The City of Champions, Wampum Pennsylvania. In 1963, a banquet was held to honor a handful of the champions that have come out of Wampum including athletes and coaches. Seated in front from the left were Buzz Ridl, Basketball coach at Westminster College, and the famous basketball coach L. Butler Hennon who led Wampum to unimaginable success including numerous State Championships.

Standing from left to right were Major League Baseball player Harold Allen, basketball player/coach Ronald Galbreath, and one of Major League Baseball’s greats Dick Allen. All three athletes played for Coach Hennon at Wampum High School and Galbreath played for Ridl at Westminster College for perhaps one of the school’s greatest teams, the 1961-62 season.

      Awhile back we at Ellwood City Memories asked if anyone knew where the old fallout shelters where located and what are they used for now. Many, many people contacted us with a much longer list of shelters in Ellwood City than we would have guessed. We received many stories but Danny John was the only one able to send us pictures.
      Mr. John mailed us these two pictures from 1973 when the US Government was removing the medical supplies from the fallout shelter inside the Wampum mines. The shelter was stocked with enough equipment for a two hundred bed hospital.
      Danny John Senior is on the left in one picture. Thank you for the pictures Danny.

     We wanted to post a story about the greatest sports franchise in the area but had a difficult time narrowing the story down with all the incredible players to play for Coach Hennon’s Wampum High School Basketball teams. We are planning to follow up this article with a number of articles highlighting the individual players. We would like to hear from you what players you remember, or any other memories you would like to share about the Wampum Indians Basketball Teams.

    School Principal and Head Coach Butler Hennon became nationally famous when Life Magazine did a feature on his unusual training techniques and the resulting success in their January 6, 1958 issue. Hennon’s unusual training techniques (unusual at the time) are still used by schools across the nation today.

     Practices were held with players wearing oversized rubber boots, a duck jacket weighted with sand, work gloves and blinders. To improve dribbling, players practice wearing gloves and taped glasses to keep them from watching the ball, Tug-Of-War for the ball between players handicapped by galoshes and weighted jackets to make tactic more difficult, medicine balls held high get players accustomed to keeping arms up to block passes, and tires hung from the ceiling for passing drills. Some skeptics could argue with the methods, but no one could argue with the resulting 100+ point games, almost season long winning streaks and the three AA State Titles.

     Many of Hennon’s players went on to play at local colleges; most notably first team All American Don Hennon at the University of Pittsburgh and Ron Galbreath NAIA ALL American at Westminster. Noveleski played at St. Francis, Shena and Swogger started for Geneva, Hank Allen had a sensational freshmen year at a small school in Ohio (maybe Baldwin Wallace) and Ron Allen played at Youngstown, and we are sure there are others we are missing. Speaking of the Allen’s, what other small town produced three major league baseball players such as the Allen brothers? From oldest to youngest, the Allen brothers were Harold, Richie, and Ron. Richie went straight from Wampum High School to the Philadelphia Phillies. Harold (or Hank) played basketball at Baldwin Wallace in Ohio his first year out of High School and then signed with the Phillies at the same time Richie (Dick) did. Ron was younger and was key to the 1960 AA title team and he played seven games in the majors for the St Louis Cardinals. There are some that would argue that Harold Allen had the best chance of reaching the NBA, even more so than the all-time great Don Hennon, but he gave up basketball for baseball.

     All this from a school with around 100 students in High School and sixty percent of the student body were girls.

    It was close to midnight on a Monday night when the peaceful night air was broken with the fearful cries of “Fire!” The men and women of Wampum ran from their homes to discover A. Moser Clothing Store erupting in flames. The flames completely consumed the store then moved onto the nearby schoolhouse, leaving but a pile of charcoal and ash.
    The fire was not done with Wampum yet as the flames spread to J.C. Davidson’s Drug Store. The men that were awaken by the desperate cries fought vigorously against the fire and saved some of the goods from the store, but the building itself was reduced to only four blackened bare walls. The church next to the drug store only just survived the ravaging inferno thanks to the exhaustive and heroic actions of the citizens of Wampum that night.
    Remarkably, despite the towering flames, walls caving in, and even one man falling from the roof of a building, no one was gravely injured. Though everyone escaped with their lives, the fire was devastating to the small town of Wampum. Davidson’s Drug Store was the busiest store in town in that day and losing the school was a big loss.