“We were kings”: 75 years have passed since Rock Falls’ historic season

ROCK FALLS – It’s been awhile since Dick Houston laced up his basketball sneakers and ran, pivoted and squeaked across the Rock Falls High School basketball court with his teammates.

But even after all those years, he can still remember when the ball was in their court – and boy, did they run with it.

Houston and his classmates were part of the first Rockets basketball teams to make shooting hoops a big deal in Rock Falls. Their successes begat even greater accomplishments in the decades to come, but those then-young hoopsters such as Houston, Lyle Bogott, Kenny Onken, Doug Unger and Bill Ebenezer achieved something special 75 years ago this school year that no Rockets team has matched.

The 1946-47 Rockets basketball squad ran the table during the regular season with a perfect 21-for-21 showing in the win column. No other Rock Falls teams had played more than 20 games and won them all before the postseason, and none had won a regional tournament championship before.

Even though the 1946-47 Rockets lost in the sectional tournament championship game to end their season, they are among the top hoops teams to be inducted in the high school’s athletic hall of fame.

Today, Houston is a one-man team when it comes to memories of the team’s days as kings of the court. After Bogott’s death last January, Houston is the last surviving player on that historic team. At 92, Houston and his wife of 67 years, Marian, split their time between their longtime house in Rock Falls and North Fort Myers, Florida, where they spend their winters. His “man cave” back home is a treasure trove of accomplishments and memories over 75-plus years of being a student, and teaching and coaching – most of those years at Rock Falls High School. The team photo from 1946-47 hangs above his desk. Other mementoes aren’t far away, such as the hall of fame induction plaque.

“We were kings,” Houston said. “Everyone knew you because the town was smaller. It was a great thing. We were riding high.”

Without several stars from a solid 1944-45 NCIC championship team, many of them three- or four-sport athletes, the 1945-46 team just went 9-16 – but that was to change soon.

Given the circumstances of the time, the 1946-47 roster had players who had seen a lot of the world. That’s because several of them had gone off to fight in World War II before returning stateside.

“They all got back and came back to school,” Houston said. “If we had beaten Rockford to go to the [state] tournament, Unger would have been 19 and would have been too old to play. We had a big advantage, a ‘college freshmen’ nucleus here. We played a tough schedule, too. All while doing that while the NCIC had big schools like DeKalb and Ottawa.”

When their military service ended, several players went back to high school to earn their diploma. Bogott came back from the Army. Harrington and Unger returned from the Navy. Onken, Unger’s half-brother, transferred from Morrison. Also on the team were Don Stevens, Marvin Courtright, Wayne Smith, Cal Morgan and manager Eddie Fritz.

Houston had the tough task of being a starter on the previous year’s team, but when the veteran trio returned, he moved into a sixth-man role, typically the first off of the bench. Houston didn’t mind, though, knowing that year’s Rockets were going to be extra special.

“I accepted what it was, and I was happy to get in,” Houston said. “I remember one time they put me in a game and Harry Kidd, the sportswriter, wrote in the paper, ‘Houston came in the game, he was calm and cool and collected.’ I underlined that back when I was a kid. You didn’t have any other publicity. If you got your picture anywhere, you were something.”

The annual alumni game opened the season, and the older players went down in defeat, 38-11 – and the victories just kept coming.

Hall Township of Spring Valley, who joined the NCIC the same year the Rockets did just 4 years prior, was always a tough team to beat, Houston said. Early wins over tough conference teams Hall and Ottawa gave them more confidence that they were going to be something special with a high-energy fast-break offense.

“We had a good fast-break,” Houston said. “In practice, [coach Lloyd] Hinders would throw the ball up on the board, we’d rebound it, and we’d have it down on the other end in the basket in 2 1/2 to 3 seconds. It was against nobody, we were just running through the thing. It would be a rebound out to the side and the guy would run and shoot. We’d do that maybe 10 or 15 times every night.

“Then we’d play against defenses. They’d just be in position, and we’d take the rebound and they’d play against us, and we’d attack them. We had a really good machine functioning.”

The Rockets won the Geneseo Holiday Tournament to open 1947. In between that feat, they beat their arch rivals, Sterling High, twice: 60-26 in Sterling and 76-28 in Rock Falls.

“The last game we played them, we hammered them,” Houston said. “They had an average team. They had the brother of the guy that ran the clothing store [Sullivan’s] in downtown Sterling, Curt Brandau, was the coach that year. We just demolished them. They had good athletes in other sports.”

Rock Falls played Dixon three times that season, and the Dukes gave the Rockets their closest games. In their first meeting on Jan. 31 in Rock Falls, the Dukes led for almost all of the game until the final 2 minutes. On two occasions, Rocket go-ahead buckets were waved off, but finally Onken scored a shot that counted for the win.

“Dixon was really tough,” Houston said. “They had a really good team. We scored two or three times and they called them off with penalties of some sort. We didn’t get them, and then he finally scored to win it. They felt cheated, but I remember their coach [Lee Davison] wrote Hinders a letter admitting, I guess, that we were the better team.”

One of the Rockets’ biggest wins came Feb. 28 in a surprise situation. Hinders arranged for a scrimmage against Clinton High School in Iowa in a non-game situation. However, when the Rockets arrived, they found that the Riverkings intended for their meeting to be a full-fledged game situation. It was a bit of a shock, but the Rockets took on this sudden challenge and came away successful against a tough Riverkings squad.

