Back when I was a boy, on a long-ago Thanksgiving Eve a rumor began circulating in the small town our family called home that the Harlem Globetrotters would be playing a game in the school gym on Thanksgiving night. Why the Harlem Globetrotters would come to a small town in eastern New York, a town about the same size as Silver Creek, wasn’t given the slightest thought only that that “the Harlem Globe Trotters will be playing here tomorrow night!”

The rumor soon became fact when it was announced that tickets would go on sale Thanksgiving morning at the elementary school. Thanksgiving morning my father and my uncle, instead of watching the colorful Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on black and white TV, went and purchased tickets.

By the late 1950s the Globetrotters were a well-established attraction as they toured much of the county. Nowadays the globetrotters are described as a “family entertainment” attraction, but back then they were still thought of as a basketball team noted for their ball handling intermingled with comedy.

By this time most people my age had seen portions of Globetrotter games on shows like ABC’s Wide World of Sports and in the mid 1950’s the movie Go Man Go was released starring actor Dane Clark as team founder and owner Abe Saperstein. That movie was featured one summer as part of a Saturday afternoon matinee at the local movie theater playing to large and enthusiastic adolescent audiences, including myself.

With people of all age groups familiar with the Globetrotters the sense of anticipation grew amongst families gathered around dining room tables that afternoon for Thanksgiving Dinner, throughout our village and in neighboring towns.

In our family, as in others it was practically a tradition to sit down to leftovers from dinner in the evening. However, that tradition was foregone that year as we and other families loaded up cars and headed to the new elementary school gymnasium.

As we arrived at the parking lot I saw a small school bus emblazoned with the words “The Harlem Globetrotters” parked in the lot. I didn’t think a lot about it then but looking back on it that little bus must have made for long uncomfortable middle of the night rides between games, especially in a day and time when African-Americans were not welcomed in hotels in many parts of the country.

Inside the new brightly lit gym was filled with a large and enthusiastic crowd quickly working off the soporific effects of Thanksgiving dinners as they waited in anticipation of the Trotters appearance on the court.

My father told us that the school’s athletic director had told him that the Globetrotters had played the previous night in the Boston area and were on their way to Rochester for a game on Friday. Thanksgiving was an off night but they found that the new gym in our town had the largest capacity and the best facilities of any in eastern New York so why not stop and make some extra money.

Then to little fanfare the Globetrotters opponent for the night, and their opponent every night in those days, the Washington Generals entered the gym. A team as bland as the Trotters were flashy they went to one end of the court and began their shooting drills.

Finally, with anticipation building to a peak, the strains of Sweet Georgia Brown, reproduced from a record that showed signs of many plays filled the gym. The Globetrotters charged through the door of the gym and to the strains of the song and began their drills. Many of us had seen this on television but seeing it live in our school gym added a totally different dimension to the show.

The game began and while the crowd loved it, after all the anticipation there was a sense of anticlimax for many. The Trotters put on a great show. Meadow Lark Lemon, as I remember, was the primary clown and ballhandler back then. At one point he ran after a referee with what appeared to be a bucket of water but when he threw the water at the ref and crowd it was, as it always was, confetti. The game took the normal course of a Trotter’s game. The Generals rolled over on schedule and the Globetrotters went on to victory putting on a great show along the way.

When the game ended we all departed for home very satisfied with the evening. The Harlem Globetrotters had come to our town and given us a Thanksgiving experience we would likely never have again. But it was an experience and a story we could tell for the rest of our lives just as I am telling you now some 60 years later.

Thomas Kirkpatrick is a Silver Creek resident. Send comments to editorial@observertoday.com