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  When the Japanese dropped bombs on Pearl Harbor, Bob Hart, like other young men at the time, found his life upended by World War II. His parents were shattered when in the summer of 1943 their only son enlisted in the army, stalling his education, at least for now.

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  He was first sent to Camp Sibert in Alabama. He wound up being assigned to the very first chemical warfare attack company the army had formed. The battalion’s expertise was the firing of mortars, tube-shaped pieces of artillery that shoot bombs, sending them spiraling toward the enemy. During World War I, mortars were used to unleash gas shells that were poisonous. The effectiveness of the mortar as artillery became especially effective during the Civil War.

  The Alabama heat proved wicked for Hart and his fellow recruits; one member of the unit, Philip Francis, died of heat stroke during training. Being an only child seemed to have fortified Bob Hart; he was not used to whining. He forged his way through boot camp with nary a complaint, not that grumbling would have done any good anyway.

  When his furlough came, he hustled home to Columbus, up the steps of the family home and into the arms of his mother and father. He regaled them with stories of boot camp, the food and the heat, the customs of southerners: Alabama was brutally segregated, and, unlike in Columbus, there was an edge to the segregation, fierce laws behind it. His return home was written up in a local newspaper (“James Robert Hart, son of Mr. and Mrs. J.H. Hart, 974 Heyl Av, is home on furlough. He is a South High School graduate….”). He got spiffed up and went out with Jean. She was very happy to see him—her soldier boy home from the army! They kissed and drank beer and fooled around. He asked her questions about local basketball games, telling her how much he missed watching the games. He begged her to wait for him while he served his army stint, and promised her he would take care of himself. He did not want her thinking about Hitler and the Nazis and the unknown.

  But he returned to Camp Sibert still unsure of Jean’s eternal love. The uncertainty bothered him. He couldn’t shake thoughts of her. He sent her more letters in his unmistakable handwriting, which was as beautiful as calligraphy. “My Dearly Beloved…I rather suppose that you’ve guessed it by now that I’m headed overseas but how soon I don’t know. Everyone seems to think that it will be within the next month…I want you to know that I love you with all my heart and even though it won’t do any good, I want to ask you to wait for me because after this damn thing is over I have a few plans in line for you and I.” He was a soldier in love and facing peril. He felt no reason to mince words: “As far as we know we’re headed for England and going as heavy weapons…I love you and I miss you more than I can put on paper.” He feared she was being wooed by other young men on the homefront. She confided she was thinking of joining the military because she had her own patriotic urges. She wanted to defeat Hitler! In a subsequent letter, he begged her not to, told her she wouldn’t like army life. She read his letter and thought he had some nerve. She had actually already made up her mind.

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  The 87th Chemical Mortar Battalion embarked for Europe from New York aboard the luxury liner the Queen Elizabeth. The army commandeered the ship for troop movement. During the week-long journey, the ship—bound for Scotland—often zigzagged in the water to elude Nazi U-boats. From Scotland the soldiers traveled by train to London. It wasn’t long before Bob Hart, college student from Columbus, Ohio, found himself in the raw madness of war. In December his battalion was encamped in the biting cold of Sadzot, Belgium, seeking warmth in a few of the houses. The unit had stationed guards on the outskirts of town, but an approaching panzer division found an opening and slipped through. In the middle of the night, several German soldiers silently crept into one house and slit the throats of several American GIs. German paratroopers began invading the area. Corporal Bill Cummings spotted some approaching Germans and bolted to warn his fellow GIs. “Get up, there’s Krauts all over the place!” he yelled upon reaching the first of two houses. The Germans spotted Cummings and hit him with a burst of gunfire; he dropped dead on the snow-covered ground. At another house, several soldiers—among them James Hosmer, William Breuer, and Bob Hart, who was the squad’s gunner—quickly realized they were badly outnumbered. They had to escape. They raced for the kitchen and dived through windows. Some of them left their outerwear and raced through the cold coatless. Hosmer stopped, whirled, and tossed a grenade in the direction of the Germans, killing two. First Lt. Ralph Walker—who had happily bragged to the unit in recent days about the birth of his son back home—spotted an SS crew of four kneeling in the street, propping up a machine gun. Walker slyly positioned himself and fired at the German crew. In seconds the Germans lay dead.

