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| 1925 Whelen Springs High School Basketball Team Left to Right: Doyle Eakin, Unknown, Cleatus Stone,Unknown Measles, Unknown Measles |
March has a lot of Americans turning their attention to
basketball because of the March Madness and the final four tournaments. So I thought it would be a
good time to share another of my favorite and cherished family photos—my father, Doyle Eakin, standing with his 1925 basketball teammates from Whelen Springs High School.
Whelen Springs is located in the southern part of Clark
County, Arkansas and is in terms of a small town was and still is the epitome
of a small southern rural town. First settled around 1881 on land owned by Henry Whelen that was laced
with chalybeate springs (hence the name Whelen Springs) it never exceeded a
population of 214. In the most recent
U.S. Census, there were only 92 residents left living in the old sawmill town.
East Whelen Springs, a suburb of Whelen Springs, is where my father was born and
raised. It too is a small community that in today’s vernacular would be called a bedroom
community of Whelen Springs! Oddly though, in the early part of the 1900s there were more families living in East Whelen Springs, another sawmill community, than
in Whelen Springs proper.
In his younger years, my father probably attended one of the
many schools near the East Whelen Springs community. By the time my father's high school years came along in 1925 he attended Whelen Springs High School, where the many small outlying schools had been consolidated in 1915. Like many people of his generation, he unfortunately only attend one year of high school and never graduated.
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| Whelen Springs High School Photo courtesy of Ouachita Baptist University Archives |
Basketball likely was the prominent sport for the small high
school. In 1925 when the photo was taken, the boys in this picture may have
been the only ones available to play this exciting young sport. Basketball, invented in 1891 by Dr.
James Naismith obviously took many schools all across the nation by storm. This new sport, developed to keep rowdy children busy while inside during the cold winter months made its way from the Springfield,
Massachusetts YMCA into the south and found a place in the little school in Whelen
Springs, Arkansas where my father and his teammates stood proud to have their
photo taken.
The Whelen Springs High
School team appears to have the most current uniform for the mid-1920s available to them. Their shorts are made of cotton, the only sensible fabric available. The sleeveless V-neck tee-shirts are standard, along with their shoes. The style of basketball shoe was made by Chuck Taylor and is known as
the All Star Converse shoe still are on the market today. In the early 1900s, just about
everyone had a pair of the shoes!
