1925 Ti — Basketball game brawl

A brawl broke out at the Ticonderoga vs Port Henry high school basketball game, resulting in play being stopped shortly into the second half.

“With left hooks predominating and strangle holds and smelling salts running for second homes, the basketball game between the Port Henry and Ticonderoga teams on the local court last Friday came to an exciting finish,” the Ticonderoga Sentinel reported on March 12, 1925.

“The exact seat of the trouble will, perhaps, never be determined, although the general rumor is that an official of the Port Henry school gave one of the Ticonderoga rooters a sudden shove during an exciting moment of play,” the report continued. “So far as is known, the official had no cause for his action, which was more or less a hotheaded incident, which ultimately resulted in the near riot.”

The conflict spread from spectators to the players.

“One of the Ticonderoga players, who, it is said, had been treated rather unfairly by the referee and put out of the game, noted the shove and immediately took a most active part in the proceedings. He was industriously and successfully at attempting to remodel the school official’s features when players and rooters of both swept onto the floor.”

Ticonderoga was leading 13–11 when the game was called.

It was expected that the game would be replayed on a neutral court.

In other 1925 Ticonderoga news collected from historic newspapers of the region:

• “Mrs. Charles Blye is proudly exhibiting to her neighbors a grapefruit, the likes of which has never been seen in this northern clime. Mrs. Blye received it in a crate of the delicious fruit from a friend on Florida, but the prize specimen measured eighteen inches in circumference and weighed three pounds,” the Ticonderoga Sentinel reported on March 26. “Mrs. Blye could probably serve the fruit course for a community breakfast and have enough left over for fruit cocktail at dinner.”
• State Sen. Mortimer Ferris, R-Ticonderoga, had both persistence and knowledge.

“Senator Mortimer Y. Ferris of Ticonderoga stood his ground in the state Senate yesterday and fought so successfully a battle for the advancement of one of his bills pressed for the construction of a state highway from Wilmington to the top of Whiteface Mountain, that the measure was advanced,” The Glens Falls Times reported on March 20, 1925.

The legislation authorized holding a state referendum on a constitutional amended necessary to construct the highway.

“Knowing every inch of the section, Senator Ferris was thoroughly at home in explaining the merits of the bill and what a road to the top of the well-known mountain would mean to the tourists of the state and other states.”

• Isabel Lumsden of Boston began work as the new superintendent of Moses-Ludington Hospital, The Post-Star reported on Feb. 28. She previously worked at New Nassau Hospital in Boston.
• “Our snow is fast leaving. But this last was a great blessing to those who had logs or wood back in the woods,” the Chilson correspondent reported in the Ticonderoga Sentinel on March 12. “Alex Stowell, Frank Armstrong and Patrick Flanigan have all finished their log jobs they took of John Sheppard.”
• “A pronounced revival of the old-fashioned square and round dance has occurred throughout the Adirondacks, says a Saranac Lake correspondent,” the Sentinel reported on March 19. “The young people, apparently tired of the so-called jazz orchestra and modern dancing, are said to be returning to the old dances that thrilled their parents and grandparents.”

Click here to read the most recent previous 1925 Ticonderoga post.