  Hart’s mortar battalion continued fighting in Germany, France, and across Belgium. Their landing on Utah Beach on D-day had been as brutal as they had imagined it might be. “The approximately 62 hours spent…in the English Channel was a rather miserable, never-to-be-forgotten experience,” a history of Hart’s battalion reveals. “Salt spray fell across the craft at all times and the decks had from one-half to an inch of water washing about at all times.” They marched and rode through Aachen, and into the Hürtgen forest, which is where Lt. Col. Bob Hart got frostbite.

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  There were more than four thousand Allied casualties on D-Day. Hart’s battalion lost 2nd Lt. Harold Shouse, Pvt. Herman Richey, Cpl. James Montgomery, and Cpl. William Trent. In the days ahead they would lose many more: Pvt. Francis Plubell, Cpl. Frank Stubb, Cpl. William St. Clair, Pvt. Tom Fowler, Pvt. Adolph Miller, Pvt. Fred Berry, Sgt. John Albright, 2nd Lt. William Cable. It was grim and harrowing. Bob Hart knew how lucky he was simply to survive. There were days he thought the noise would never stop, men yelling and blood spraying. “There has never been any rest for the…chemical mortar company for when the infantry to which it is attached gains its objective,” a field report noted. “The heavy mortar company is transferred to another unit which jumps several hours later. The wear and tear on our men and material is terrific.”

  Bob Hart’s hometown girl, Jean, did join the army, becoming part of the WAVES. Bob admonished her from Europe about the drop-off in her letter writing.

  The men of the 87th Chemical Mortar Battalion moved far and wide across Europe. From Poland, Hart wrote yet another letter to Jean: “This might sound funny to you but you came awful close to becoming a mother yesterday. We ran into some Polish refugees and in the group there [were] two of the cutest twins you ever saw. Both were girls, Danut and Sophie. They were nine years old and honest if I had some way to get them home I’d have taken them with me. We gave them chocolate and all kinds of candy and gum…Honey, it sure made me homesick. I was holding one of them on my lap and thinking that if this damn war hadn’t come along maybe I’d be home with you holding our Baby Jean on my lap. That’s all I want, just to come home to you and raise a family. What do you think of that idea?” So he was professing his love. But it didn’t seem to matter all that much to Jean, because her letter writing tapered off and the romance lost its heat.

  When it was all over, Bob Hart had his health, some war medals, and a broken heart. He made his way back to America at war’s end, back to the Ohio Wesleyan campus in 1946. He really didn’t talk much about the war. There was the time he had marched a couple of captured German soldiers back to base and realized, once there, putting his rifle down, checking it, that he had had no bullets in the chamber during the entire march. He could chuckle at the memory of that episode. But not about much else: There were just too many soldier buddies, too many friends, who had been lost. Dead in the snow, dead in the mud, dead in the tall grass of some battlefield. Gone forever.

  There was something that seemed to stay on Bob Hart’s mind after his return from the war. It was inequality. He had witnessed the mistreatment of blacks in the Deep South and then overseas. The d
isenfranchisement of blacks began to bother him. He told his college English teacher he was going to write a paper on black Americans and their plight. He got the Encyclopaedia Britannica citation of “American Negro” and pored over it for hours, for days. He became familiar with the teachings of Booker T. Washington, the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the singing of Paul Robeson, the writings of Carter G. Woodson. He felt energized and enlightened as he pursued this course of study. This is what the home-from-war soldier with a social conscience wrote in his paper, handed in to his professor on February 18, 1946:

  I am convinced that the Negro has possibilities for development equal to anything we whites have. I am convinced that if given the chance the whole Negro race can become one of our greatest assets. To do anything to deprive them of this possibility is to deprive the world of some of its greatest culture. I am convinced that the only answer to the race problem, the only hope for an undivided America, the only possible program from a cultural viewpoint is equal rights for black and white, and the opening up of our institutions to the development of the Negro.

