An answer for the question of the day

Don Cantrell

Mervin Greiwe is a long-time reader of the Daily Pilot sports and a

splendid Harbor High athlete down through past years.

Greiwe, Class of ‘45, like many, has followed the Pilot’s Sports Hall

of Fame and finally contributed a strong recommendation.

After a flow of compliments over past honorable folks, Greiwe poses a

fair question. He wants to know about an old friend of his--George

Yardley, one of the great names to emerge from Harbor High and

professional ranks as an all-star basketball player. Will he be named?

The Pilot staff will long remember “King Georgie,” but even if there

was ever a lapse of memory relative to honors, he would still stand tall

in the NBA Hall of Fame with all the other significant pros at

Springfield, Mass.

I’ve checked it out, and I’ve been assured that yes, King Georgie will

be inducted and before you can say Happy New Year!

Over past years from the 1940s, Greiwe’s dad took good care of many

Harbor High teens by allowing them to work on their hot rods at his old

service station on 30th Street and Newport Boulevard.

Another old friend of Yardley’s from Balboa Island, Bill “Dutch” Van

Horn, still recalls Greiwe’s risky scooter race from one of the Island to

the other one night.

He barely lost, but Van Horn thinks the best thing is that the pair

didn’t get pulled over by the local gendarmes.

A recent mention of the late Horace Parker who once published the

Paisano Press, which produced numerous tidbits of area heritage, recalled

one past amusement from the late 1930s when he was coaching Cee level

football at Harbor High.

The young athletes were well-behaved about any mention of beer or

cigarettes. They were totally forbidden in those days, and there was no

trace of drugs, either.

One afternoon, an innocent Cee footballer named Edward C. Stephens,

who later became a running guard for the legendary fullback Hal Sheflin,

started to enter Allen’s Drug Store on Balboa Island, then quickly edged

out and disappeared.

The shock was spotting his grid coach, Mr. Parker, sitting at the soda

counter smoking a ciggie.

With a laugh in recent years, Stephens related the story. He admitted

he had kept it a secret all these years, but thought he was clear to

convey the incident now.

A kid would not have considered walking up to the coach and saying

something like, “Hi, coach. Boy, it sure looks smoky in here.”

We were able to share one amusement with Frank Hamilton before he

passed away in October at his home in Fort Walton, Florida.

Over the years, we had a habit in sports stories of referring to him

as the 6-foot-4 southpaw pitcher. In fact, he pitched Harbor High to its

only baseball title in 1948.

The school had opened in 1930 and won numerous titles in football,

basketball and track and field, but not baseball.

Nonetheless, Hamilton laughed on the phone, then told this corner that

he did reach 6-5 after high school days, but he was no longer playing

baseball after that.

Hamilton was always a class “A” gentleman and highly regarded by all.

Ruthelyn Plummer, a former classy swimmer at Harbor High, noted song

leader in 1942 and a one-time Mayor of Newport Beach, left commendable

marks out of World War II.

In the spring of ‘42, Plummer and many kids out of physical education

classes were bussed to abandoned farms in the area to pick strawberries

and vegetables. The crops were left after the government took the

Japanese-American farm families off to internment camps like Arizona,

Utah and New Mexico until after the war ended.

Plummer was always impressed by the official action to save all the

valued crops.

In World War II, she worked as a riveter at a McDonnell-Douglas

airplane plant. One source said she still finds herself inspecting the

rivets on airplanes before she steps aboard.

There was no swimming pool at Harbor High in the early ‘40s, by

Plummer said the swimming athletes would work out down in the harbor near

Lido Isle.

She said the coach generally organized the team and events with a

clipboard en route to a rival school on the bus.

The pool was finally constructed in 1949 and the coach assigned to

take charge was Al Irwin, who graduated from Harbor High in 1936 and

advanced to College of the Pacific.