Remembering the 1956 Frederick Championship
Remembering the 1956 Frederick Championship

By Berry Tramel

Published: February 18, 2007

FREDERICK — Dean Wild gathered his boys together on the golden August grass.

Tensions ran high on the first day of football practice 1956, which mixed boys from opposite sides of the tracks, from the same town but separate schools and separate teams and separate worlds.

So Wild, in his second season as Frederick High School's coach, ordered pig-in-a-pen. The Bombers formed circles of 8-10 guys. Wild would call a name, and the player would enter the circle and run in place. Then Wild would call another name, and the second Bomber would rush his teammate and try to knock him down.

Blacks hit blacks.

Whites hit whites.

Whites hit blacks.

Blacks hit whites.

Something about pad on pad, and bone on bone, makes stress scram. Soon enough that first day, tension fled with the southwestern Oklahoma wind.

"You could see everybody had respect for each other," said Weegie Williams, a white junior who would go on to quarterback those Bombers.

Said black senior Lloyd Logan, a star halfback who that autumn would become a Frederick leader, a mantle he still wears half a century later, "We went over there with the attitude we didn't want to be there. But we made friends."

Friends they remain.

A cotton-topped coach with an ornery streak surpassed only by his sense of fair play integrated the Frederick football team a full decade before Frederick's schools did the same.

White players who had won a 1955 district championship teamed with black players who had won a 1955 black-school state championship to form one of the great teams in Oklahoma gridiron history.

The '56 Bombers went 14-0 and won their games by a combined score of 553-26. They routed most all the big names of high school football in western Oklahoma.

But to a man, those Bombers talk more about the camaraderie than the prowess. More about the brotherhood than the domination. The spirit of '56 has only grown over the years, living now in men whose waistlines have expanded and hairlines have receded, men who still enthusiastically recall not the wonder of those scores, but the marvel of the unity.

"The way we came together, that was a remarkable thing," said Logan. "We made everlasting friends."

Logan became a minister and still pastors Frederick's First Missionary Baptist Church, which sits on the foundation of the old black school, Boyd High. Williams, too, became a Methodist minister and now is retired in Hobart.

"Did you see that movie, '(Remember) the Titans'?" Williams asked. "That wasn't half as good as what happened in Frederick."

Two quarterbacks, one team. Two right guards, one team. Two left ends, one team.

Do you understand what Dean Wild faced in coaching the '56 Bombers? Volatile enough combining two football teams of the same color into one, much less two teams of different colors. Two groups of boys that never interacted, never had known each other, never really knew how the other even lived.

Yet 44-year-old Dean Wild made it work.

"Dean wasn't interested in anything but letting the best players play, regardless of color, religion or anything," said Jim Varner, a white center now living in Tulsa. "We soon learned there would be absolutely no special privileges. The competition was fierce."

Wild is with us still, at age 94 and living in Oklahoma City. He's best known as Darrell Royal's 1940 high school coach at Hollis. Wild also won a state title in 1948 at Watonga and was a coaching partner of Mike Little at Putnam City Hefner Junior High in the 1960s. Wild retired in 1977 as an assistant principal at PC West and still frequents West basketball games and Putnam City Stadium football games.

But his most lasting work came at Frederick.

"Dean Wild was the perfect man in the perfect place at the perfect time," said Weegie Williams.

Wild was no politician. Tony Massad, Frederick's school attorney for 47 years, said Wild was a straight talker. Ask a question, get a straight answer.

While many of the players from Frederick's 1956 team romanticize those days, Wild paints a less serene picture.

Wild said white people in general considered blacks "the lowest form of human beings that there were."

In 10 years coaching at Frederick, Wild said, he never had a football banquet. "They didn't want those white girls sitting with the blacks. I don't know whether you want to write that, but that's the way it is."

Driver's education was not available to the black kids in Frederick. So Wild, the driver's ed teacher at Frederick, taught them after hours.

Wild arrived in Frederick in 1955. He won 31 games the first three seasons, but eventually the talent ran dry, victories ran short and the glory of the 1950s faded.

But even during the later losing seasons, Wild commanded respect from Frederick players of both colors.

"He treated every kid just the same," said Bob Collins, who coached with Wild from 1958-64. "The kids believed Coach Wild was going to treat them fair."

Wild meshed that 1956 team. Took 12 black kids, 27 white kids and taught them to play together.

"Good coach," said Charles Shaw, a black guard on the '56 team, who still lives in Frederick. "And he didn't show any favoritism to anybody."

Dean Wild gathered his boys together on a yellow school bus for each trip home from Duncan or Lawton or Snyder. Few places get as dark as the southwestern Oklahoma night, and as the Bombers bounced along those lonely state highways, invariably Clarence Byrd's voice would rise above the din, and the Bombers would break out in song.

