Doyel: Kitchel is an Indiana basketball story at intersection of Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
Gregg DoyelEditor's note:This story was originally published in July. We are republishing it as we look back at some of our most-read stories of the year.
KITCHEL, Ind. – This is a story you’re not going to believe, and it doesn’t help that the first word is a lie. See that dateline, the word “KITCHEL”? It’s not true. We’re here, but we’re not here, because the town Kitchel doesn’t exist anymore. Kitchel is gone.
The story lives, told in concrete and cornstalks and piles of copper pipe in the middle of nowhere, because that’s where we are. That’s where Kitchel is: Nowhere.
But in 1942, and again in 1943? This was the place to be, with the basketball team running and the bonfire raging and the smallest school in Indiana, at times the smallest school anywhere – size of 1930 graduating class: 1 – claimed back-to-back sectional championships.
A story like this doesn’t just happen. It needs a hero like the coaching savant from Scircleville, and something cataclysmic like World War II. It needs railroad tracks and a secret in the cornfield. And it starts with a barn, falling apart now, located at the intersection of Here Today and Gone Tomorrow.
A farm, a railroad, a town
She’s telling me to go slow on County Road 350, or I’ll miss it.
Her name is Vicky Bostick Logue, she’s the Union County Public Library genealogist and official county historian, and pay attention to that middle name – her maiden name, actually: Bostick. None of this happens without Old Man Bostick and his wife, Clinton and Marie, who had so many kids, so many athletes, that the coach at Kitchel was always asking: “Are you going to keep those Bosticks coming?”
“Grandma just laughed at that,” Vicky Bostick Logue is saying.
We’re standing on a peninsula of grass in northeast Union County, surrounded by oceans of corn. In the middle of all this farmland, carved into the cornfield, are four trees standing sentry above concrete proof that Kitchel existed. It’s a marker of cement and brick, maybe 5 feet tall and 15 feet long.
Harrison Twp. School, the sign says, the school’s name in 1923 when it was built here. The earliest stories from the Indianapolis Star refer to “Harrison High of Kitchel,” and before the 1927 sectional noted the “unique size of the school and the personnel of the team. With only 10 boys enrolled in the entire high school, nine are eligible for basketball, and a squad of eight represents the school. One of the two remaining boys acts as yell leader.”
In 1930 the papers were referring to the school as Kitchel, the family that settled this fertile farmland 10 miles south of Richmond, Ind., in the early 1800s. Daniel Kitchel appears to have been the first Kitchel in town, and soon there were Kitchels like there was corn, as far as the eye could see. Five miles away in Liberty, Ind., buried at West Point Cemetery, is the 1982 grave of John Robert Kitchel under a tombstone that says: “Indiana State Corn Husking Champion in 1931.”
E.A. Kitchel owned most of the land near the crossroads of County Road 350 and County Road 400, also known as Kitchel and Fouts roads, families with their own intersection in 1906 when Nellie Kitchel married attorney J. Earl Fouts. By 1880 the Eastern & Indiana Railroad Company was planning an extension from Cincinnati to Richmond and eventually laid those tracks through Kitchel, misspelling it “Kitchell.” About a dozen houses were built around the tracks, and the U.S. Postal Service put an office here in 1901.
Soon there were enough kids running around for a school, and E.A. Kitchel donated the land. The first graduating class of Harrison Township School, in 1925, had five members. There were three graduates in 1928. Aneta Wilson was the only graduate in 1930.
Such was the birth of Kitchel, Ind., but town-sustaining business didn’t follow. The post office has been gone for decades. As for E.A. Kitchel’s farm, all that’s left are a crumbling barn and smaller outbuilding, weather-beaten wood structures that will fall soon enough, abandoning the concrete marker a quarter-mile away that shows what the school was once called – and how it came to be known.
Harrison Twp. School, the sign says, in letters shadowed by a century of sun, rain and snow. Below that and to the right, an addendum put here well after the high school closed in 1961 – bright white concrete over blighted brick – tells the biggest story about a school and a town that don’t exist anymore:
Kitchel Cowboys, it says.
1942 & 1943 sectional champs.
Down goes mighty Connersville
In those days, nobody was beating Connersville.
