Posted on Fri, Nov. 21, 2008

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Kennedy: 1949 Paschal High team reunited but missing a key man: coach

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Six of the 1949 Paschal Panthers: (from bottom) Bill Thurman, Kenneth Cochran, Cecil Morgan, George Scaling, Bob McDonald and Henry Ohlen. Cochran and Scaling have died. The others will reunite for a celebration at Billingsley Field House tonight during halftime of the Paschal-Arlington Heights game. Star-Telegram Archives

They were high school basketball heroes in postwar Fort Worth, schoolboy superstars in an age when their disciplinarian coach made them run laps and paddled them for drinking a Coke.

Tonight, the remaining players from the 1949 Paschal High School Panthers will stand proudly again at midcourt, reunited after nearly 60 years and still afraid of irascible coach, Charlie Turner.

Cecil Morgan, Panthers star-turned-Fort-Worth-stockbroker, 77, invoked the name of another famously prickly coach.

"People talk about Bobby Knight," Morgan said Thursday. "Look, Coach Turner made Bobby Knight look like a Sunday school teacher."

Six decades after Turner badgered the Panthers into a 41-40 victory over Houston Milby, an undefeated 24-0 season and the school’s second state basketball championship, they will be remembered tonight at halftime of the Paschal-Arlington Heights game at Billingsley Field House.

Much has changed about basketball and high school since 1949.

The sport is now played above the rim in a city that produces All-Americans. Paschal, then a huge segregated high school near hospitals in the center of booming Fort Worth, now serves students of all colors from a campus on Forest Park Boulevard.

The 1949 Panthers’ star center, 6-foot-5 Henry "Hank" Ohlen, can identify with today’s working-class students. He walked three miles to school every day from his mother’s frame house east of South Main Street, even though he didn’t even have a winter coat.

"The other guys had cars and dated, but we were poor folks," he said Thursday by phone.

He was in the Paschal office asking for a transfer when Turner noticed a tall kid.

"Coach Turner told me to stay," Ohlen said. "I was so terribly clumsy, I couldn’t run from one end of the court to the other without falling down. But he became a father figure to me."

Ohlen became an all-star center for Texas Christian University and a Ph.D. geologist for Shell Oil.

When Turner wasn’t watching, the Panthers cruised Eighth Avenue, watched movies at the old Parkway Theater and went to Massey’s Restaurant after games, hiding the cream pie whenever their coach walked in.

They won the city championship back when schools played in what is now Cowtown Coliseum. Then, they went to Houston and won the state title in a tournament restricted to schools from big cities.

Texas City and Houston Yates won championships in the state’s top two divisions that year — for white and black schools respectively. But Morgan said the Panthers were better.

"With the discipline Coach Turner taught us, we could beat anybody," he said.

"This past year has been the most trying in my 47 years as a stockbroker. But I’ve remembered how Coach Turner taught us patience."

Turner retired in 1971 after 30 years as the Paschal coach. He died in 1996.

Playmaking guard Bill Thurman, now of Austin, put it bluntly: "We just got our butts chewed out and run into the ground over and over again," he said.

Some of the players haven’t seen each other for half a century.

But they still see Coach Turner everywhere.