used to be some mean sons of bitches in these towns. But, now --" and their voices would trail off, as if some great tradition had been lost, as if without knives and chains and rumbles the Silver Valley was a lesser place.
I don't know when this golden age of intra-county rivalry and violence took place. I always pictured it, when I'd hear these stories, as if happened in black and white and the guys had packs of Camels rolled in their T-shirt sleeves and arrived for the rumbles in Hudson Hornets and Chevy Bel Airs with their weaponry loaded in the trunks.
All I know is that by the time I was in junior high and high school, every Kellogg/Wallace football game or basketball game I attended or played in ended without the fans of the two teams spilling out of the stands and having it out and I never heard of any rumbles up any gulches or at any campgrounds.
That said, things were intense when teams I was on played Wallace.
Therefore, it's especially memorable to me that by my ineptitude I contributed to a couple of Wallace wins, helped undermine my own Kellogg teammates in a couple of Wallace/Kellogg tilts.
When I was 12 years old, it looked like I might have been a hero against Wallace in the district Little League All-Star tournament. I'll say it was in the third or fourth inning and the game was tied at 1-1 and I slammed a high arching home run to straight away center field off of Steve Rife. We held on to that lead going into the bottom of the sixth (and final) inning. Wallace had a left handed hitter named Cameron someone, a left-handed hitter, as I remember, and Cameron hit a routine grounder just to my left at third base. I fielded it cleanly, but, as I was prone to do, I got excited and threw the ball to first base about 150 times harder than I needed to and my peg sailed over first baseman Don Knott's head, putting Cameron on second base.
Well, one thing led to another in that sixth inning and Wallace eked out two runs and beat us, thanks largely to my stupid error. I looked it up one day. I think the final was 5-4.
My senior year, in basketball, I started one game all season long. Regular starter John Hinkemeyer had sprained his ankle and for some God forsaken reason, not only did our coach decide at nearly the last minute that I would start in Hinkemeyer's place, he also named me captain for the game. I hadn't started a high school basketball game in over a year and during this, my senior year, I hardly played.
And then the coach named me captain.
Well, whatever is the opposite of I rose to the occasion, that is what I did that night.
Right from the start, I played abysmally.
Terry Turner won the opening tip and Lars retrieved it. I broke at breakneck speed for the basket, Lars saw me, fed me perfectly, and as the barely able to control myself bundle of nervousness and anxiety and adrenaline that I always was when playing in a high school game, multiplied by the factor of Kellogg v Wallace, I laid the ball up just a little too hard and missed an open lay up. Our coach called an early time out, in part to berate me in the huddle, sarcastically thanking me for getting us off to such a great start, and until I got benched later in the quarter, I played some of the worst basketball of my life.
I suppose I know part of what made me so nervous and dizzy in this Wallace basketball game: I really liked their players and I wanted to impress them. In the summer, our American Legion baseball team was the Kellogg-Wallace Miners. Players from the entire county comprised this team and so most of Wallace's starting five on their basketball team were my teammates and fellow pranksters in the summer: Steve Rife, Steve Grebil, Don Beehner, Mike Crnkovich, and, until he got hurt that season, Steve Blum.
I was greatly relieved in the summers to be these guys' teammates because I didn't like the rivalry stuff. I didn't like the legendary stories of violence and I didn't like the added pressure I felt whenever we played Wallace in high school sports or competed in other activities like High School Bowl. I don't now and definitely didn't then have much of a stomach for a fight. I have never been very competitive. I wanted to have fun, enjoy other participants, play the game well, but somewhere along the line I never got a fire burning in my belly to defeat others whether in poker, golf, basketball, baseball, or anything else. I didn't thrive on competition. It wilted me. It still does. If I hear someone say, "I don't care if it's tiddlywinks, if there's a winner and a loser, I want to win!", I try to escape that situation and get out of the card game or the board game.
So, back in the summers of 1970-72, when we Kellogg guys and the Wallace guys, guys like Doc, Jake, Nifty, Grebe, and the others came together to start practicing and forming a team, however lousy, it was the highlight of my year. I was a lot happier joining forces with these guys than having them as opponents.
The payoff for playing on the same team with these guys and not being bitter rivals is happening now that I'm in my sixties. I'm starting to see the Wallace guys. I see Rob every Friday afternoon that I join the Wallace Social Club for beers. I see Beehner, too. If I hadn't been resting my gout inflamed toe and foot a couple of months ago, I would have seen Doc and Jake at the Pine Creek Tavern. I have become friends with Mary, Doc's wife. I know Hughie is in the Valley still and Starr is is CdA and Dan Carrico, a Wallace rival, shares a river property with Kellogg Wildcat Jim "Byrdman" Byrd who is married to Wallace's own Stephanie Mattern.
Just this past weekend, Byrdman and I traveled to Priest River to pay our respects to Wallace's Steve Rife (remember than Little League homer I mentioned?). We didn't go to Steve's Celebration of Life to bury a rival who made our blood boil. We went to pay tribute to an American Legion teammate and a Silver Valley brother.
Maybe guys of another generation enjoyed having a bitter rival in Wallace. Maybe they thrived on the bad blood, the hard fought games, the ongoing competition to see which town was the best in Shoshone County.
I didn't want a bitter rival.
I wanted friends and teammates.
Still do.
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