The Spartans had won 18 of 20 sectional titles entering the 1941-42 season, but the kids at Kitchel had something going, led by all those Bostick boys. Before becoming a U.S. Marine Corps pilot, Orren Bostick, class of 1939, was a basketball player. So were his younger brothers Ken (class of 1940), Darrell (‘43), Clint (’44) and Herm (‘50). So was his youngest brother, Ted Bostick, class of 1956.
“Everybody played,” says Ted – that’s Vicky Bostick Logue’s dad – the last of the Bostick boys. He’s 84 now, living in the same brick house he bought in 1970 for $10,000, surrounded by 25 acres.
Ted was a toddler in 1941 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the U.S. war machine kicked into high gear. Young men were going to fight, and younger men – high school kids – were going to work in factories. Connersville was a factory town. Its basketball team was decimated in 1942 and ’43.
Little changed for the sons of Kitchel. They worked the farms and went to school – and played basketball – as usual.
“Dad was a hired hand,” says Ted Bostick, a lifetime in eastern Indiana turning those last two words into hard hand. “He raised seven kids working for $7 a week.”
With Connersville depleted by the war, here came Kitchel – coached since 1936 by Keith Stroup of Scircleville – and all those Bostick boys. In 1942 and ’43 the Cowboys were a combined 46-8, going into the Connersville sectional both years to beat the Spartans in double overtime for the title. In those days double overtime was a sudden-death affair decided by the first field goal, and Clint Bostick hit the winner in 1942. Harry Dils won it for Kitchel in 1943, when Bostick set a sectional scoring record with 72 points in four games.
They didn’t do parades in Kitchel.
“We built big bonfires,” Ted Bostick says, gesturing toward the corn, “and it was over there.”
The Indianapolis News wrote about the smallest town in Indiana to win a 1942 sectional, noting that Kitchel was “said to be less than 100 souls, and all souls in Kitchel are quite happy about the double overtime victory over Mose Pruitt’s Connersville lads.”
Kitchel kept it going a week later in Rushville, the News reported, beating Arlington before losing to Aurora in front of “the smallest crowd in the history of a Rushville regional.”
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Stroup left the next year for Fairmount, where he won more of his six career sectional titles, before becoming the first athletic director at North Central in 1956. Kitchel, down to one Bostick for 1943-44, never won another sectional.
“My dad always said if he’d a-stayed,” Ted Bostick says of Stroup, “we’d have won the third year, too.”
Tiny population, huge heart
When Kitchel makes the news these days, it generally means somebody died.
Search Google for “Kitchel High” and “Indiana,” and obituaries pop up: Maurice Pentecost (class of 1938), sectional hero Harry Dils (’44), Charmaign Dare (‘53), and Harold Crouse Jr. From Crouse’s obituary: “He is a 1950 graduate of Kitchel High School where he played basketball for the Kitchel Cowboys. While in school he was the Indiana State Sheep Judging Champion.”
The news was happier in another century. The basketball team drew attention, of course, and when William F. Jones was appointed Kitchel's first mail carrier in 1903, it made the newspaper. The post office quietly closed in 1951, a sign of things to come.
The high school closed in 1961, consolidated with Liberty and Brownsville into Short High. Eleven years later Short consolidated with College Corner – a school so close to Ohio, halfcourt of its gymnasium was painted cheekily above the state line – into Union County High in 1972.
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Kitchel lost its elementary school in 1982 but the cornfields remain, as do a handful of houses around the railroad tracks. A sign in one yard congratulates “Ryan” for his 10th year in 4-H.
“That’s my nephew,” Ted Bostick says.
Farming will always be at the soul of unincorporated Kitchel, and its heart beats strong. A resident launched a $5,000 fundraiser last month for the American Cancer Society, ambitious for such a small area. The drive stalled at about $4,000.
“Word spread,” says Steve Logue, Vicky’s husband, “and someone went down there and wrote the check to get them to $5,000. Things like that happen all the time around here.”
Vicky and her dad, Ted, are nodding in agreement. We’re standing near the cement-and-brick school sign, under the four towering trees, where a secret is hidden from passerby: a mound of copper pipe, all that remains from the schoolhouse that once stood here. The pipe rests behind the concrete sign, on a sidewalk that extends away from Kitchel Road until it disappears into a field of corn.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.