"Hey Lidi, Lidi, Li, hey Lidi, Lidi Lo; We got the best ol' coach that you ever did, and the name of this coach is Coach Dean Wild. Hey Lidi, Lidi, Li, hey Lidi, Lidi Lo."

Fifty years later, Weegie Williams still sings those songs his new black teammates taught him.

"We became a brotherhood," said Danny Griffin, the white fullback. "Going to out-of-town games, singing those songs, sometimes sleeping leaning over on each other. We liked each other. It was a neat thing."

Driving the bus, Dean Wild set the spirit for those dark nights that still shine so bright.

Fifty years later, on a cold February day, Weegie Williams sits on a pew in Lloyd Logan's church, between Logan and Charles Shaw, and tries to coax his black teammates to join him in song.

Shaw, the blocker, says he used to lead Logan through the line and now Logan leads him as pastor. When he joined Logan's church, Shaw said he would help in any way, just don't ask him to sing.

But as Williams breaks into another school-bus special — "Give me that ol' Bomber spirit, give me that ol' Bomber spirit... — Logan's soft voice joins him. And if you strain your ears just enough, you can hear Shaw's low tone singing along. "...it's good enough for me."

1956 Frederick was a bustling town with downtown parking meters, three movie houses and five factories to supply jobs. Area farmers raised cotton and wheat.

Sue Edwards, whose husband, Jerry, played on the '56 team, likened it to Happy Days. "We'd go up and down Main Street, burning our parents' gas," she said.

The races rarely mixed, other than on farm work or when the black folks crossed the tracks to work as domestics. The blacks called their side Ward 3; the whites called it Colored Town.

Ward 3 bustled, too, with cafes and beauty shops, seamstresses and grocery stores. Ward 3 was self-sufficient, and black parents didn't want their children crossing the tracks.

"They didn't want us to go across town, get accused of things you didn't do," Logan said.

Frederick already had a fine football tradition. Boyd High had won three black state titles, and Frederick had produced players like Glenn Dobbs and Buddy Ryan, who would become great coaches. Wild's predecessor, Floyd Gass, later became head coach at Oklahoma State.

So 1956 brought two mighty cultures into combat: football and segregation.

"We were kind of ignorant," Weegie Williams said. "We had no idea what it was like to be black."

But there were clues. Some white men told Williams to be careful that the black skin didn't rub off on him. Some members of his church wouldn't come to the games because black players had joined the team.

Danny Griffin, who became a Baptist minister, looks back with regret at the racial situation.

"There is a strong feeling among the white players that much more could have been done for race relation in town and beyond if we had just been aware of the reality of the divide," Griffin said.

The Tillman County Courthouse included separate drinking fountains and separate bathrooms. "Whites" and "Colored."

"We accepted what we were told not to do but never even asked why," Griffin said. "We realize today there were countless numbers of little things we could have done that would have made big differences in the lives of our community for both blacks and whites."

Rest easy, Bombers. These grayed black men hold no rancor over those times. Truth is, most of Ward 3 didn't celebrate the integration of football.

Said Clarence Walker, who attended Boyd High School in the 1940s and eventually was elected to Frederick's city council, "Only thing that bothered me was breaking up a state championship team,"

After the Supreme Court ruled segregated schools illegal in 1954, the issue began to flare in Frederick. Massad, the school attorney, said Oklahoma City activists had come to Frederick in the mid-'50s, demanding school integration. Frederick superintendent Prather Brown instead opted for a gradual plan by which athletics would be integrated, followed by the school.

But Wild beat him to the punch.

Dean Wild gathered his boys together on the Frederick track and introduced some new runners.

Facing a dual against state power Lawton, Wild went to Boyd and recruited black kids to run, citing a state association rule allowing athletes to compete for an adjoining school if their school did not offer the sport.

"I got to thinking about those black kids," Wild said. "I asked them, how would you like to run track with us? You'll have a big time."

The Boyd athletes were hesitant. "They didn't know whether they should cross the railroad tracks," Wild said.

But Prof Kennedy, principal and superintendent at Boyd and the most respected man in Frederick's black community, urged the boys to compete. They worked out with Wild for several days, then ran the Bombers to victory over Lawton.

"I thought, 'Oh my God; I'm going to catch hell,'" Wild said.

The next morning, Brown, the superintendent, read the results in the Lawton Constitution and quizzed Wild. "Are you running the blacks?" he asked.

Wild answered, "Yes, state law says I can."

Track is one thing. Football quite another.

That summer, Boyd dropped football, which made Boyd players eligible at Frederick. It is unclear whether Prof Kennedy dropped football for financial reasons or to accelerate the integration.

But Kennedy had no small part in the joining of the teams.

