YES THEY DID

THANK YOU

42,000 Views Thank you for checking out my blog . Appreciate it. 

HARRY PLAYED BASKETBALL ON MY DADS AMERICAN INDIAN TEAM

Harry taught the TEXAS COWGIRLS  TRICK BALL HANDLING HARRY ALSO KNOWN AS HAT TRICK HARRY    WAS   A SHOW  HIMSELF AND WOULD PREFORM AT TEXAS COWGIRLS HALFTIMES

HARRY McLAUGHLIN (Men's Basketball) Harry McLaughlin, who played from 1946-47 until 1949-50, was arguably the first "great" in Pacific Lutheran men's basketball annals. He was a bit of Magic Johnson and the Harlem Globetrotters while on the court, combining excellent ball-handling skills with showmanship to give the audience a real show. McLaughlin ranks third on the all-time PLU scoring list with 1,783 points. He averaged 17.0 points per game as a freshman, his highest per-game average, and never averaged less than 12.9 per contest. In addition, he twice earned Evergreen Conference All-Star honors. Since leaving Pacific Lutheran, McLaughlin, himself an American Indian, has been involved in Indian affairs in South Dakota.

THE RENS READ ABOUT THEM IF YOU HAVE NOT

The Rens played two years in Pittsburgh in the American Basketball League, losing in the preliminary round of the playoffs in 1962 and not making the playoffs in 1963.

However, the Pittsburgh Pipers won the ABA championship in 1968 led by Connie Hawkins (who was also a member of the 62 Rens team before they disbanded).

Lessons from my mama

Don't judge others   you cannot walk in their shoes                         Money  cannot  make a person a good human,  giving without taking does.
If someone can do nothing for you and you do for them that is kindness and  the real road in life.
""Fonie  baloney to private schools country clubs  titles who cares ....  
Money comes money goes  love  is free.
  I never knew what growing up "poor" meant even  growing up without indoor plumbing and hand me downs and an orange and nuts in a sock for Christmas was not painful or shameful I never knew those emotions because there was so much real love in our family we were happy .  
Why do people with more dollars shame those with less? That is shameful !!!
When people go through tough times get arrested, a divorce. lose  a job  don't shame them wrap your heart around them ....  that is what everyone needs acceptance and  compassion not ridicule or judgement  . 

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Ollie Olegario, House of David Basketball and Texas CowGirls barnstorm basketball team 


Ollie travelled with the Texas CowGirls as a halftime entertainer. 

Lessons from my daddy

Stand up straight

                                             Always look sharp



                                                                                                               Be proud

VINTAGE BASKETBALL LOT OF (5) PHOTOS CELTICS vs , TEXAS  COWGIRLS

ORIGINAL PHOTOS      1951   1953    1955     1957    1958    

SPORTS COLLECTIBLES       -     SELLING FOR       289.00      

SENDING       TO ME AT  FOR MY   ARCHIVES  NO COST WHEN THE SELLER   FOUND OUT WHO I AM FABULOUS  !!!

THANK YOU     SAL GORDY   OF NY CITY    THE CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM SENDS A THANK YOU TOO!

ASSOCIATION PROFESSIONAL BASKETBALL RESEARCH

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Texas Cowgirls toured with Globetrotters in ’50s

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Texas Cowgirls toured with Globetrotters in ’50s

