There never seemed to be enough food at home. No one was starving, but there simply wasn’t enough of a comfort zone; a second or third helping was never a guarantee. On out-of-town games, the coaching staff would marvel at how much food the players ate.
The mothers, mindful of the appetites of their athletic sons, would set aside supper for when they arrived home from practice. But the sons, coming through the door and seeing their younger siblings, some of them still with hungry looks on their faces, would start sharing the meal they had grabbed from the stovetop. Scenes like this were emblematic of the poverty of black Americans. These households were suffering various kinds of hurts—overdue rent, not enough food in the pantry, an ex-husband missing yet another child support payment. The East High coaches had visited some of the homes of their players. They had seen the gnawing poverty up close.
In 1967, Senator Bobby Kennedy had traveled to the Mississippi Delta to investigate hunger. The pictures appearing in national magazines and newspapers showing black children with the distended bellies of the malnourished were heartbreaking, a stain on rich and powerful America. Bo-Pete’s mother, Lucy Lamar, shook her head when she saw the photos of Kennedy’s trip on TV: If only people knew of the struggles single mothers like her were having outside Mississippi, in a place like Columbus, Ohio, at the Poindexter Village housing projects! Barbara Crump, Eddie Rat’s mother, and Beatrice Conner, mother of Nick Conner, also harrumphed when they saw those pictures from the Mississippi Delta. There were plenty of mornings Lucy Lamar woke up and wondered what she’d be able to scrounge together to put on top of the stove come dinnertime when her three sons were expecting to eat.
Some of the basketball players’ families had to scrape by on Aid to Families with Dependent Children, otherwise known as welfare. Lucy Lamar couldn’t depend on regular maid work, and her migraines were always an issue. Moving from the North Side of town to the East Side so her son could play basketball—and keep his Afro—had not depleted her savings, because she had no earthly savings. She lived week to week. She was in a constant state of worry. During summers, the families could depend on the players working jobs, bringing in a little extra income to help out, but not during the winter, during basketball season. The one good thing about subsidized public housing—and several of the basketball players lived in public housing—was that the heat never got turned off because it was regulated by the on-site housing office.
Young athletes, everyone knew, needed plenty of food, and mothers worried about getting it. So, in 1969 on the East Side of Columbus, everyone fairly celebrated when Carl Brown opened his grocery store—an expanded one from his earlier mom-and-pop operations on Mount Vernon Avenue, just a few blocks from East High. The trek there from the high school was even shorter if you cut through the Poindexter Village housing projects. Before Carl Brown’s store, mothers had to hop a bus or get a jitney taxi to take them over to East Main Street or North High Street where they could shop at a large, traditional grocery store. In the wintertime it was an arduous trip. Waiting at a bus stop with bags of groceries could be wearisome. Not to mention the fact that the cost of transportation cut into the food-buying budget.
Carl Brown was one of the few blacks of his generation in Columbus who was not born in the American South. He was born in 1917 in Westerville, Ohio, a rural community twenty miles outside of Columbus. At Westerville High School, he felt quite lonely. There was not another black in his senior class. His family badly wanted him to graduate, so he withstood the racial slurs and survived the fisticuffs. Following high school, there were odd jobs, but nothing he thought would lead anywhere. So he hatched his own business plan: he would start a one-man farm stand, using his entire savings of $84. He went around to car dealerships, trying to talk them down to the lowest price for a dependable car. He finally came to an agreement and purchased a Model T. He got permission to set up a little fruit and vegetable stand on Mount Vernon Avenue. He’d go around to farms in rural Ohio and load up with fresh fruits and a variety of produce. Fridays and Saturdays were popular days on the avenue because women began shopping for Sunday dinner. Carl Brown’s outdoor market became a mainstay on the avenue for years. To improve his profit margin and bypass wholesalers, he began traveling to southern states—Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas—to get the kinds of items his customers wanted: collard greens, okra, watermelons, peaches, corn. He’d embark on his journeys on weeknights, be gone for a few days, then get back to Columbus, his borrowed truck quite full. He didn’t want to risk the wear and tear on the Model T. In time he had small storefront booths, but nothing to brag about.
People kept telling Brown he should open a big store of his own. It sounded like wishful thinking. How was he going to get the kind of money it would take to open a grocery store, with a roof, aisles, shelves of food, and his own staff?
If Carl Brown were a white man, he could have marched downtown to one of the big banks in Columbus, applied for a loan, and most likely gotten it. But black men in Columbus were not routinely getting loans to start businesses in the 1940s and 1950s. Then Carl Brown met Don Tishman.