The Boyd football players, just like the runners in track, were not thrilled at the prospect of crossing the tracks. Some quit football. Others transferred. Lloyd Logan had a chance to transfer to Wichita Falls, Texas, and finish high school.

"But I loved Professor Kennedy," Logan said. "I wanted him to sign my diploma."

Without Prof Kennedy, we would not be remembering these Bombers. Kennedy came to Boyd in 1924 as principal and retired in 1965, just as the schools integrated. Forty-one years he guided Ward 3's boys and girls, and maybe the men and women, too.

"Whatever he said was gospel," Charles Shaw said. "You didn't argue with him."

When Wild recruited the Boyd players in 1956, Prof Kennedy didn't make his boys go. But he urged them to, with strong advice.

"If you want to go over there, go over there," Shaw said of Kennedy's charge. "If you want to play football, go play football and act like young men."

Dean Wild gathered his boys together the day before the season opener at Snyder.

"I want to talk to you," Wild told the Bombers. "We're all black and white mixed up together. I know you've been hearing stuff around town, but don't pay attention to that. We're a team. We're going to go places. We'll go as a team, we'll play as a team, we'll eat as a team and we'll come home as a team."

Wild always fed his teams after road games. Come 1956, that was difficult in the Jim Crow Southwest. If a cafe rebuffed Wild, he would not even tell the Bombers the problem.

"We didn't know Coach Wild had trouble finding places for us to eat," said Griffin. "We didn't have enough sense to know there was a race problem."

That spring and fall, Wild integrated restaurants all over Oklahoma. Stillwater, Hennessey, Wichita Falls, Texas.

When Wild couldn't find a place to feed his Bomber football team, he would return them to Frederick to dine at the Blue Room in the old Frederick Hotel.

Bombers of both colors were hit with racial insults in a variety of locales. Name-calling in Temple. The Grandfield newspaper proclaimed its boys would have to beat two teams, a white team and a n----- team. Wild was so incensed, he played part of the game with all-white Bombers, then all-black Bombers. Frederick won 53-0. The state title game against Okmulgee Dunbar, a black school, was marred by a bench-clearing melee before Frederick won 33-0.

Wild's one concession to Jim Crow was the state-title game trip to Oklahoma City, where the white players stayed in the Roberts Hotel and the black players stayed in the YMCA.

But remarkably, the Bombers were protected from racial strife, in or out of Frederick.

"Maybe we were sheltered," said Bill Brown, son of Prather Brown, the Frederick superintendent. "I didn't know what was going on in the stands."

Those stands mainly filled and cheered. The Bomber Bowl drew throngs of both colors as they followed the juggernaut football team.

Said Weegie Williams, "It never hurts when you win."

Dean Wild gathered his boys together last October. Oh, truth is, the boys gathered him. Griffin and Williams drove to Oklahoma City and retrieved Wild and his lovely bride, 90-year-old Mildred, for a 50-year reunion of a team to remember.

The reunion was held at Lloyd Logan's church, on the foundation of old Boyd High. "The warmth and affection each of us shared between black and white was as genuine today as it was 50 years ago," said Jim Varner.

These days, the bustle is gone from Frederick. Like a lot of places in western Oklahoma, it has become a last-picture-show kind of town. Ward 3 is virtually desolate, save for Logan's church and the Head Start program at the old black elementary school named for Prof Kennedy.

The black population has declined. The most recent student ratios show 50.7 percent white, 29.3 Hispanic, 14.0 black and 5.7 American Indian.

The '56 Bombers did not heal all racial hurts in Frederick. The schools did not integrate until 1966. A school riot in 1973 destroyed trophy cases and much goodwill. In 2005, Tillman County sheriff Billy Hanes resigned after he was charged with threatening a violent act based on race.

But the reunion restored a warm feeling, reminding all that when they were young, they were part of something very special.

"I often think about that team," said Bill Brown, the superintendent's son. "One of the best experiences of my life."

During the reunion, old Bombers Jerry Hidlebaugh, Dennis Feinberg and Varner climbed into Hidlebaugh's 1955 Bel Air and relived their youth by dragging Main Street, this time burning their own gas.

Hidlebaugh, a white dentist from Alvarado, Texas, had with him the letter jacket of teammate Bill Forrester, who died a few years back. Forrester's widow had given it to Hidlebaugh.

The group spotted Charles Shaw in a parking lot. Hidlebaugh pulled over, they chatted and the discussion turned to letter jackets.

Shaw explained that when he returned from the military, his ex-wife had disposed of many of his things, including his Frederick letter jacket.

Hidlebaugh retrieved Forrester's jacket, sporting the state championship patches, and gave it to Shaw, saying their teammate would want someone who treasured it to have it.

Then Hidlebaugh returned to the Bel Air and resumed reliving the days of 1956.

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