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Gordon Shepherd
WE THOUGHT THE WORLD WOULD BE BETTER
By Gordon and Gary Shepherd
Wayne Miller and Mike Ellis were among the five African American kids in our 1961-62 senior class at South High, a central Salt Lake City school that had a total student population of approximately 2,000 the year we graduated. Of the entire student body, twenty-four (1.2 percent) were African Americans. On the basis of these numbers, South was atrociously labeled by some of the kids attending wealthier, lily-white schools in the region as a “n****” school. Gordon especially heard that foul epitaph as sports editor for the South HighScribe when our teams were playing on the fields and gyms of other schools.
Both Wayne and Mike were athletes who played for South. Neither is still living. Wayne died of “natural causes” in 2007. We’re less sure about Mike’s exact date of death, but it wasn’t from natural causes, and he was only 25 years old. So, let’s begin with his story first.
We met Mike Ellis in the 8th grade at Lincoln Junior High. Located on the corner of 13th South and State Street, the block that once housed a neighborhood educational institution named for our greatest president, has today become another thicket of small shops, eateries, business office spaces for lease, and the Salt Lake County Probation Services building. Our vague recollection is that Mike lived with either his grandma or aunt in an older apartment building with stairs, somewhere in the central city area between State Street and 5th East, and 3rd South and 9th South. These street coordinates also unofficially defined Salt Lake’s “ghetto” neighborhoods, where a majority of our African American classmates lived.
Mike was always a big kid, husky and quick on his feet, with athletic reflexes. He was good at basketball and could throw baseballs a long way too, as well as knock people down in our junior high games of flag football. Gordon learned this when they shared a gym class. But he was also an easy-going, friendly kid with a big grin and a ready laugh.
His good-natured tendencies notwithstanding, Mike had a few after-school fights—not meanly provoked by him, we would wager. We remember one fight—in “Durmer’s Alley,” across from Lincoln on 13th South. A blondish tough kid had challenged Mike in gym class to meet after school. He was there waiting in the alley with his friends when Mike showed up, alone. Mike wasn’t grinning. The adolescent fighting norms of the day were fisticuffs and no kicking. But if Mike was going to fight a white kid surrounded by his friends, he wasn’t going to just talk tough and play macho games; he was going to whale the hell out of him and get it over with quickly, and that’s exactly what he did.
At South, Mike threw the shotput in the spring and, in the fall, played left tackle on the football team. He was Big Number 75. On his White, South High Cubs helmet he hand-painted the name of his football hero—“Big Daddy” (Lipscomb), all-pro tackle for the fabled Baltimore Colts—in blue script, South High’s primary color.
The South High Cubs had a losing season that year, and there weren’t many opportunities to cheer. One game stands out in our memory, though. It was against the Granite High Farmers (coached by future BYU coach, LaVell Edwards) and was played on their home turf in Salt Lake County at 3300 South and 5th East. The Farmers ran an old fashioned single-wing offense and proceeded to ram the ball down South’s throat for a score of 21-0 at half time. As sports editor, Gordon trudged into the locker room with the team to hear the players lambasted by South’s head coach, Dale Simons. “I thought you were real football players,” Simons snarled. “You seniors! You’re letting this junior carry you on his shoulders!” Simons pointed at junior Mike Gold, Mike Ellis’ broad shouldered, strawberry blonde line-mate at right tackle. Ellis sat with his head down, he was sick, he had a temperature, and he had to excuse himself to go throw up.
The second half was a different game. South scored twice and shut down Granite’s single-wing attack. In the closing seconds South was moving the ball again into Granite territory, but the gun went off and the game was over. Another loss. At least the team could hold up their heads; Coach Simons would have to grudgingly admit that they had finished the game like real football players—especially Mike Ellis, drenched in sweat with steam rising off his shoulder pads, as he wearily boarded the team bus for the short ride home.
At the end of the football season, Mike Ellis, Big Number 75, was awarded all-state honors by both the Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret News, the only one of his teammates to be thusly acknowledged and acclaimed.
One weekend night later that year, Mike, in the company of another friend, showed up at our Denver Street Circle home after downing a few beers. They were not roaring drunk, but Ellis was tipsy and had to catch himself from stumbling when they came into the living room. Big Mike was mortified. He straightened to his full height, in his blue and white letter jacket, and remorsefully blurted an apology to Gary: “I’m real sorry, Shep. I don’t mean to disrespect you and your home and your parents showing up here like this.”
We have another particularly vivid high school recollection of Mike Ellis. Gordon became buddies with another Mike—Mike Mitchell, a white kid and football teammate, who was co-captain of the South eleven and Gordon’s best friend at South. “Mitch,” as everybody called him, was the proud owner of a 1956, two-tone red and cream-colored Chevy Impala hardtop with a wrap-around windshield, which he kept in impeccable condition. Ellis always road shotgun when we cruised Main Street. One Saturday night while cruising, we pulled into Snelgrove’s on 21st South. Painted pink and built in Art Deco style, Snelgrove’s was Salt Lake’s snazziest ice-cream parlor. Inside it looked like a restaurant, with linen table clothes and napkins. And you ordered from a fancy menu, with dozens of imaginative ice-cream dishes from which to choose.
We slid into a plush booth and waited for a waitress to take our order. Other customers were being waited on too, many of whom had been seated after us. We waited some more. Then, Mitch beckoned a passing waitress. She glanced at Mitch, then at Mike Ellis, winced, and kept on walking. Our ears and cheeks started burning. We looked at Ellis, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Let’s leave.” It wasn’t just a hateful waitress that night. We later found out it was Snelgrove’s policy not to serve “colored customers.” Salt Lake City, circa 1962.
As with many of our other high school classmates and friends, we lost touch with Mike Ellis after graduation. For us there followed a year of freshman studies at the University of Utah, six months of military basic training in California and Oklahoma for the Utah National Guard, and two years as Mormon missionaries in Mexico. When we got back from Mexico in the summer of 1966, we resumed our studies at the University of Utah and also reconnected with our good friend, Mitch. In 1968 Gordon learned from Mitch who, while stoically blinking back his tears, informed him that Mike Ellis had taken his own life. We can’t pretend to know what drove Big Mike to such a desperate end. According to Mitch, he had lost the cheerful grin that was his trademark in high school and seemed depressed and even angry much of the time. Mitch was asked by Mike’s family members to be one of the pallbearers at his funeral.
Damn. Damn. Damn. This wasn’t the future that any of us had foreseen. The democratic ideals we uncritically embraced at South High in 1962 didn’t comport with the realities of American society a mere six years later in 1968. Yes, 1968—the year that the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in Memphis after supporting a rally for Black sanitation workers; the year that Senator Robert Kennedy was shot to death in Los Angeles campaigning for president on a platform that strongly supported civil rights for both black and brown Americans; the year that virulent racism boiled over at home, and a controversial war was being fought by our generation in Vietnam.
And Wayne Miller? Well, without pretending to comprehend the various struggles with which he contended while growing up as a minority kid in Salt Lake City, or later as an adult living and working in the city of his birth, it’s apparent that Wayne’s life took a different track than Mike Ellis’. Like Big Mike, we met Wayne Miller at Lincoln Junior High in gym-class intramural sports. Unlike Big Mike, Wayne was lithe and sinewy, with not an ounce of fat on his soon-to-be six-foot frame. And, in contrast to Mike’s gregarious boisterousness, Wayne was quiet, diffident if not downright shy, and a good student. In high school, Wayne played piano in the dance band, was one of eight classmates selected to represent South at Boys’ State in 1961, and subsequently was elected to the South High Board of Delegates his senior year. He was never challenged to an afterschool fight that we know of and, had he been, he would probably have coolly walked away. Even without sports, Wayne Miller was one of the most well-liked and respected kids in the school.
But, of course, it was in sports that he acquired his chief renown among his classmates. By the time he started high school, Wayne was the fastest kid in the sophomore class. He went out for football and seemed destined to become an all-star running back. But he developed a mild case of Rheumatic Fever and was diagnosed with a heart-murmur. His doctors forbade him from playing football his junior and senior years but allowed that he could run track and play basketball.
On the track team, Wayne ran the 100 and 220 yard dashes and anchored the 4 x 220 yard relay team. We remember South’s first track-meet of the 1962 season at Olympus High School, at the feet of Mount Olympus in eastern Salt Lake County. It was a chilly, overcast day in late March. Snow still thickly covered the mountains behind the track and the thinly clad runners were shivering. Since Gordon was the school’s sports editor, he was granted permission to stand on the track at the finish line to witness the first race of the day, the 100 yard dash. He stood there in frozen awe as he watched Wayne Miller—a vision of surging power and grace—storming directly at him, ten yards in front of his nearest competitor. Standing next to Gordon at the tape was his counterpart sports editor from Olympus High, who exclaimed, “Jesus! that Black kid from South runs like Man O’ War” (the fabled racehorse from the Roaring Twenties).
South’s 1961-62 basketball team was short, even for a high school team of that era. The tallest senior on the squad was a measly six-two (and he wasn’t even a starter). Wayne was an even six feet. Wayne didn’t play guard, however, and he didn’t play forward, either. He was the center. He was the center because he could jump. He had a short, muscular torso, long legs, long arms and big hands. Did we mention already that he could jump? He was quick; he was fast, and, oh yes, he could jump. Taller centers on opposing teams were too slow to block his short-range jump-shot. And they also discovered that he could spring high enough in the air to swat down their dinky layups inside the paint. Wayne soared for rebounds and, like the big guys, he could dunk.