“They were ranked third of fourth in the state at that time,” Houston said. “We went down there and it was a game situation. They had referees and everything. We went down there for a practice. We didn’t have a crowd. We beat them not too bad at all, and didn’t have much problem with them.”

In the regional tournament held at the Coliseum in Sterling, Rock Falls opened postseason play with a 72-21 win over Amboy, a 59-48 win over Community Catholic (now Newman), and endured another tough game with the Dukes before winning 53-46 to take the championship on March 7. In the game, Unger led the Rockets with 18 points, Bogott had 15, and Houston and Harrington each had seven points.

The Rockets’ fast-break style proved once again to be no match for the Dukes.

“I had a really good game,” Houston said. “We were coming down on a fast-break one time. Bogott was in the middle and had the ball, and there was a guy between us. He threw me a bounce pass, and I took it right on my hip and I went up to the basket and put it up left-handed and made it before I crashed into the chairs. To do it left-handed in those days was huge, and I did it all in one motion.”

Rock Falls moved on to the sectional tournament at West High School in Rockford. They opened play with a 57-33 win over Rochelle before taking on Rockford’s East High, a regional power that was in the middle of a 4-year run as state qualifiers. In the win against the Hubs, Bogott led the way with 19 points, and Unger and Harrington were in double-figures with 12 and 11 points, respectively.

“We murdered them in the first game, just murdered them,” Houston said.

Midnight struck on the Rockets’ season in the sectional championship. The Rockets opened that game with a 7-0 lead, but with Harrington dogged with foul trouble early on, it hurt the team’s chances against a much larger E-Rabs squad. They played catch-up the rest of the way, but East ended their season and advanced to the state finals.

“They got fouls on Harrington right away,” Houston said. “They had a big 6-foot-4 center [Lou Proctor], and they were a good team. The big schools were supposed to win back then. Everybody assumed that.”

In the 44-36 defeat, Bogott led Rocket scorers with 14 points and Unger chipped in eight more. Houston felt that one issue that hurt the Rockets against East was the officials’ treatment of the two head coaches. E-Rabs coach James Laude was given a little more preferential treatment, Houston thought.

“Coach Laude was running up and down the sideline, and Hinders was very fragile as he had back surgery,” Houston said. “He got up and he started to protest, and they went, ‘Get over there and sit down or we’ll throw you out!’ That just demolished his whole mindset. He just sat on the bench, so crushed by how they treated him, I think. He didn’t function on the bench the way he normally would have. He didn’t know how to react to being treated so ungentlemanly.”

Hinders, according to Houston, wasn’t a tough coach at all, but a soft-spoken man free of foul language, someone who would fit in well with today’s high school coaches. Before coming to the high school, Hinders coached at the junior high, where his 1943-44 eighth-grade team took third place in the state elementary tournament with most of the same kids who later had high school success.

While the Rockets from 75 years ago didn’t win the amount of postseason hardware that other memorable teams did years later, Houston knows of one other special team that might not have had playoff success but perhaps most people have forgotten, he said. That’s the 1944-45 squad that he and Bogott were a part of, one that went 19-6, won the NCIC title, and defeated the much larger New Trier High School of suburban Winnetka during the DeKalb Holiday Tournament. Hinders coached that team, which also included John Bohms, Dick Livingstone, Jim Elhoffer, Ed McDaniels, William Wescott, Bob Brainerd, Bob Yount and Larry Nielsen. Houston is the last survivor of the that team as well.

In the New Trier game, Houston hit two “big, long ones” in a 47-27 win. He probably would have excelled if a 3-point line was around then, he said. “That was a really big deal back in those days, because they were big and they were suburban.”

After attending college at DePauw and the University of Illinois, and a 2-year stint in the Army, Houston began his teaching and coaching career in Marseilles before moving downstate to Lexington, where he was an assistant coach on the Minutemen’s 1957-58 rural county and conference championship-winning squad, and also was head football and baseball coach. He returned to Rock Falls in 1958 – 1 year after the Rockets’ basketball team finished second at the state tournament – to teach history, physical education and driver education, and coach several sports along the way, including underclassmen basketball and football, track and field, and he was head cross country and golf coach during the 1960s.

Among his memorable coaching moments, in Houston’s second year back at his high school alma mater, he was an assistant coach for the 8-0 undefeated freshman-sophomore football team – which became the unbeaten 9-0 varsity conference champions the following year – and coached NCIC cross country conference champion Addly White.

Houston taught at Rock Falls High until 1988, and his basketball skills lasted just as long. During a special school event in March 1986, when the reigning Super Bowl champions, the Chicago Bears, came to town for a “Bears vs. faculty” game, Houston played and sank a shot from halfway across the Tabor Gymnasium court.

Houston remains proud of the accomplishments he and his teammates achieved to make their years at Rock Falls High School a memorable ones, not only for the team but their hometown as well. They made high school hoops a local attraction for not just adults, but also for young kids who may have looked on thinking they wanted to be the next Lyle Bogott, Doug Unger or Dick Houston. Some of those kids grew up to be stars on the 1957-58 second-place team – including Gary Kolb and Ken Siebel – who, in turn, inspired another generation of Rockets to excel in athletics.

For now, Houston has his place in Rocket athletic lore, and he’s carrying on the legacy and memories his teammates helped create.