Don Tishman had grown up in the tough Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York. His parents, Jewish immigrants, worked in and around the garment industry. Emmanuel Tishman, Don’s father, did some organizing work for Emma Goldman, the renowned labor organizer, and suffered his share of run-ins with the police. Young Don saw how the garment workers were mistreated. He had grown up hearing stories about the ghastly Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Greenwich Village. On March 25, 1911, fire erupted from within the building and quickly spread. The workers, mostly Jewish and Italian, started to flee, but chaos ensued as they realized many of the doors were locked. The owners later claimed they had had to lock the doors to keep workers from taking unscheduled breaks and from stealing. Many of the workers eventually made their way to the roof, from which they jumped to their deaths to escape the flames. The death toll was 146; many others were injured. The owners of the factory were tried on various charges and were shamefully acquitted. Each family received a paltry $75 for their loss.
Don Tishman was twelve years old when his family relocated to Ohio, first Youngstown, then Columbus. He served in the Navy on a submarine during World War II, survived the war, and later attended Ohio State University Law School. The life he had seen on the mean streets of New York City as a child had bred in Tishman a strong social conscience. He felt strongly about fair housing, the rights of blacks, and unions.
The Republican Party ruled Columbus in the 1940s and 1950s, and Tishman didn’t like that at all. A fearless Democrat, he thought Republicans were holding back social progress. The Wolfe family, who owned the local newspaper and wielded a lot of influence, came to consider Don Tishman a damn nuisance. He wrote letters to the editor, gave fiery talks, sometimes to anyone who was within earshot. In 1960, Tishman chaired John Kennedy’s Ohio presidential campaign. Ohioans’ support of Nixon proved he had a solid grip on Ohio, but Kennedy won in a squeaker nationwide. Tishman celebrated.
A go-for-broke liberal in a conservative city, and one of the big Democratic supporters in Mayor Jack Sensenbrenner’s rise, Tishman started filing lawsuits on behalf of blacks who couldn’t get decent housing. He regularly dragged his little daughter, Tracy, to church basements full of black people; he wrote down their complaints, vowing to do something about them. “He was so determined about helping people,” Tracy Brown recalls. Once, while Tishman was engaged in a housing lawsuit brought against the rural town of Centerville, Ohio, a Centerville official cornered him in a parking lot and called him a “nigger lover.” It was a bad move: Tishman cold-cocked the man, flattening him, then he got in his car and drove off. The punch didn’t make the papers. “What was the guy gonna say—that my dad knocked him out?” says Dan Tishman, Don’s son.
Don Tishman became a familiar face on the black East Side of the city. It was hard to miss a tall white man loping about with an easy manner. He could backslap and cuss with the best of the residents of the area. One day Carl Brown, who had been making a living working out of the Eastern Market, an indoor farmers market, mentioned to Tishman that he wanted to open a major grocery store on Mount Vernon Avenue. Tishman—who seemed to know every enterprising black in the community—wanted to know why Brown didn’t go ahead and do it. Brown explained that he couldn’t get a bank loan, and he figured it was because of his skin color. Tishman grew furious and decided to take action. He took Carl Brown downtown, to the headquarters of the Huntington National Bank, into the office of Franz Huntington—one of the family’s banking heirs and a Tishman acquaintance—and insisted that Huntington give Brown a loan. And that is how, in that tumultuous year of 1969, the big Carl Brown IGA store opened on Mount Vernon Avenue. It was the first full-fledged stand-alone grocery store on the avenue, and a black man operated it. Tishman lived in the white enclave of Bexley, but he got a kick out of coming over to Carl’s store to shop. He’d jawbone with customers, get agitated when he heard more of their woes, and slap a business card into their hand.
Lucy Lamar, Mildred Mizelle, Beatrice Conner, Ollie Mae Walker—and all the other mothers of the East High basketball players—finally had a place to get fresh groceries that could compete with some of the big grocery stores on Main Street and High Street. And when they were short on money, Carl Brown told them they could open an account, allowing them to shop and pay their grocery bills in two- or three-week intervals.
But if the mothers were helped in their efforts to keep food in the pantry at home, there always seemed to be other challenges blowing in like fierce winds.
