Coach Parker shaped community, Congressman says

Above photo, World War II interrupted the coaching career Sam Parker resumed in 1946 when he came home to a wife who’d taken a teaching job in Mt. Pleasant during his service years. Sixty five years later, in a 2011 address on the House floor, Congressman Louie Gohmert described Sam and Norween Parker as people who’d made America great.

From The East Texas Journal, January 2019

By Hudson old, publisher

Uniforms for Arm Band Combat were the same strips of old torn sheets for both armies, tied on different arms. The boundaries were the creek and the road “inside the park.
“When the whistle blew the objective was to rip the arm bands off the other guys,” said businessman Barry Hamilton, a veteran of Coach Sam Parker’s Summer Parks Program.
“He talked the city into a $500 budget,” said his son, Sam Maxwell Parker. Coach Oza Colley was among teachers getting a cut. They kept the baseball fields mowed in exchange for use of the park.
“They saved broken little league bats for him,” his son said. “We spliced them back together with wood screws then wrapped the break with black electrical tape.”
Mr. Hamilton’s got one in his game room.
“If you didn’t miss a day for all six weeks you got to pick something out of the equipment bag to keep,” Mr. Hamilton said.
“If you didn’t miss a day during the week, you got to go swimming free in the city pool on Saturday,” he said, a deal cut with former Mt. Pleasant High English Teacher Bill Ellis who leased and operated the pool in summers.
Born in 1917, Coach Parker was a World War II vet and an intermural boxing champion at the University of Arkansas.
His Summer Parks Program had a 25-year run. He took roll and kept notebooks, pages of games.
King on the Mountain became Murder on the Hill.
Storm the Fortress involved scaling a chain link fence to invade the opponents’ castle.
“Maybe he liked it so much because it was stuff he never got to do when he was a kid,” his son said.
Some participants loved rainy days, Mr. Hamilton said, when Coach Parker got the keys to Brice Gym and a bus to cart them through town on the way to a boxing tournament, one-minute rounds.
“He was the place and the right time,” his son said. “You couldn’t do what he did today. You’d have to have three lawyers and a million dollar liability policy.”
Graduating at 16, it was about 1936, the Great Depression era, when he went to work at Little Rock’s Coca Cola plant, earning an extra 50 cents for every game he pitched for the company baseball team.
He played football at Little Rock Junior college and the girl at the dry goods store who told a passing coach stopping to buy a shirt about his athletic prowess was his sister.

“She told such a good story that the coach called him, interviewed him at a hotel and signed him up to play for the University of Arkansas,” his son said. He was a starting lineman his junior and senior years.
Graduating in 1940, he met Norween Hopson when they first year teachers in Magnolia.
After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, she moved to Mt. Pleasant while he was in the service.
It was after the Allied victory in Europe that Norween Hopson-Parker came to understand that when it came to first loves, she had serious competition.
Home from Europe, he could have mustered out of the service at Shreveport but for his duty as captain of the Kessler Airfield Flyers, the base football team back in Biloxi, Mississippi.
He stayed in another three months, long enough to finish his last season as a player.
“I was never jealous of anything but football,” she said.
He came to Mt. Pleasant in 1946 and maybe it was 50, or maybe 51 that he was named head football coach. The critical year was 1952, when the Tiger football program turned into front page news.
The Mt. Pleasant Daily Times gushed over his 9-0 record after a 44-0 romp of Winnsboro set up a District Championship showdown in Sulphur Springs.
Jackie Barrett, a biology teacher whose tenure overlapped his coach’s teaching years in Mt. Pleasant, was an offensive end with two touchdown receptions that night. A halfback, Carlos Kidwell, later a teacher who was an assistant superintendent when Sam Parker retired, broke through the line and electrified the crowd with an 87-yard touchdown.
Neal Hinson, who later retired from the superintendent’s slot at Pittsburg, added another six.
A week later, Sulphur Springs broke their hearts, 13-0.
The school board asked for his resignation.
He gave them what they wanted.
“My mother remembered thinking they might move and when she asked him about it, his joke was that he wanted to stay in a place where everybody’d come to his funeral. He was serious when he said he was going to stay and teach.”

He made treasure of common things.
“Somewhere, I may still have a pint jar of jelly beans he gave me for making the best score on a test he didn’t count,” said Lance Hinson. “I had him for government. He came in one day and said he wanted to give us a test over material we hadn’t covered, just to see how we’d do.”
A graduate of Baylor Law School, Mr. Hinson returned and opened his practice in Mt. Pleasant. A school board veteran and a candidate on the March Primary ballot in the District Judge’s race, he’s not the only politician to have been inspired by Sam Parker.
He’s likely the only Mt. Pleasant Coach whose story will ever be told in Washington on the House Floor. It was 2011 and Congressman Louie Gohmert, R-Tyler, took the floor in opposition to Obama-era legislation, closing a 17-minute speech with a story about, “the man who most influenced my life behind my father.”
He told the story of the aftermath of Coach Parker’s firing.
“He did the unthinkable,” Congressman Gohmert said. “He stayed and taught civics and history. I met him seven years later in a park recreation program he organized each summer. He was my scoutmaster through my becoming an Eagle. He taught Sunday school.
“The man who lost his job for losing a game changed Mt. Pleasant. Before he died they named the football field for him.

“He and his wife, Norween, are the kinds of people who are the reason we’ve been blessed as a nation like we’ve been blessed.”