Biggest Impact on Small Town : Seminole, Okla.: Imported players make a difference on basketball court and on Main Street.

This is a town that few folks cared about 20 years ago, even in Oklahoma. Even in Seminole.

But as the 1960s gave way to the ‘70s, a strange thing happened.

The town’s pride and jewel--Seminole Junior College--began raiding the rest of the country for black basketball players.

Overnight, there was a competitive team here, instead of a middling, lusterless team. And suddenly, the town wasn’t being ignored anymore. Suddenly, for miles around, people were toasting Seminole.

As indeed they still are.

Today, after all these years, the junior college is still bringing in tall, talented black athletes. The town is still white, basically, but its basketball team is still competitive. And for miles around, everyone is still noticing.

The formula for instant prominence has proven to be a recipe for continued eminence.

“It’s a new kind of old-fashioned American success story,” Ted M. Phillips, publisher of the Seminole Daily Producer, remarked one day recently. “Hey, we’ve had a kind of revolution.”

SERENDIPITY

In all, three things could have been said--were said--in the 1970s about Seminole and the people here:

First, the successful basketball team promoted the college so thoroughly that the administration could picturesquely enlarge the campus. In 1972 it was nothing but a one-building college. There are nine buildings now in a handsome academic setting.

Second, in the early years, almost nobody watched the basketball team. From the start, the SJC Trojans promoted the school but not, curiously, the school budget.

Third, and perhaps saddest of all, nobody admired the town. In the early ‘70s, the Main Street area in Seminole, a community of 8,500 in south-central Oklahoma, was a crumbling mess.

The architecture was 1930s desolate--and that was the best thing about it.

The 1989 update:

First, Trojan teams continue to advertise Seminole in what continues to be a successful program.

Second, Seminole sports crowds--for baseball now as well as basketball--continue to be strangely undersized.

But, third, the town has changed, strikingly. It has transformed itself into the most attractive of the many little towns in this part of the country.

“We’re proud of Seminole now,” said Bob Jones, who after 17 years is still manager of the chamber of commerce.

“And visitors like us now,” he added, calling attention to the vast changes of the last decade or two. Some of them:

--Unlike most American towns, Seminole has carefully landscaped its Main Street area with, on every block, an abundance of shrubs and flourishing trees.

--Brick sidewalks have been installed everywhere to complement the wide, brick streets.

--At great cost, Seminole’s unsightly tangles of telephone and utility wires have been repositioned underground. No more poles.

--And though most of the downtown buildings date from the ‘20s and ‘30s, most of the storefronts have been rebuilt. They’re not only new but well proportioned and pleasing.

What happened? What prompted this renaissance?

It all started, Jones said, with the imported black basketball players.

Out-of-town sportswriters, who came by to watch them play, were impressed by the basketball team--but depressed by the community. They called it unnecessarily ugly.

“The way our town was criticized made us angry,” the chamber of commerce manager said. “So angry that we had to do something about it.

“We went out and raised $2.2 million in (local) and federal financing--and used it all to put on a new face.”

The junior college only wanted a better basketball team, Jones noted, but got a better city as well.

“That’s the definition of serendipity,” he said.

ADJUSTMENT

The idea that a college basketball program can be upgraded markedly with one or two gifted athletes from afar goes back at least to the John Wooden era at UCLA. The Bruins prospered first with Walt Hazzard from Philadelphia, and then with New Yorker Lew Alcindor, the 7-footer who later became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

But at UCLA, Wooden didn’t make a practice of national recruiting.

“A good 90% of our players were always from Southern California,” he said.

In Oklahoma, it was the junior college at Seminole that came up with a dramatic adjustment in Wooden’s philosophy--bringing in a black team instead of a player or two from the South and East.

The architects of the Seminole policy were the school’s first president, Elmer Tanner, and first basketball coach, Bailey Vanzant.

When Tanner told Vanzant to build a basketball team that would make a major improvement on SJC’s first-year Trojans, who had a hard time breaking .500, the coach flew to Louisiana and New York, and returned with 15 good athletes, nine of whom stayed.

That year, of SJC’s 705 full-time students, only 26 others were black.

The revised team was an instant winner, satisfying President Tanner.

“The health of any school depends on two things that have little to do with education as such: morale and public relations,” Tanner said in 1972. “Without advertising, the best product withers and dies.

“A winning basketball team is the finest thing we have going for us in the areas of morale and public relations.”

Asked if the small basketball crowds were harmful to Seminole’s image, Tanner said:

“You don’t need a sellout to get attention. Regardless of the size of the gate, an athletic team is an advertisement for the school--provided it wins.

“A loser does nothing for morale on campus, and it’s just something to joke about downtown. You must be competitive.”

That explains why Seminole’s athletic philosophy is unchanged today under a new president, James J. Cook, whose recruiters range from Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi to North Carolina, New York and Washington, D.C.

“The public recognition of a college is associated with its athletic teams,” Cook said recently. “And you have to win to be viable. Losing is a negative.

“When you have some success, people identify with you. And that’s what you’re after.”

AMBIVALENCE

A prominent Seminole businessman was approached this year by two different junior college fund raisers--the first of whom tried to sell him a pair of basketball season tickets.

It couldn’t be done.

The second sought $250 for the SJC athletic booster fund to help with recruiting, travel and other expenses. This request also brought a quick, simple response--a $250 check.

“I haven’t seen their basketball team play yet,” the businessman said. “But it’s good for the town, so I support them.”

For the better part of 20 years, when contemplating Seminole Junior College sports, the downtown citizenry has been uncommonly ambivalent. The business people who make intercollegiate sports possible for the Trojans seem to have little or no interest in the school’s games.

“Seminole is on the map now, thanks to the junior college teams, (because) everybody respects a winner,” said the town optometrist, Hubert Callaway. “The teams, though, have never caught on with the townspeople--not the way you’d expect in a state that goes for basketball in such a big way.

“The main problem is that we have a lot of good high school basketball in the Seminole area. The town is ringed by five or six high school (districts) that are just a few miles away, and they’re very competitive. It’s a strange situation.

“Anyhow, everybody watches their neighbors’ boys on the high school teams instead of the junior college boys--most of (whom) are from out of state.”

At the same time, the town’s business people strongly favor and steadily support junior college basketball in Seminole.

As Phillips put it at the Daily Producer office, a winning basketball program is invaluable to the junior college--which is invaluable to the town.

“The team earns headlines all around the state,” the publisher said. “That’s had a lot to do with the growth of the college.

“And nothing’s better for a town this size than a prospering college.

“One important thing: It brings in a class of people that you wouldn’t have otherwise. It provides the churches with a pool of educated people. It enables local people to expand themselves--in some cases to re-educate themselves.

“Some years ago, my society editor married out of high school, but the junior college gave her a place to get started again in her spare time, and now she’s well on the road to a degree (at the University of Oklahoma).”

To begin with, it was the residents of Seminole who got together and, in 1970, bought the first 30 acres of real estate for a junior college.

Said Phillips: “We also voted a sales tax on ourselves--if you can believe that--to help build the first buildings, and get the school started. That was before the state would step in.”

STABILITY

From the railroad station uphill to the center of town, Main Street wasn’t even graveled in the 1920s when a prospective Seminole newspaper editor got off the train on a cold, rainy day and started wading through the mud on the way up toward the print shop.

Oklahoma legend has it that halfway, he was met by a small civic delegation whose spokesman greeted him warmly and asked: “Are you going to start a daily or weekly?”

The editor shivered, looked around at the tumbledown wooden buildings, and said: “I’ve just decided to start a daily. That way I can go broke faster, and get out of here.”

It was either boom or bust in Seminole in those days, and it has been boom or bust ever since, largely because of fluctuations in the supply and price of oil.

In 1926, when the first well came in, Seminole’s population soared in a week or so from 750 to 30,000. Soon, there were three daily papers, and for a while Seminole was the second-busiest station on the Rock Island Line, behind only Chicago.

It didn’t last. In this town, prosperity never lasts. But then, it’s never far away, either. It always comes back. So they don’t give up here, although, for years, what they really longed for was some stability.

These days it’s the junior college that gives them that, at least in part. The wide campus lawns on the northwest edge of town provide a green and restful setting for the school’s nine neat, new brick buildings, including the field house where the basketball team plays.

By design, Seminole JC competes in only two varsity sports, basketball and baseball, figuring that with just two, it can be successful in both. The baseball program, in fact, has been the more productive.

SJC baseball teams have been to the national tournament six times in the 1980s, the basketball team once or twice.

“Since (1980), 55 of our graduates have gone into pro baseball, and some have (progressed) from Class A to the big leagues,” said school publicist Lana Reynolds. “We’ve had seven (basketball) players in the NBA.”

Happily for Seminole’s athletes--black and white, tall or small, basketball players or baseball players--the school’s downtown base has remained unchanged for nearly two decades.