A few of the memories are getting hazy — it’s been 50 years, after all — but the numbers and the records are still there, ready to be digested, debated and discussed.
How good were they? How strong and fast? How dominant?
A 16-3 record. A league championship. A district championship. And, of course, the only state championship in Chehalis basketball history.
Just a few members of the 1960 Chehalis High School basketball team were able to make it to Wednesday night’s Centralia/W.F. West hoops game — a big Chehalis win, appropriately — to be recognized in a halftime ceremony commemorating that fantastic season.
Even though all this time’s passed, the teammates — just Jerry Kaija and Dick Melhart were on hand Wednesday, with assistant coach Rod Giske and manager Al Spady — still love talking Chehalis hoops, albeit with the occasional wry smile. They’d spent the previous night talking with coach Tom Smith, who was on his way out of town Wednesday and missed the ceremony.
The championship game, a 70-56 win over Sumner, was played at the University of Puget Sound fieldhouse.
“I subsequently went there,” Kaija, the team’s 6-foot-3 center, noted. “I played well enough to fool them into giving me a scholarship.”
Two other members of the team — Dave Dowling and Alan Allie — were named to the all-state first team that year. Dowling would later pitch for the St. Louis Cardinals with the legendary Bob Gibson and infamous Bob Uecker, the latter of whom would later play the Cleveland Indians’ announcer in the Major League comedies. Dowling’s now a dentist in Arizona. Orin Smith was named to the all-state second team, and went on to a fairly distinguished business career as the CEO of Starbucks, and holds current spots on the board of directors at Disney, Nike and the University of Washington’s business and medical schools.
Dowling, according to Kaija, was fouled with 7 seconds to play in a district championship game their junior year at Hudson’s Bay with the Bearcats trailing by 3. He hit the first shot, missed the second hard off the rim (“To my knowledge, we didn’t discuss anything,” Kaija said), grabbed his own rebound and was fouled again. He sank both shots this time around and the Bearcats went on to win in overtime.
The next year, though, was when Chehalis really came into their own. With Dowling, Allie, Kaija and Orin Smith — “One of the best high school shots I ever saw,” Kaija said — leading the way, the Bearcats set a record by scoring 295 points in the four-game state tournament.
Kaija, regrettably, injured his ankle in the second game, but tried to return in the third contest.
“They taped me up tighter than a drum,” he said, adding that he scored the first 4 — or was it 6? — points before retiring to the bench.
“They did all this without me,” he recalled.
Kaija made it back into the title game, though, when the Bearcats, up by a safe margin and in a made-for-the-movies moment, called time in the final seconds to get their injured center onto the floor.
Spady, Kaija and Melhart agreed that the team won because, well, it was a team: great athletes, great shooters, excellent conditioning and a love for the game. On Saturday nights, the players would ask for a key to the gym and play pick-up ball late into the night.
“It was Chehalis in the 50s,” Spady joked. “What else was there to do?”
It was entertainment, but also preparation. The previous years’ teams had set the tone, and as juniors the 1960 class had lost to Lynden in the state tournament’s fifth/eighth place game.
“We were really motivated to meet Lynden, and beat them. It was kind of a ‘Remember the Alamo’ thing,” Kaija said. “But Lynden didn’t make the finals.”
Lynden or not, they made short work of the rest of the field and wrapped up a title.
The players may have gotten the letters, but Spady, to his credit, claims another school record: the only student to go to the state tournament all three years of high school. That he was a manager, of course, is beside the point.
Upon asking, I was told there’s maybe two teams in the last 50 years of Chehalis hoops that might have give the 1960 boys a run for their money. The most recent was the 1995 Bearcat team, which went 25-2 and placed fifth at state with stars Brian Wilson, Ian Moog, Kraig Perry, Brandon Rinta and Jeremiah Conner under coach Dennis Bower.
“I used to scrimmage them,” Spady said. “They had some really good ballplayers.”
“But they only had five players,” Kaija points out. “What made us outstanding, is every one of those guys could play.
“Heck,” he added, with a smile, “They won it without me.”
The best Chehalis team ever? Probably, depending on how you want to put it.
“We need all the ink we can get at this point,” Spady told me with a laugh, as I was leaving Wednesday. “Put it up any way you want.”
It remains, though, the only basketball title in Chehalis history. There’s only one way to put that.
