Growing Up: Farm Life & Basketball In The 1940S & '50S

FROM A FAMILY OF 15 ON A FARM WITH NO ELECTRICITY, INDOOR PLUMBING, OR CENTRAL HEAT TO 1962 NIT CHAMP UNDER LEGENDARY DAYTON COACH TOM BLACKBURN A story of a long-gone world of working with neighbors, radio entertainment, few telephones, unsupervised play, and sports just for fun; of attending college via a basketball scholarship; of struggles to adjust to college life, to make the team and then to win the NIT. Hal was born in 1941, the family's fifth child and oldest boy. From age seven or eight, he milked several cows by hand every morning and evening. He helped his parents and others in their neighborhood group to thresh wheat and oats and to butcher hogs among many other farm chores. For entertainment, the family enjoyed listening on their large battery-powered radio to westerns, dramas, and comedies like The Lone Ranger, The Shadow, and Father Knows Best. The barn, woods, and creek were good settings for imaginative, unsupervised play for the Schoen children when they had leisure time. Hal and many of his siblings developed a love of reading in spite of an environment in which reading and education were not always encouraged by the adults. They also enjoyed playing softball, baseball, and basketball just for fun. Hal became interested in attending college even though no one in the family before him had done so and neither parent graduated from high school. A basketball scholarship to the University of Dayton provided the financial means. UD was college basketball at a very high level. The Flyers, coached by Tom Blackburn and then Don Donoher, won more games than any other Division I college basketball team in the combined decades of the fifties and sixties, edging out UCLA and the University of Kentucky. After a challenging freshman adjustment and warming the bench as a sophomore, Hal was a starting forward on the 1962 National Invitation Tournament championship team. The NIT was then a prestigious national tournament played entirely in New York's Madison Square Garden. As chronicled in the book's "Afterward," Hal went on to a 34-year career as a Professor of Mathematics Education mainly at the University of Iowa, and two of his younger brothers earned doctorates in Mathematics. Rick Schoen is internationally renowned for his ground-breaking research work in Differential Geometry. In 2017, he was awarded the prestigious Wolf Prize in Mathematics. Hal's other siblings also did well in both their professional and personal lives. The Schoen family's story is one of rising economically and educationally from humble beginnings, the American Dream. It is a story of the importance of family, hard work, tenacity, patience, education, and a college basketball scholarship. Timing, too, is a crucial factor as the equalizing effects of the Great Depression and World War Two made upward social mobility more common than ever in the two or three decades after the War.

• | Author: Harold L. Schoen
• | Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• | Publication Date: Jan 27, 2017
• | Number of Pages: 222 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1542501857
• | ISBN-13: 9781542501859