Dick Allen, Wampum High School legend

Richard Anthony Allen was born March 8, 1942, in Wampum, Pa., and was laid to rest there. He’s the most famous athlete from a school that no longer exists. The following story appeared in Pittsburgh Quarterly on Feb. 20, 2023, a story about the one-time high school basketball powerhouse for which Dick “Sleepy” Allen starred, as a two-time All-State player.

In the well-trod regions of the sports writing firmament, there is a progression in cliches used to describe successful coaches. It starts with “winning” and escalates to “renowned” and culminates with -- ultima gloria -- “legendary.”

• Phillies Alumni

With justification, sportswriters in Lawrence County, which borders Pennsylvania and Ohio about 40 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, reflexively apply the adjective legendary to L. Butler Hennon. Hennon coached basketball at tiny Wampum High School, the smallest school in the county (and the state) for 28 years. At Wampum, he was not only the basketball coach, but the baseball coach and the principal and the social-studies teacher -- and the janitor for the high-school gym as well. He was immediately recognizable around town by his silver hair, softly rounded features, black metal-and-acetate spectacles, and conservatively tailored suits.

The New Castle News, the county’s major daily newspaper, once put it this way: “Among high-school basketball coaches, there’s L. Butler Hennon and then there’s everyone else. He achieved a level of legendary coaching excellence that put a hamlet of 1,100 people on the national map.”

As tiny as Wampum High School was (enrollment typically numbered fewer than 120 students), it would have been even tinier without the influx of students from two neighboring semi-rural communities: Big Beaver and Chewton, the home of Dick Allen, who went on to slug 351 home runs in a 15-year Major League Baseball career, played mainly with the Philadelphia Phillies and Chicago White Sox.

Allen and his four brothers, Coy, Harold, Ron, and the oldest sibling, Caesar, whose last name was Craine, were standout basketball players at Wampum from the 1940s to the early 1960s.

Wampum’s population has shrunk to below 700 over the past 50 years, and its streets are often empty today. “Your footsteps echo on the sidewalk at times,” one resident says.

At Wampum, L. Butler Hennon coached the Allens and scores of other players, drilling and motivating them to realize their potential as basketball players. In the process, he accomplished these things, in competitions typically against much larger schools: He won 521 games, including 82 consecutive league victories from 1953 to '59, 15 section titles and three state championships. (Dick was a point guard on the 1958 [sophomore] and 1960 [senior] state champions.)

In what was then the Class B division in Pennsylvania high-school basketball, he developed nine All-State players, including his son, Don Hennon, a two-time University of Pittsburgh All-American whose 1,841 career points set a school scoring record that lasted for 19 years.

He introduced training techniques that were considered so innovative and novel -- “decades ahead of their time,” says Jim Santelli, a player on Wampum’s 1960 state-championship team -- that they were featured in a photo essay in Life magazine, titled “Training Tricks Help Wampum Swamp ‘Em." In practices his players, for example, wore weighted jackets, gloves and blinders to improve their quickness and dribbling skills, and honed their leaping ability on a jumping machine equipped with an arm that flashed when touched.

Noted Life: “A casual visitor dropping in to watch basketball practice at Wampum (Pa.) High might wonder if he had wandered by mistake onto a comic skit in the school variety show. The players wear galoshes, weighted jackets and clumsy workman’s gloves. ... ‘When they take the weights and galoshes off, they move like elves,’ [Hennon] says.”

Such extraordinary media coverage of the team and Butler Hennon largely ended in 1961, when the Pennsylvania Department of Education merged Wampum with Ellwood City to create Lincoln High School. (Dick graduated in 1960). The Wampum Gym, located on Main Street across from the former high school, has been rechristened the L. B. Hennon Recreation Center. A bronze plaque that summarizes Wampum’s basketball history, ornamented with a sculptural relief of Butler Hennon, is displayed on the center’s exterior.

