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Post by Commissioner on Apr 3, 2023 21:31:03 GMT -5
St. Mary’s (Orchard Lake).
St Mary’s College was founded by Father Joseph Dabrowski in 1885. It was a regular on the Titan schedule in the 1910s and 1920s, and then again for 5 games during the WWII years, when teams had to minimize travel. The Titans won 14 of 17 meetings between 1913 and 1945, usually by large margins. St. Mary’s then appeared one last time on the Titan schedule, in 1986-87, with the Titans winning 82-45. St. Mary’s merged into Madonna College in 2003. St. Mary's Prep, which shared the campus along with the college and the Polish Seminary (see above in this thread) is the last of the three entities to carry on.
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Post by Commissioner on Apr 3, 2023 21:32:34 GMT -5
St. Viator.
The Titans beat St. Viator in three meetings, all played in the mid-1920s.
St. Viator, founded in 1868, was a Catholic School in Bourbonnais, IL, a small town near Kankakee on the southern edge of what is now the Chicago Metropolitan Statistical Area. It played in the Illinois Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. In the 1920s the league included Bradley and the schools that eventually became Illinois State, Northern Illinois, Southern Illinois, Eastern Illinois, and Western Illinois, all D-1 programs today. Central Michigan and Eastern Michigan were members in the 1950s/60s, when the conference was renamed the Interstate Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. The Shamrocks, as St. Viator teams were known, won the conference title in 1922, a year before their first meeting with Detroit, and again in 1931, so they seem to have been reasonably competitive.
St. Viator typically enrolled about 300 students, but in the midst of the great depression, enrollment fell to 75. In 1938, mortgage holders foreclosed on a $320,000 debt (about $6.5 million today), and St. Viator closed. After closing, campus was purchased by what is now Olivet Nazarene College.
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Post by Commissioner on Apr 4, 2023 7:22:17 GMT -5
U.S. Hospital. The Record Book reports that we played "U.S. Hospital" back in the 1918-19 season, suffering an embarrassing 23-2 defeat. Ouch. Detroit Mercy me! "U.S. Hospital," I thought, might be pretty tough to track down, being a rather generic name. But it turned out to be pretty easy. According to the Varsity News, this was U.S. Hospital #36. With the #36 added to the name, it was easily identified as the U.S. Army Base Hospital #36. In other words, another military base team. U.S. Hospital #36 was organized by the Detroit College of Medicine (now Wayne State) in April of 1917, and sent to France in late October or early November of 1917. There it operated a 1000 bed hospital out of this building in the old resort city of Vittel, France, in 1918, just behind the front lines: This is the facility of U.S. Hospital #36 in France during WWI.After the Armistice the Hospital returned to the U.S., and its base team played the Titans in February or March of 1919. According the Varsity News, which is usually more reliable than the Record Book, the final score was a more believable 23-21 loss—the Record Book probably suffers from a typo that cut off that last digit of the Titans' score.
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Post by Commissioner on Apr 4, 2023 7:28:11 GMT -5
Victoria.
The Titans beat “Victoria” 29-26 during the 1922-23 season. Educated guess is that this was Victoria University of Toronto, founded in 1836. Victoria became part of University of Toronto in 1928, and continues to operate in that capacity.
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Post by Commissioner on Apr 4, 2023 7:36:47 GMT -5
West Texas State.
The Titans beat West Texas State in 1966, 68-57. Located in Canyon, Texas, near Amarillo, today the school is West Texas A&M, and plays in Division 2. The school played D-1 ball through 1986, and was a member of the Border Conference—a forerunner to the WAC—from 1942 through 1962, and of the MVC from 1971 through 1986. They were a D-1 independent when we played them in January, 1966. Lou Hyatt led the Titans with 22 points, while Dorie Murrey had 32 rebounds, more than the entire West Texas team.
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Post by Commissioner on Apr 4, 2023 7:43:19 GMT -5
Young Men’s.
The Titans played “Young Men’s” three times in the 1918 season and once more in 1919. This was not the YMCA, but an apparently similar organization called the Young Men’s Order. I could find surprisingly little on the YMO, but seems to have been a pretty big deal. For at least two decades the club sponsored basketball, track, even football teams, and held dances and Detroit River cruises. The Order’s colors were green and grey. It marketed itself as “Organized by YOUNG Men for YOUNG Men and featuring only matters of interest to YOUNG Men.” (Emphasis in original). I found some cryptic references suggesting that it was a Catholic alternative to the Protestant YMCA (and its choice of the color green may suggest that, too), but nothing definitive. It definitely recruited membership at U of D, running occasional ads in the Varsity News. The YMO was open to young men aged 18-33.
The YMO was legit competition—a Varsity News story before the first game in 1918 said it was “about the most important [game] this season: and “will only be rivaled in interest by the ... game with the YMCA on March 15.” Its teams were mentioned in discussions of Michigan basketball and track and field in Spalding Guides of the 1910s and 1920s. They played home games at the Detroit Roller Palace—the Titans complained about the low roof interfering with shots and the lack of any place for players not in the game to stand or sit, other than the aisles. The teams split the first two games in the 1918 season and scheduled a third at the end of the year to determine the city champion. The first two games had been close but Young Men's blew out the Titans, 20-9, in game three at the Roller Palace. A certain "Rynearson" led the Titans with 5 points.
The Young Men’s Order seems to have petered out in the mid-1930s. Oddly, one of the few references I can find to the Order, other than its athletic teams, is from a divorce lawsuit in the mid-1930s, when a witness testified that the YMO was “on its last legs.”
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Post by Commissioner on Apr 4, 2023 7:45:55 GMT -5
728th MP.
Yes, this was indeed another military base squad, the 728th Battalion of the Army Military Police. Organized at Fort Custer, it was assigned to guard munitions facilities in Detroit during WWII. The Titans beat the MPs 40-32 in December of 1944, behind Tom Molitor's 18 points. Today the 728th is based in Hawaii.
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Post by motorcitysam on Apr 4, 2023 21:53:03 GMT -5
728th MP. Yes, this was indeed another military base squad, the 728th Battalion of the Army Military Police. Organized at Fort Custer, it was assigned to guard munitions facilities in Detroit during WWII. The Titans beat the MPs 40-32 in December of 1944, behind Tom Molitor's 18 points. Today the 728th is based in Hawaii. A post that mentions the US Army Military Police, Fort Custer, and basketball brings up a lot of good memories for me. As a fan of both history and college basketball, I have found this thread to be quite enjoyable.
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Post by Commissioner on Jun 5, 2023 6:47:14 GMT -5
In the fall of 1976, the Titans beat Iowa Wesleyan 133-79. It was the third win in what would become the Titans' 21-game winning streak, and set a school record for points in one game (eclipsed two years later in a 135-91 win over CCNY).
Iowa Wesleyan, founded in 1843, closed its doors this spring. The College still enrolled about 850 students, but had been running substantial operating deficits since 2013. For several years the college has barely stayed afloat thanks to Covid relief funds and the presence of over 100 foreign students in its student body. The U.S. Department of Education, to which it owed over $25 million, has taken physical control of the campus.
Anyway, we can add them to the "who were those guys?" list.
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