  It was certainly a progressive piece of writing for a twenty-two-year-old white midwesterner. Bob Hart finally graduated from Ohio Wesleyan in 1949. He decided he wanted to teach and to coach. His mother fretted about his emotional state of mind because of the breakup with Jean, but he assured her he would be fine.

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  Shortly after graduation Hart got a lucky break and was offered a head basketball coaching job at Manchester High School in rural Adams County, nestled along the Ohio River. Hart was a quiet, methodical coach and considered himself a student of the sport. He realized the talent pool would be limited in such a small school. Nevertheless, he coached his team to a 26–4 record and a county championship. The victories did not ease his loneliness. Jane Breeze was a cheerleader. She thought the head basketball coach was worldly. They spent time together, away from the eyes of others in hopes of avoiding any meddlesome gossip. On September 8, 1950—she was eighteen years old—they went over to a justice of the peace and got married. The couple did not think it a good idea to remain in Manchester.

  Bob Hart was soon in the trenches of journeyman coaching, bouncing around rural Ohio with his young bride. There was a two-year stay at Peebles High School, where he won a county championship. In 1952 he landed a coaching job at Junction City, Ohio, another all-white rural community. He would sometimes joke that he was out in the sticks, but he was also learning how to coach, how to draw up defenses and analyze an opposing team’s strengths and weaknesses. His teams at Junction City had admirable success, going 44–29 over a three-year period. He was happy to have a job, even if the kids were smallish, and even if he was sometimes pulled into coaching football as well. His wife, Jane, occasionally complained that he was never home.

  Hart began to go to basketball clinics. He cornered veteran coaches, getting as much insight as he could. When he landed at Watkins Memorial High School in Pataskala, Ohio, in 1956, he was a little giddy because he was getting closer to his hometown. Pataskala was just a short distance from the state capital of Columbus, which is where he wanted to coach because the schools were larger and, as he knew, the talent pool would be more wide-ranging. He also reminded Jane that they would be nearer his parents, who could help out with their young brood, Sherri and Bobbi. Later they would have one more daughter, Lynne.

  A year later, in 1957, Bob Hart’s desires came true. He was offered a job as the reserve basketball coach at Columbus East High School. Jack Moore was head basketball coach at the time; Hart and Moore had been roommates at Ohio Wesleyan. Hart told his wife he had to take the job, that there would be a chance for advancement if he did well.

  East High sat on the city’s mostly black and segregated East Side of town. (City fathers didn’t seem to pay any attention to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling three years earlier, in 1954, which had called for the desegregation of public schools. And the protestations by black teachers about equality of education, for the time being, fell on deaf ears.) In 1951 East High won its first state basketball championship. Romeo Watkins was a star guard on that team. Watkins enjoyed being an East High Tiger and all the neighborhood celebrity that came with it. But there was an individual at the school he didn’t like: Helen Bartow, the vice principal. Every day, or often enough that she put a wicked fear into the black students, she would admonish any of them who dared come through the East Broad Street entrance—the front doors—of the school. She insisted they enter the school through a side door. It was tantamount to the backdoor policy that was customary in the South. It may have been an unwritten rule in Columbus, but Watkins and the other black students at the school felt the impact of it. “She was the one who related everything to the students,” Watkins recalls years later. Watkins played alongside three other blacks on that championship team, and one white player, Dick Linson. Linson had grown up on the East Side of the city, alongside Italians and blacks. He was a kindhearted soul. His fellow players thought so highly of him they voted him team captain, an honor usually reserved for one of the team’s stars. As team captain, he was the representative face of the team at the beginning of every game. Whether it was fair or not, some black parents wondered why one of the black stars hadn’t been named team captain; they wondered if the fix had been in for Linson to be named captain. At season’s end, the only player on that championship team to receive a scholarship offer was Dick Linson. He went to the University of Kentucky. All of his fellow athletes there were white. He hated the place, hated the segregation, thought the school was downright racist.

