About the author
Steven Farney, author of "Title Towns! Class BB Boys Basketball Champions of Kansas, 1952-1968," grew up at Wilson, where he played small town basketball and was coached in high school by Marion Ogden.
He now lives in McPherson with his wife Mary and three children.
Farney's mother was the family historian, and a brother wrote for the Wall Street Journal for 35 years.
Farney has a degree in history education and was working as a musician when he got to thinking about all the attention paid to big schools and their achievements.
"Why should they have all the fun?" he thought.
So he began digging up information on championship basketball teams from the smallest schools, those with 60 or less students and classified in basketball as BB from 1952 to 1968.
Of the 17 teams honored in the book, only three schools retain their original identity: Rolla, Brewster, and Tescott. All the others have been consolidated with other schools. (Durham High School closed in 1972 and was consolidated with Hillsboro.)
Because of that, Farney sees his book not only as highlighting championship teams but as preserving the history of small towns.
"It's about teams and towns that may have been forgotten in time and shouldn't be," he said.
Farney spent a considerable amount of time digging up the information. His research began in July 2004 at Durham Public Library. He said most of the yearbooks of those years are gone, and he had to rely mostly on newspaper reports.
"A lot of great people helped me connect the dots," he said.
The book was compiled and book cover designed at Print Source Direct in Hillsboro. It was printed in Topeka.
Farney said while transporting the books from Topeka on a flatbed truck in September, he almost lost them when he crossed the railroad tracks on K-15 at Durham.
"My research began there and the whole thing almost ended there," he joked.
The book on Class BB basketball in Kansas is the first of several basketball histories that Farney plans to write. He currently is working on a history of Kansas State University basketball.
