Proud Bear players

It was a memorable time.

The movie classic “Casablanca” was in theaters and an entire generation shed a tear when Humphrey Bogart looked into Ingrid Bergman’s eyes and said “We’ll always have Paris,” and fell in love to haunting melody “As Time Goes By.”

The Mills Brothers had an all-time hit with “Paper Doll” and the immortal Lena Horne did the same with “Stormy Weather.” Tommy Dorsey, Xavier Cugat, Perry Como, Glenn Miller, Bing Crosby, Benny Goodman, Dinah Shore and Judy Garland all had hit records that year.

And out in Veradale, the Central Valley Bears became a hit on the basketball court.

Gordon Crabtree, Chic Sale and Bud Waybright from the Central Valley class of 1945, gathered Tuesday to reminisce about their two-year run as district basketball champions. The teammates will attend the second annual CV All Class Reunion Saturday at Pavillion Park in Liberty Lake.

“We’ve had reunions over the years,” Crabtree said. “We got together for our 30th class reunion, and again for our 50th.”

The team lost members over the years. Marv Ainsworth, who went on to coach rival University for 20 seasons, died first.

“The interesting thing about this team is that everyone stayed right here in the Spokane area,” Waybright said. “A lot of us went into the service during World War II, but we came back.”

“And a bunch of us became teachers,” Sale said.

Waybright and Crabtree went from Central Valley to the military. “I spent 27 months on the Island of Attu (in the Aleutian Islands),” Crabtree said.

Sale, who officiated college and high school football games for 52 years and basketball for 35 years, played basketball at Eastern Washington University, where he played under legendary coach Red Reese, for whom the EWU basketball court is named.

“I was there for a quarter when I was drafted,” he laughed. “The college president got me a deferment for a quarter and they let me finish the season.”

Coaching legend Ray Thacker took over the Central Valley varsity for the 1942-43 season.

“Thacker took over for our sophomore season,” Sale said. “It’s funny, looking back. Thacker didn’t know a thing about basketball when he became our coach. He just copied everything Squinty Hunter did at Lewis and Clark and had us do the same thing. We ran their offense, their defense – everything.”

“And then we started beating them with it,” Crabtree laughed.

The Bears gained entry into the state’s lone championship tournament each year by winning the Northeast District tournament, which played its championship games at the EWU in Cheney.

“When we got to the state tournament, we played at the University of Washington in Hec Edmundson,” Sale said. “We’d never been in anything that big before. I remember we played our first game at 10 in the morning and I couldn’t believe that that many people would turn out to watch a high school basketball game at 10 in the morning.

“In those days you could smoke indoors. I remember looking up in to the seats and seeing these little red glows and not knowing what that was.”

The Bears were a pre-tournament threat to win a state title their senior season.

“I really thought we were going to win it all right up until Gordon got hurt,” Sale said.

Crabtree, the team’s speedy guard, was injured late in the season when he caught a knee to his neck.

“I got a nasty infection in a gland in my neck and I was out,” Crabtree said. “And Bud was out with an infection in his knee so he couldn’t play at state either.”

In those days, before penicillin, an infection was a serious affliction.

The three men sat around a table at the new Central Valley High school, thumbing through the yearbook Crabtree brought, along with a collection of programs and newspaper clippings.

“I have my mom to thank for all this,” Crabtree laughed. “She saved everything. Looking back, I’m glad she did.”

Thacker and E.L. “Squinty” Hunter, the legendary LC coach for whom that school’s fieldhouse is named, are forever linked in Spokane basketball coaching lore. Hunter won state titles in 1926, 1944 and 1949; Thacker led the Bears to the state title game in 1960 and won it all in 1968. By the time they retired, Hunter had 475 career wins in 40 seasons as a head coach; Thacker was just two wins behind in 35 seasons.

“He was just a gung-ho kind of a coach,” Sale said. “I can tell you one thing, if you played for coach Thacker, you made your free throws. If you missed free throws, you sat.”

The Bears played their home games on the site of what is now Greenacres Middle School and in a gym that was built as part of the Civilian Conservation Corps.

“It was a tiny gym,” Waybright said. “There were posts standing right next to the basketball court that were padded during games. When we finally got the new high school, it was the first time we had a bigger, better gym than West Valley. They were our arch rivals, so it was a big deal in those days.”