TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME
TAKE ME OUT TO THE CROWD.
BUY ME SOME PEANUTS AND CRACKER JACK
I DON’T CARE IF I EVER GET BACK.

February 23, 1983—Letter to Reporter Editor

Dear Sir:
Lester has had basketball for a long time. Lester played the first game in this county, with Larchwood in 1916 on an outside court.

Fred and Bill Haegele, Harold Wick and myself and others that I don’t remember were on the team.

The rules were much different then. We could take three steps and could have body contact so there were probably only 10-15 fouls per game.

A few years later we had a team that played three games a week. We went from town to town. We would take the train on Monday and come back on Saturday night and have a game at home that night.

That team was run by Ray Bonynge. We would play teams from Sioux City and Minneapolis. One time we played Rock Rapids and we run a special train from Sioux Falls to Rock Rapids, they would pick people up at Sioux Falls, Granite, Larchwood, and Lester and go to Rock Rapids and back to Sioux Falls that same night. It was Olsen Sporting Goods team that we played in Rock Rapids.

Jake Schoelerman was one of our best supporters, he would take the team out to supper after a hard game to Fats Inn. That’s all the pay we got.

We had many more good teams after that. One year our team won the tri-state tournament in Sioux Falls. That was when the Lohman boys played on the team.

We had many good high school teams after that. There were many games played at Lester from 1918-1950.