North Union’s Rich Halbrook remembers the good old days
Athletic participation, as it has been for many athletes, was a means to an end for Rich Halbrook; it helped him get a college education. Halbrook was a standout basketball player for North Union High School in the mid 1960s and was a big part of some very competitive teams for the Rams.
“I enjoyed basketball and the coach gave me a chance to play as a junior,” Halbrook recalled.
Halbrook had played sparingly as a sophomore, tallying six points in 1962-63 on a team that went 10-8 overall and 6-8 in Section 10. North Union posted a 14-5 overall record and went 10-4 as Halbrook scored 255 points for an 11.6 average in 1963-64. The big highlight in his sophomore season was handing section champ Albert Gallatin its only setback in section play.
“They had a very, very strong team,” Halbrook said. “That was a nice win.”
In 1964-65, the Rams had an outstanding season finishing 21-2 and reeling off 18 wins in a row on their way to the Section 10 title. Halbrook, who was a senior co-captain, notched 292 points and averaged 12.7.
“I saw it building toward that type of season,” Halbrook remembered. “We won the Donora Undergraduate Tournament. We beat Monessen in the championship game, 65-63, and along the way defeated Donora, 63-57; Bentleyville-Ellsworth, 63-57, and Monongahela, 70-63. We won the tournament pretty easily because we pressed, so I thought we were going to have a good season.”
The Rams 64-65 season came to an end at the hands of the talented Midland Leopards 90-54 in the WPIAL tournament.
“I was pleased with the season we had and what I did personally,” Halbrook said. “We won the section and of course we didn’t do too well when we went down to Pittsburgh. We ran into Midland and they had some outstanding players in Simmie Hill, Norm Van Lier, Ron Brown and Brent Lake. They pounded us on the boards pretty good. They were very, very good.”
Looking back, Halbrook felt the Rams were a very close-knit group.
“We looked for the open man and it was a team sport, it wasn’t just one person,” Halbrook offered. “We all came together and we all played hard. Gene Painley was North Union’s all-time leading scorer and he was very consistent and he hit the open shot when we needed it and he did a very good job. But we all played our roles, Brent Watson, Ted “Binky” Martin, Benny Hall and me – we played well together.”
Halbrook has good memories of his coach, Harold “Horse” Taylor.
“He was a good coach,” Halbrook opined. “He was a coach that gave you the opportunity to show what you could do and he would let you play if you did well. He coached us well.”
Halbrook was a Section 10 All-Star as a senior along with Painley. The Section 10 All-Stars faced the Fayette County All-Stars at North Union and the County All-Stars prevailed, 58-52. Halbrook scored four points in the loss.
“It was a great way to cap off the senior season playing in the All-Star game,” Halbrook said.
Following his graduation from North Union in 1965, Halbrook took a circuitous route to college.
“I went to the FBI for one year right after high school,” Halbrook explained. “They were drafting people into the service and I realized I was going into the service one way or another and I decided to pick what service I wanted to go to and I joined the Air Force.
He wound up playing a lot of basketball in the Air Force.
“It was a good brand of basketball,” Halbrook opined. “You had a lot of college players playing and on the base where I was stationed we had a lot of officers that had played college ball.
Halbrook really honed his basketball skills in the Air Force. Stationed at Little Rock Air Force Base in Arkansas, he played for the 825th Transportation Squadron. He led the team in scoring in 1970 with an average of 24.1 points. He was the leading scorer of a three-year period averaging 19. His top game was a 34-point effort against the Headquarters Squadron.
“It was a little bit different because I was an aggressive ballplayer,” Halbrook stated. “If the ball is there I was going to get it, whether it’s rebounding or whatever it is and the biggest thing is I developed an outside shot in the service. Most of my scoring in high school was around the basket. I also played for an AAU team while I was in the service.
“I was recruited by several schools while I was playing in the Air Force. The University of Arkansas, Arkansas Little Rock and East Tennessee State were interested. I had a chance to go to Arkansas because there were several players on the base team that had an audition to tryout for Arkansas. I chose East Tennessee State because it was closer to Pennsylvania.”
On the freshman squad in 1970-71, Halbrook played in 20 games and scored 173 points for an average of 8.6. Moving up to the varsity in 1971-72, he scored 79 points and averaged 3.8 on a team that posted an overall record of 11-14, with a 6-8 Ohio Valley Conference mark. In 1972-73, the Bucs went 9-17 and 2-12 in the conference. Halbrook only saw action in 11 games as a junior and averaged 2.0. He saw almost no playing time as a senior in 1973-74 as East Tennessee finished 8-18 overall and 3-11 in conference play.
“I was in the service for four years and I was really as they called me the ‘old man,’ ” Halbrook recalled. “I was 23 years old playing with the kids. It was tough for me to break into the lineup because, at 6-3, I wasn’t fast enough to play guard and I wasn’t big enough to play inside, but I did play inside. I was an undersized forward. My playing time diminished as I went along and my senior year wasn’t a good year. We had a change in coaches and it wasn’t a real good period for ETSU basketball, we were struggling and didn’t have real good unity on the team.”
Looking back on it, Halbrook felt he accomplished what he set out to do.
“I wanted to get an education because I knew I wasn’t going to play professional ball, Halbrook said. “I wanted to go to school and they were going to pay for it, plus I had the GI bill and I was going to get an education and that was really what I wanted. It worked out real well.”
An accounting major in college, Halbrook got into the industrial side of accounting after graduating from East Tennessee State. He worked as an accountant for Magnavox for several years and went to work for several different companies before retiring in 2010.
Halbrook, 63, resides in Kingsport, Tenn., with his wife of 33 years, Pamela, and they have one son. He had a son and a daughter from a previous marriage.
He still gets back to Fayette County once a year for his family reunion and still has great memories of growing up in Fayette County.
“I liked everything that went on in those times,” Halbrook said. “Those were the good times as they say.”
George Von Benko’s “Memory Lane” columns appear in the Tuesday editions of the Herald-Standard. He also hosts a sports talk show on WMBS-AM radio from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturdays.