Fifty years at ‘The Mecca’ revisited for tourney fans

Probably not a whole lot of fans attending the annual high school basketball tournaments that began yesterday at the Bangor Auditorium realize that this is the 50th anniversary of tournament play at the venerable, though increasingly oft-maligned landmark.

A half-century ago, on Feb. 23, 1956, the Class S (small school) teams of East Corinth (13-6) and Mount Desert Island (13-5) took to the floor to begin the late-winter tradition of playing before thousands of rabid fans for post-season bragging rights at the so-called “Mecca” of eastern Maine basketball (pronounced “Mekker” in The County, where the natives have never met the word they couldn’t vastly improve by inserting the letter “r” at some point).

When Jim Trafton of East Corinth took the first shot in that first-ever high school tournament game at the new auditorium he became an interesting two-part trivia question for the ages. That’s because he also was the first to score. As Bangor Daily News Sports Editor Owen Osborne explained in the day’s sports jargon, Trafton’s original shot “backfired, but he came back to dunk the first deuce.” Trafton also committed the first foul in the building’s tournament history, allowing Marshall Taylor of MDI to make the first foul shot.

I tracked down Trafton, 67, at his Waldoboro home where he lives in retirement after a long career as a lineman with Bangor Hydro. Did he really dunk that shot way back there when a dunk happened about as often as a referee today makes a palming-the-ball call, which is to say hardly ever?

“No,” confessed the man who stood six feet, three inches tall at the time and would score close to 2,000 points in his four-year high school career. “That was out of my range. I could get to the rim, but I couldn’t dunk…”

Sixty-nine-year-old Ken Tate of East Corinth – the retired longtime bus line operator and prominent grower of strawberries – was a teammate of Trafton’s who vividly recalls that opening game with MDI. “They waxed us pretty good,” Tate said earlier this week. And indeed they did, 72-44. No shame there. Stuff happens. “They were really big and strong, as I remember. And good. Especially the Hooper boy,” Tate explained. That would have been Trevett Hooper, an MDI whiz who made the tournament all-star team.

“Our problem was that we played in a very small gym,” Trafton recalled. “When we got to the Bangor Auditorium with all that running room underneath the baskets and all that open space we were lost…” Legions of old ballplayers whose antiquated home gyms were often so small the opposing foul circles rubbed together will easily catch Trafton’s drift.

Other teams in the “S” tournament 50 years ago were Island Falls, Columbia Falls, Beals, Freedom, Easton and Albion. Beals won the tournament and then defeated Oxford High School for a record third consecutive state championship, a mark that would expand in subsequent years.

Teams competing in the 1956 “M” (medium school) tournament: Pemetic of Southwest Harbor, Hallowell, Greenville, Lubec, Mattanawcook Academy of Lincoln, Winthrop, Corinna and Aroostook Central Institute of Mars Hill. Mattanawcook Academy won the tournament, but lost to Cape Elizabeth in the state final at Waterville. The Eastern Corp.’s Lincoln paper mill shut down at 3 p.m. that Saturday so employees could attend the game.

Attendance at the opening day of those eastern Maine M-S tournaments was 3,362. Total attendance for the three days was 8,271, which was 1,451 over the previous year. Backers of the new auditorium who had promised that if the city built it the fans would come, were right, and for 50 years Bangor area merchants have been smiling all the way to the bank come tournament time.

All the while, another truism has held, first expressed 50 years ago by Osborne in his daily sports column: “Beals appears to have the color to attract followers,” he wrote. “For some reason, each time a Beals team competes it gets the backing of almost every viewer but its rival’s fans. The fabulous Beals Braves over the years have made basketball history with a chapter all their own in the court records…”

It’s difficult to not like a team that had three consecutive state basketball championships under its belt by 1956 and only 18 kids, including just 12 boys, in the entire student body. Today, as Jonesport-Beals High School, with an enrollment of 84, the school’s state title count is 20 in all sports – including nine in boys basketball and three in girls basketball.

That’s a state championship for every 4.2 kids in the building. Ask not why the public’s love affair with such excellence continues.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.