You Gotta Play

An excerpt on basketball from When Once Destroyed, a letter to my grandson, Vern, about the life of my dad, Vern, and about the life and death of Somerset, Indiana. When Once Destroyed will be published by Wise Ink Media, Minneapolis in 2025.

Larry Knee left Somerset High School in 1956 as its all-time leading scorer. This is a photo of a yearbook picture.

Dear Vern,

Along with their dad's cousin Bob, all five Shroyer brothers played basketball at Somerset High School, starting with Maurice in 1929, and concluding with Wayne in 1951. Maurice, Bob, Vern, Burnell, Wendell, and Wayne. Second cousin Tom Snyder told me that they made an impression on his uncle, Larry Knee.

“The Shroyer name in Somerset was pretty big,” Tom said. “They were neighbors and they were good ballplayers at Somerset High School and that was what Larry aspired to be.” In fact, Larry became Somerset’s all-time leading scorer by the time he graduated in 1956. He led Wabash County in scoring his junior year.

It would be wrong, though, to say he eclipsed them.

“When you grow up in the Shroyer family,” Larry told me, “You gotta play basketball.” In 2023, he told me, “I couldn’t wait to be a sixth grader because you get to play ball with all the schools around.”

It was basketball that kept him on the straight and narrow. A friend had encouraged him to start smoking when he was around the age of 12, Larry told me. “I had to do the milking on [his mother] Vernie’s farm,” he said, after his father had died when he was eight-years-old. “I’d put the milkers on and sit on the barn beam and light me up a cigarette. I was sitting there trying to be big stuff when I look out the corner of my eye and seen the barn door slide open and Mom stuck her head in and seen what I was doing.” She didn’t say anything, simply turned around and left, Larry said.

“I put that cigarette down and looked up at that barn door and I could see her going up the hill to get up to the house. I could tell she was crying. I mean I knew she was crying. And I was crying, ‘What am I going to do?’

“I washed the milkers, I re-washed the milkers; it took me forever to get in the house.

“I walked into the house and she says, ‘Sit down,’ and I said, ‘Okay Mom,’ and she said, ‘I been figuring it out. I been worrying about how I was gonna get you to basketball practice,’ she said.

“‘You just settled tonight.’

“‘I’m gonna take up smokin’ and you and I are just gonna sit around and smoke every night. We’ll just sit and smoke and listen to the radio.’

“And I started crying,” Larry told me. “And I quit smoking that day. And that was the wisest thing. That was so profound, how she taught me. That was your Aunt Vernie.”

Your great aunt Linda remembered feeling a bit like a princess when she attended Uncle Wayne’s games at the Somerset High School gym before our brother Stan and I were born, 1950 or ’51, when she was three or four.

“It was a very old fashioned gym,” she said. “The windows were above the bleachers. There was a giant scoreboard and a stage where they held graduation. It was also the auditorium. It was green and white and it smelled sweaty. It was hot.

“It was packed with people. People couldn’t get in. Six hundred maybe. Everybody knew our dad. Everybody spoke to him. It was the gym that Dad played in. Shroyers were a big thing.”

“I had a green and white outfit and I cheered. I sat with the cheerleaders. I was hot stuff. I was Vern’s kid and I was Uncle Wayne’s niece. We never missed his games.”

“The brothers would show up for them ballgames.,” Tom said.

“Wayne was really good,” Linda said. “All the brothers showed up. It was like a family get together every Friday night.” Wayne’s senior year, the school opened a new gym and it remained a source of pride for the community until it closed in 1962 and then was demolished for the Upper Wabash Valley Flood Control Project Mississinewa Reservoir in 1965.

“When Wayne was a senior, I was a seventh grader,” Larry told me. Seventy-three years after the fact, he said, “I was the first seventh grader to make a basket in the new gym.”

When brothers Vern and Burnell later came to his high school game against Marion St. Paul, he remembered, “They were not impressed with my ball playing.”

“Impressed or not impressed,” I replied, “It wouldn’t much matter.” He chuckled, like he was glad I understood.

“When I talked to ‘em afterward, I wouldn’t know if I’d scored a point.”

“I should have been happy they were there,” Larry said, in a way that sounded like he still would have liked a bit more. And then he changed the subject.

Grandpa Sid