by rlee » Tue Oct 25, 2011 10:57 pm

Texas Cowgirls toured with Globetrotters in ’50s
By BILLY WATKINS
SunHerald.com

PEARL -- Picture this: A double-deck bus barnstorming the northern United States and Canada with the Harlem Globetrotters filling the upstairs and the Texas Cowgirls, a women’s basketball team, riding below.
The Globetrotters, featuring Wilt Chamberlain and Meadowlark Lemon, were black. The Texas Cowgirls were white.
The years were 1957 and `58.
“We got a lot of strange looks,” said Barbara Leggette, a Pearl resident who was 18 years old and a member of the Cowgirls at the time. “But us and the Globetrotters got along great. They looked after the girls in every big city we went to and made sure nobody bothered us.”
Those big cities included New York, San Francisco, Boston and Chicago. Small towns were on the schedule, too, “because we played every day and usually twice on Sunday,” she said.
It was, in some ways, a traveling circus.
The Globetrotters were proving that comedy and basketball made good companions.
The Cowgirls -- formed in 1949 and disbanded in 1977 -- always opened the entertainment, taking on local men’s teams. And playing against the Pro Hawaii 50th Staters and others.
They came onto the court wearing western hats, vests and holsters filled with cap pistols. Whenever a player made a shot during warm-ups, she would take off something.
“We’d get all the way down to our uniform, and the crowd would start yelling `More! More!’ but that’s as far as it went,” Leggette laughs. “Lord help me if my daddy could’ve seen that.”
Rarely did the Cowgirls lose.
“For the most part, men resented us playing at all, so it would burn them up when we beat them,” said Leggette. “We were in Utah one night, and one of the players on the other team kept trying to get fresh with me every time I brought the ball down court. It really hacked me off. So I reared back and slapped the hell out of him. That guy didn’t know who he was messing with.”
Leggette, 72, the youngest of 12 children, grew up in Transylvania, La., a community 20 miles north of Tallulah.
She loved basketball, and spent most of her spare time shooting at a hoop nailed to a chicken house.
From fifth grade through 10th, she played at Transylvania Middle School.
Then she led Lake Providence High School to the state championship finals as a junior and senior, winning one title and losing another by one point.
Leggette earned All-State honors by averaging more than 40 points per game.
“I had a hook shot they couldn’t stop,” Leggette said.
This was no ordinary hook shot. Leggette usually launched it near the out of bounds line on the right side of the court, a good 22 feet from the basket. She learned it playing against her four brothers.
“I had never seen anybody else shoot a hook,” she said. “I was only 5-foot-6, so I had to figure out a way to get a shot off against the boys. I worked on it until I could pop that net.”
Two men from Wisconsin visited Lake Providence to work on a power plant.
They took in a local high school game, and saw Leggette pour in nearly 50 points.
They told one of her sisters about the Cowgirls, based in Beloit, Wis., and owned by promoter Dempsey Hovland.
“My sister and my mother brought me to Jackson and put me on a train to Chicago, where I took another train to Beloit for a tryout,” she said. “I was a country girl who had never been anywhere.
“When I got there, there were about 40 girls, and they were only going to keep eight. We did some drills and scrimmaged. I felt like I was as good as any of them.”
She was the only Southerner that year to make the team and earned the starting point guard position.
Off they went, playing high school gymnasiums and some of the most famous arenas in the world -- the old Madison Square Garden in New York and the Cow Palace in San Francisco.
The 1957 Green Bay Packers, with outstanding athletes such as Bart Starr and Paul Hornung, went 3-9 in football and 0-1 in basketball, losing to the Cowgirls.
Leggette earned $400 a month, a ton of money in those days.
She sent most of it home to help the family.
“I enjoyed every minute of it,” she said of the 1957-58 season, which ran from October through May.
As the team prepared for a European tour, Leggette received word her mother had suffered a stroke and her father was battling cancer. She also learned that one of her nieces, a special-needs child, wasn’t doing well.
Leggette returned to Transylvania. Within a 10-month span, her mother, father and niece died. She never returned to the Cowgirls.
“I helped raise my nieces and nephews, helped keep the farm going for a while,” she said. “It was the only decision I could’ve made. I couldn’t have lived with myself, otherwise.”
Leggette’s story, along with others who played with the Cowgirls,
Became an interest of  J. Butler who  was urged by a professor to take an inventory of a small historical museum in Winthrop, Ark., just to see what she might discover.
She found stories on World War II heroes and one about a bear killed.
“The usual small-town stuff,” she said. “But one day they gave me the key to the sports room. I opened up a box, and there was a picture of the Texas Cowgirls. It just tugged at me. I immediately wondered, ‘Girls, where are you now?”’
Butler realized finding them would be no easy chore.
“These ladies would be in their 70s and 80s, so they weren’t going to be on Facebook or MySpace,” she said.
Her search was made more difficult because each girl was identified as a Texan. Leggette’s hometown was listed as Austin.
“But I figured Southern women do two things -- they go to church and they go to the beauty shop,” she said. “And every once in a while, they would slip up and list their real hometown in a newspaper article. So I started calling every beauty shop and church in those towns.”
She had the preacher in Transylvania ask his congregation one Sunday morning if anyone knew a Barbara Leggette.
“Every elderly person in the church raised their hand,” Butler said. “That’s how I found Barbara.”
Butler has interviewed 10 former Cowgirls in person, and many others by phone.
“This is American history. These women were world-class athletes who should not be ignored.
“When you think about it, it was quite fitting that the Globetrotters and the Cowgirls toured together. Both were minorities whose only choice of a professional career was one in a  barnstorm type atmosphere. The Globetrotters became famous,the CowGirls were known around the world .
Butler contacts the hometown newspaper of each Cowgirl she finds.
“If I can get their stories told, I feel like I’ve fulfilled what I was supposed to do,” she said. “And they’re stories worth telling.”

