Sports And Other After-School Activities At Eckstein School
Eckstein School students loved their sports teams. Basketball was popular with the spectators, both the boys team and the girls team, called the Baskedettes, were often successful. Eckstein also had a small successful track team.
Some the schools most gifted athletes include:
Joe and John Saunders whose winning ways thrilled everyone in the 1930s. Between 1935 and 1938, John (Junior) Saunders won ten individual events at state track and field tournaments. Joe won five and two second places.
Hattie (Hall) Garrette Parnell was a great track athlete whose Olympic hopes were dashed when the United States cancelled its involvement in the 1940 summer Olympics because of World War II.
Jack Brock was a basketball star in the early 1940s. He was inducted into the Cincinnati High School Basketball Hall of Fame in 2001.
Tom Turner played professional baseball in the Negro League for the Chicago American Giants.
Dorothy Parrish, an all-rounder, who competed and won at National events in running, jumping and throwing in the 1940s.
Hattie Turner was the Discus Throw and Baseball Throw Champion at the U. S. Women’s Outdoor Track and Field 1944
The Boys of Summer, 1955
Tom Turner excelled in Glendale athletics at a time when most school and professional sports were segregated. He played professional baseball with the Chicago American Giants.
Born June 22, 1915 in Olive Branch, Tennessee, Tom is the ninth of thirteen children. The Turner family moved to Ohio. Tom went to Eckstein school and then on to Glendale High. When he graduated in 1934 he attended Tuskegee Institute on a football scholarship.
Before being inducted into the U.S. Army, Tom played shortstop for the Cincinnati Stars, the only black team in the Indiana/Ohio Baseball League. After serving in World War II, he joined a newly formed Mexican League, which also attracted several major league players.
His first experience of baseball was as a child playing with his siblings. His mother would make a ball out of a rock covered in rags and sewed closed and they used a tree limb or broomstick for a bat.
The Saunders brothers, Joe (left) and John, were the Glendale track squad in the late 1930s.
Together they brought the team championship back to Glendale in 1935, and won the runners up trophy in 1936, missing out on first place by just half a point.
Together with older brother Bob, Joe and John played football for Glendale. Their speed helped Coach Walter Straub’s team to spectacular successes.
They also both played basketball, but not for Glendale. At that time basketball was a segregated sport. The boys played in the local Hi-Y team, and won the state Hi-Y championship.