Gordon remembers a game at Granite High again, watching the Granite Farmers in their warmup drill before the game, their big guys lumbering up to the basket and showing off with two-handed dunks. Then he turned to watch Wayne and the Cubs warming up at the other end of the court—Wayne Miller with the ball, loping toward the basket, and then launching upward as though shot from a catapult to hurl a smashing dunk through the net with one hand. Gordon stood in adolescent awe and hoarsely whispered out-loud: “Wayne, you thrill me!” Yep, that’s what he said—it was a spontaneous, heartfelt expression from a kid who idealized sports heroes, but who was not generally known for public displays of expressive feeling.
South went to state that year in both basketball and track, playing well enough to win some games against bigger opponents at the state basketball tournament and placing third or fourth at the state track meet. At the end of the school year the South High coaching staff unanimously named Wayne Miller as the school’s outstanding athlete. This is what Gordon had to say about Wayne in a short summary of his achievements on the sports page of the South High Scribe:
The best senior athlete and the all-around best senior at South High is Wayne Miller. Wayne is a showcase of self-improvement, coachability, desire, and plain hard work. To begin with, Wayne is not a natural athlete. Instead of natural ability he was given a body capable of high achievement. Wayne has taken it from there, practicing, working and molding himself into an outstanding performer. Illness prevented Miller from playing football, a sport that easily could have become his best. Instead, Wayne poured his concentration into basketball and ended up as second high scorer on this year’s team with a 14 point per game average. More important to the team was Wayne’s tremendous rebounding and intangible something that seemed to add fire to the Cub attack. Track comes easiest to Wayne, who is one of the top sprinters in the state. He runs like a smooth moving thoroughbred, picking up speed as he goes. Wayne’s long, sleek legs, dangling arms and hands, broad shoulders, and short, v-shaped torso make him look taller than his actual six feet. Draped around his bones are 175 pounds of slabbed muscle. These physical features, coupled with his willing attitude, have been responsible for making Wayne Miller senior athlete of the year.
Two years after graduation from South High School, when we were preparing to leave for Mexico on Mormon missions, we sent Wayne a formal invitation in the mail to attend our missionary farewell. He wasn’t a Mormon, but we hoped he would come. He didn’t. But after all, there were other friends from school who were invited who didn’t come either. Had he showed up, though, Wayne Miller’s face would have been the only black one in a sea of white. As the Reverend Martin Luther King used to say, the most segregated places on Sunday morning in America are the Christian churches—regrettably, still true today.
Years later, Gary, who had been the student body president our senior year, made the following glass half full-half empty remarks about Wayne to an audience at the 10-year reunion for the South High Class of ‘62:
We listened with faith to Dr. Backman’s lectures on democracy, and we applauded Wayne Miller with our hands and hearts when he spoke to us at the Award Dinner at the tail-end of the 1962 school year. But, I remember too that Wayne was quietly taken aside during the drawing of dates to attend that celebration and was assigned to escort a black girl who, but for the felt need to arrange for Wayne an “acceptable” partner, would not otherwise have been in attendance.
As with Mike Ellis, we didn’t see Wayne after high school nor after our church missions to Mexico. Through the grapevine we learned that he became a supervisor over youth sports for Parks and Recreation at the Central City Recreation Center on 6th South and 3rd East—right in the middle of the old neighborhood where he grew up as a kid.
It came as a shock to learn, in 2007, that Wayne had passed away prematurely at the age of 63. From his obituary we learned that Wayne obtained a Masters’ Degree at the University of Utah and, after retiring from City Parks and Recreation, went to work as a counselor at Valley Mental Health Clinic in Salt Lake. In his spare time, and for fun, he played piano for appreciative audiences at area dining spots and other venues, both public and private. Among other things said in his memory, Wayne Miller’s obituary stated simply, “He was always quiet, dignified, and respectful of others.”
Amen, brother. Your respectfulness of others was reciprocated by everyone we ever knew who also knew you. Rest in peace, Wayne, and you too, Mike. We fear now that the country we live in today has failed to progress very far in the direction of acknowledging in actions—and not just words—our shared humanity and sense of mutual respectfulness. We hate that. We nonetheless continue to prize our youthful association in a time and place when we thought the world would be better for us than it was for our parents, and even better for our own children than it was for us. And in too many ways, it isn’t. May we renew in the years to come the ideals of equality we were taught and proclaimed at South High, and may we rededicate our personal and collective efforts to align our professed ideals with the way we actually conduct our daily lives in contact with our fellow citizens whose backgrounds and race differ from our own.
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