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
Albert Einstein

Barbabra played for one season. She has been bombarded with autograph seekers at Home Depot where she is employed since her interview. 

. The CowGirls also opened for the NBA teams and games in the 1950 and 60s were sent overseas by President Kennedy to play the US Airforce Teams and then again to Alaska by US State Department. The CowGirls were featured  in thousands of newspapers television and radio appearances

COWGIRLS were the female version of the HARLEM GLOBETROTTERS AND SIGNED AS OFFICIAL MEMBERS OF THE HARLEM GLOBETROTTERS BASKETBALL ORGANIZATION

THE CG were a melting pot of teams with muti ethnic female squads in an era when segregation was still rearing its ugly head on other teams in professional sports. The Cowgirls through history had African American, Native American Pacific Islander, and Jewish female basketball players.

SEASONS OF THE ROAD

Summer season   Dempsey  and  Florence pull their 7 children out of school early each year. Suitcases packed station wagon loaded, end of year homework assignments competed on the road and mailed in from around the country .Dempsey and oldest son stay at home to work on next years itinerary for barnstorm basketball teams, bookings for appearances and shows  are attended for fairs and summer events. Final accommodations, choreography, staff, media set for annual national  finals for Miss American Teenager competition and crowning in Palisades Park New Jersey. Training camp preparations for basketball teams that arrive in the fall. Oldest son works in office when Dempsey is on the road with his baseball teams. Florence spends the summer driving every state west of the Mississippi and a few on the other side with 6 children town to town hotel to hotel. State by state  state finals are held for Miss American Teenager pageants. We all worked the door , set up , the press etc. My mom would also check out possible players for the coming seasons basketball tours. She would plant us in a movie theater across the country  where we'd watch movies for hours as she went to scout players then we would hit the road agin.
We stayed in comped Presidential Suites at hotels such as The Brown palce in Denver. Palmer House Chicago, are provided for Florence and her brood of kids in major cities . Holiday Inn stays and educational site seeing along the way. Florence runs the pageant business on the road with 6 kids in tow who all I have jobs: ballroom set up, florists, gate and program sales, timing interviews with judges, tours for the contestants, photo shoots with Governers   etc etc ,  My mom made stops in major cities to scout basketball players for the Harlem Queens or Texas CowGirls,, in the fall 85-120 recruits would  vie for for tryouts only 8-12 would make each team.   Return home in August . The last days before school began were packed with dad time. My mom had driven thousands of miles with us for 3 months eating 3 meals a day in restaurants, living out of suitcases and hotels. My dad was ready to play--- swimming at Lake Ripley, a day at Madison Zoo, picnics, Outdoor Movie Theaters, Museums,  Pizza, Dryans Ice Cream Parlor, backroad  exursions to where ever we wound up. This was all a blast and  purposeful to give his wife and mother of 7- 3 weeks to regroup before 11 baseball players would leave our home and 8  young women would appear to stay and prepare for training and newbie tryouts for their World Famous Texas CowGirls Professional touring barnstorm basketball team.