A tablet at the L. B. Hennon Recreation Center highlights Wampum’s remarkable basketball history and some noted citizens.

Today, the center is open only occasionally. Its stillness is in sobering contrast to the time when the place resounded almost continually with noise. The gym was the venue for boisterous standing-room-only crowds at the Wampum varsity players’ home games and at other times for the squeak of aspiring younger players’ rubber-soled sneakers scraping the hardwood floor; at Butler Hennon’s decree, the gym was left unlocked day and night so that boys would be free to come and practice there at any time. (And some Wampum boys did indeed shoot hoops in the middle of the night at the gym.)

When Wampum High School ceased to exist in 1961, something vital went out of Wampum. Wampum suddenly seemed diminished, inasmuch as the Wampum High School basketball team was integral to the town’s self-image. The team matters, so we matter. Wampum without its high-school basketball team was Pittsburgh without Forbes Field, Brooklyn without the Dodgers, Alexandria without the Lighthouse.

After the high school closed, Wampum’s population diminished as well: fewer than 700 residents live there today, down from 1,189 in 1970. The town’s shrinkage is an all-too-familiar narrative locally, reflecting an aging demographic, a declining birth rate, the loss of good-paying industrial jobs and a once-vibrant Main Street lined with local businesses that ultimately failed.

In fact, the only business on the town’s Main Street that has survived since Don Hennon was shattering basketball scoring records in Wampum more than 60 years ago is Marshall Funeral Home. “Proudly Serving Four Generations, Since 1905,” the Marshall Funeral Home website declares. Gone are Main Street enterprises such as Scala Shoe Store, Victory Café, Al’s Super Market, Brown & Houk Hardware, Roberts Flower Shop, Wampum Hardware Co. and Repman’s drug store -- all of them ultimately supplanted by the big retail and restaurant chains that moved in elsewhere.

Dick Allen, who in high school was nicknamed Sleepy for his hooded eyes, would come over from Chewton to hang out with the guys at Repman’s drug store. A big Coca-Cola sign was bolted more than 10 feet above Repman’s storefront. The guys would say, “Sleepy, see if you can touch that Coca-Cola sign.” Sleepy was about 5’9” as a high-school sophomore, and he could easily leap and tap the sign. The sign was dusty, so Sleepy’s fingerprints were visible on it. Each year he left his fingerprints a little higher on the sign.

After graduating from Wampum High School in 1960, Sleepy went on to also leave his fingerprints in big league baseball and did his own bit to increase national awareness of Wampum. At the end of his baseball career, when he joined the Oakland Athletics in 1977, the team’s equipment manager asked him what uniform number he wanted.

“Sixty,” Allen said, without hesitation. “For Wampum High School, Class of 1960.”

He had one other request for personalizing his Athletics uniform. He didn’t want his last name stitched on the back, he wanted something else: WAMPUM.

WAMPUM
60

It was his way to demonstrate his steadfast affection for his hometown. It was a way to validate and celebrate his feelings for a precious place far, far away from California, a place in western Pennsylvania where his mother Era imposed limits and discipline on him, where he was proud to build on the athletic legacy of the Allen brothers, where he never encountered the kind of racial prejudice that he did afterward, where he was Sleepy instead of the rebellious Bad Boy of big league baseball, as he was often simplistically portrayed on the sports pages.

Era cleaned houses in Wampum to make a living for her five boys and four girls. “My mom did a swell job of raising us,” Dick always said. When Era died in 1995, Dick and his wife, Willa, moved from their retirement residence in Florida to Wampum to live in the home on the hill that he built for his mother with the $70,000 signing bonus he received from the Phillies 35 years earlier. Era sat under a huge oak tree on the hill daily and watched the crew construct the house. Her rascally Dickie -- who for boyhood fun liked to swat stones with the sawed-off handles of her old brooms, resulting in some broken windows at neighbors’ homes -- died in 2020 at age 78. He is buried in Clinton Cemetery in Wampum.