Eddie Rat’s stepfather, John Crump, was an alcoholic. Eddie’s mother, Beatrice, had moved away from Bellefontaine, Ohio, to get away from one no-good husband, only to end up saddled with another. Beatrice knew she could not make a living doing maid work—day work—by herself while she raised her children. She felt she needed a husband. But now she was mired in a bad second marriage. John Crump began to show up at East High basketball practices, trying to tell Bob Hart how to coach his stepson. He’d wobble about, slurring his words, plowing his way into the locker room after games and practices. It was embarrassing, but Eddie Rat had to endure it. He knew that living “in a tough area” was hard on his mother, and he simply did not wish to bring any acrimony into the home. It didn’t take a family therapist to realize that John Crump was jealous of his renowned stepson.
Meanwhile, over in the household of Bo-Pete Lamar, Lucy Lamar worried about the pull of the streets on Bo-Pete and that he might give in to the allure of street life. Denizens of the city’s nightlife were attracted to Bo-Pete because of his marquee magnetism. Pimps and hustlers wanted to give him rides to school. They wanted to give him gifts. Both Lucy Lamar and Jack Gibbs were vigilant about the questionable characters gravitating toward the star basketball guard. Many nights Lucy could not fall asleep until Bo-Pete had returned to the apartment.
Ollie Mae Walker, mother of basketball player Larry Walker, didn’t much worry about him, but she did worry about her other son, Charles, who was living on the wrong side of the law, hustling and pimping. She worried about the police knocking at the door looking for Charles.
Nick Conner liked to walk. Sometimes he’d just leave the house and start walking, and that made his mother, Beatrice, nervous. Police brutality was a constant concern of the local NAACP. She’d often tell Nick that Dr. King didn’t give up his life so her son could go out into the night and get into some kind of scuffle with the police, or, worse, lose his life in a confrontation with them. She knew that he had occasionally been stopped because he looked older than most seventeen-year-olds. Nick withstood the questioning because he was mild-mannered, but it still bothered him.
Mildred Mizelle, mother of the basketball player Kenny Mizelle, was pregnant again. She was already raising six kids in the Bolivar Arms housing projects. She was a stern, loving mother, but soon there would be another mouth to feed.
In 1969, blacks accounted for approximately 12 percent of the American population. Yet in government statistics that measured poverty—households bringing in less than $3,000 a year—blacks made up 31 percent of poor families. Impoverished black families headed by women dropped even further down the ladder of poverty than those headed by a black male. More than half of the Tiger basketball players lived in households headed by impoverished black women. The lives of these young men could sometimes seem cobbled together by government assistance, the will of their high school principal, charity from local black churches, and their own basketball talent.
Not a single basketball player owned a car. During the summers, Nick Conner would at least get to borrow his mom’s car and would invite other players to go with him to scout playgrounds for games. But during the school year, the players were like nomads, cutting through backyards and alleys, wrapping their leather coats tight around them against the cold winds, pulling down their be-bop and stingy brim hats. And as lunchtime neared inside East High, they were counting the precious nickels and dimes in their pockets as they made their way toward the cafeteria. When they could get away with it, the student cafeteria workers would heap a little extra food on the athletes’ plates. Yes, the team members got little advantages inside the world of poverty that they lived in.
Carl Brown, a longtime Tiger booster, was always proud to see the players drop by his store. Jack Gibbs—who always appreciated Brown’s paid ads in the student yearbooks—made sure that the business teachers at the school used the example of Brown to inspire the students. Gibbs saw Brown’s ascendancy as a moment of genuine hope in the community. Less than a year earlier, buildings on Mount Vernon Avenue had been torched during the urban rebellion in America. Now a building had risen. And a few more jobs (after-school employment for East High students) were available in the community. On a big corkboard in the store, Brown would tack up pictures of East High students who had distinguished themselves in some recent event at the school—a music recital, a scholarship winner, someone who had shone in an In the Know academic contest. And you certainly couldn’t miss the pictures of the Tiger basketball players in action.
Brown loved hearing commercials for his store on WVKO radio. The store meant so much to the ladies of the Poindexter Village housing projects. Lucy Lamar and Ollie Mae Walker could now step out their back doors and walk to Carl Brown’s store and pick up their ham hocks. The hell with trekking on the bus all the way over to High Street. (A ham hock is a piece of flavorful pork used to season southern dishes such as collard greens, pinto beans, black-eyed peas, or lima beans.) Thanks to Carl Brown, there were many afternoons when apartment living rooms inside the Poindexter Village housing projects smelled of sweet smoky ham hocks cooking inside huge boiling pots.