Fall  Basketball training camps for returning players, new recruit indoctrinations on media readiness, moral charecter routines travel  rules are all  in session   Teams hit the road playing 7 days a week twice on Sundays in October thru May. Our house is frequented by halftime acts, beds full of athletes and  entertainers.

Winter    my dad or mom are on the road with his pro basketball team  we are in school take trips in car or by plane on weekends and a few times we take off school for longer periods during the regular school season. Once in a while we had Mrs Levi or Mrs Aggie as nannys  never for buisness but when my mom and dad could get away alone together... with 7 kids and a business that was an octopus it took alot of work to make it happen. It was an exciting childhood!!!!
 

HEADLINERS TRAVELING BARNSTORMERS AND ADVENTURES

1-2-3-4-5-6-7- kids to travel with

MIDDLE DAUGHTER ERIN  1972 15 years old 

DENNIS AND BABY SISTER JULIE IN PHOTO BOOTH 1956 IN CHIICAGO
GRANDPA OTTO GRANDMA LOIS, DENNIS  AND ERIN 1957
LEFT  JULIE  2  ERIN  1 DENNIS  8
ERIN KINDERGARTEN JULIE FIRST GRADE DENNIS  6TH GRADE

TEXAS COWGIRL BASKETBALL PLAYER FEEDING BABY SCOTT HOVLAND HIS BOTTLE
1962 IN HOVLAND LIVING ROOM

DENNIS US ARMY VIET NAM

Mom Florence in middle

Hovland kids 

Kam Fong of Hawaii Five O tv Show  right side middle

EARLY  1970s

1961JULIE DENNIS ERIN TODD

1972
BETH ERIN JULIE TODD SCOTT KIRK

Daughter Erin working - on the road FOR HER PARENTS  -17

1974

DAUGHTER BETH       14    1977

                                 1955
                            Dennis  lived on the road with my dad and his traveling ball teams    
                             CROSS COUNTRY MY MOM ON LEFT MY AUNT ON RIGHT

KIRK  DOUGLAS- THE YOUNGEST  1973

                                   1969


 BUSINESS WAS FAMILY AND FAMILY WAS BUSINESS THIS WAS EASTER GOING TO A SHOW AND FUN RAISER FOR AN ORPHANAGE OUR PARENTS RAISED MONEY FOR.  
PERFORMANCE BY THE HARMONICA RASCALS, EASTER EGG HUNT , PONY RIDES,   
 

Topic "DEMPSEY Hovland" was discussed 1,552 times on 112 sites in last 3 months


ACCORDING TO yAHOO 4-2012

1st TEXAS COWGIRLS TEAM BEGAN CHICAGO 1949

Audrey and Hank Williams MY DAD DEMPSEY HIRED AUDREY

MY DAD DEMPSEY HIRED AUDREY AFTER HER DIVORCE AND HANKS DEATH TO ENTERTAIN

THE FANS DURING HALFTIME FOR HIS TEXAS COWGIRLS BASKETBALL GAMES

HANK HAD ALSO  PERFORMED BEFORE HIS DEATH.

SO IT IS FAIR TO SAY MY DAD PUT FOOD IN HANK WILLIAMS SR MOUTH

MY MOMMA

MY MOM -ANOTHER TOWN-ANOTHER DAY-

A pretty good documentary - for a highschool project

Note sent with video to me

from the film maker  (you can view parts I and  II  on Youtube)

Thank you very much! That's awesome that your father knew Satchel Paige!

5:43

Satchel Paige part 2

This documentary of Satchel Paige won 1st prize for 9th, 10th, and 11th grade documentary media. I had to split it into 2 parts because it was over 10 minutes.

MY DAD MANAGED SATCHEL NUMEROUS TIMES HE PLAYED FOR MY DAD ON 2 TEAMS
THEY  WERE GOOD FRIENDS BEFORE AND AFTER .

MY MOM SKIER MY MOM WITH SISTER RED TWO BEAUTIES BOTH PLAYED PROFESSIONAL BASKETBALL- MY MOM ON NATIONAL TOUR

MY PRETTY MOM -HER SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL PICTURE

florence   cleo   holder hovland