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  Close friends and acquaintances suggested to Bob Hart that he might want to live anyplace but the East Side of town. They referred to the area as alien, unknowable, even dangerous. But those people didn’t really know Bob Hart, how he viewed the racial dynamics of America. Bob Hart didn’t blink and moved his wife and daughters straight to the East Side of town.

  Once they were settled, the Harts enrolled their daughters in the local public school. The girls did not mind that they were among the few whites in their school because they lived in a neighborhood where black faces were all around them.

  Bob Hart was quite delighted about being back in Columbus. He began going to the black playgrounds of the East Side: Franklin Junior High, Champion Junior High, and—later—Monroe Junior High. These were the all-black feeder schools that served East High. And Bob Hart, hanging out around the playgrounds that abutted those schools, introducing himself to players, could hardly believe what he was seeing: Good basketball players were everywhere! He saw tall players and lightning quick players. He saw players who could jump higher than he had ever seen at this level. And they all wanted to play, hard, every day, no matter the heat. This was a new kind of athlete to Bob Hart. These were also the players who would make up Bob Hart’s East High reserve team in the upcoming 1957–58 season. The reserves usually comprised a team of first-year high school players. They had their own coach and schedule of games.

  That season, after tryouts, he winnowed the reserve team down to thirteen players. More than half the team was over six feet tall. They won their first three games, then the next two, then three more after that, leaving them undefeated as the mid-season approached. They kept winning into the second half of the season, their record going to 12–0. And when the season had ended, they had won the city championship with an undefeated record of sixteen straight victories. East High officials suddenly had to take a good long look at their new coach and his coaching abilities. Athletic school administrators tend to have a conservative bent. The East High decision-makers were not going to jump on Bob Hart’s bandwagon because the reserve players had one impressive season and won a championship. So he kept on coaching the reserve teams, year after year, piling up fine seasons. No other school tried to poach him, nor did school officials promote him. He thought they were o
verlooking his talent, even as they, in their own manner, continued to make mental notes on the coach with the crew cut and thick eyeglasses who seemed to have a rapport with his players.

  In 1961 East High had a head coaching vacancy in basketball. Of course Bob Hart wanted the job; he believed he had proven himself after years of coaching the reserve teams to winning records. But the job went to Mark Whitaker. Hart was disappointed. “Bob should have gotten the job in 1961,” recalls Paul Pennell, who had just joined the athletic staff at the school as an assistant on both the basketball and baseball teams.

  Bob Hart was notorious for possessing a calm demeanor in tight and edgy situations. He kept quiet when he didn’t get the job. But following Whitaker’s year as head basketball coach of East High, during which the team posted an 11–12 record—finishing a woeful fifth in City League competition—Whitaker abruptly left for Brookhaven High, a newly built school. He told acquaintances he was excited to be starting something at the new high school, and besides, he always loved coaching track and cross country more than basketball. “We were just like a misguided missile,” recalls Bob Martin, who had played for Whitaker’s 11–12 team. “I lost a lot of inspiration. We were losing games we should have won.”

  After Whitaker’s departure, finally, in 1962, East High principal D. E. Wiley named Bob Hart head varsity basketball coach. Hart now had the job he had so badly wanted. And this was why he had chosen to live in the community, so he could get to know his players better, and get to know their parents as well. The coach did not want to feel like an interloper.

  In Hart’s first season as head coach of the East High Tigers, he welcomed six returning lettermen. Many of those players were still smarting from what they saw as Whitaker’s inadequate coaching from the year before—and they hoped that Hart would institute new plays and schemes.