by Doug Haught
Dust Bowl Girls, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill by Lydia Reeder. 292 pages
This book is about the 1932 girls’ basketball team for Oklahoma Presbyterian College.
We have forgotten that during the 1930’s, girls faced unbelievable obstacles just to play basketball. The obstacles were national and personal. President Hoover and the First Lady, along with others, attempted to prohibit girls from playing competitive sports. President Hoover and the First Lady portrayed girls as being too delicate both physically and emotionally, to participate in competitive athletics. The difficulty was also personal. Sports writers who wrote accounts of a girls’ basketball game felt that it was appropriate to comment on how pretty the star players were; they also commented on how not-pretty the star might be. Few colleges offered competitive sports programs for women.
The girls in this book were not deterred. They wanted to play basketball; they wanted to compete; and they wanted to go to college. They were given the opportunity to do these three things by a disabled basketball coach from Oklahoma Presbyterian College. He recruited these girls from rural high schools across Oklahoma. (La Homa Lassiter grew up on a farm near Mangum) These girls were raised facing the rigors of Oklahoma farm life during the 1930’s, and they defied the official disdain that girls faced during that era. They became heroes for the entire state in 1932.
My mother was a competitive basketball player during the 1930’s, and during her lifetime, she only hinted to me what the difficulties were that she faced. Now that I have read this book, I have a thousand questions that I wish I could now ask her.
I could not put this book down after I started it. The book contains an astonishing amount of detail regarding the events recounted and regarding the lives of the people portrayed. The sources that enabled the author to write the book with such intimate details will become apparent as you finish the book.
Oklahoma Presbyterian College no longer exists, but these girls bravely paved the way for the Caitlin Clarks of today’s women’s basketball. In 2003, the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame honored the Oklahoma Presbyterian College Cardinals basket ball team as its first Team of Legend.
The photograph below is of the 1935 Gould High School girls’ basketball team. Velma Atchley, Doug Haught’s mother, is back row, second from the left.
