My Take on Centralia Chronicle Sports
You hear “Centralia Chronicle sports,” and you probably think high school football, big wins, the usual stuff. And yeah, it’s got all that. Most folks grab it for the headlines, looking for the latest scores or who the star player was last Friday night.
But my dive into the Chronicle’s sports pages? It started from a completely different place, a real specific need, actually. It wasn’t about the current season, or any season I’d personally witnessed. I was on a mission, a personal one, you could say, to dig up a piece of the past.
The Hunt Begins
It all kicked off when my grandpa passed away a few years back. We were going through his old boxes, you know how it is when you’re clearing out a loved one’s belongings, and stumbled upon this really faded photograph. It was him, looking super young, probably just a young man, standing with a bunch of other guys in some kind of team uniform I didn’t recognize. No names on the front, no date clearly visible. On the back, all it said was “Champs ’58,” scribbled in faint pencil. My mom mentioned he never really talked much about his youth sports, but she had this vague memory of him playing in some local league when he was younger. He was Centralia born and bred, through and through.
So, that set me off. My “practice,” as I started to call it, became trying to figure out what this team was, what championship they’d won. The local library, the one downtown, was my first port of call. I figured they’d have archives of the Centralia Chronicle. And they did – stacks and stacks of them, all on microfilm. Man, those old microfilm readers are something else. My eyes were burning after just the first hour of cranking that handle and squinting at the fuzzy screen.
Down the Rabbit Hole of Yesteryear
I started my search in the year 1958, seemed logical given the note on the photo. I’d carefully load up a reel, spin that handle, and just scan through the sports sections. Page after page of old newsprint flying by. It was unbelievably tedious. You wouldn’t believe how much sports stuff they actually covered, even back then. Sure, the big high school games got plenty of ink, but there were also tiny league results, bowling scores, sometimes even horseshoe tournament winners. I started to keep a sort of log, just to keep my sanity:
- Systematically went through January to December 1958 sports sections.
- Kept an eye out for any mention of “Champs” or local tournaments around that time.
- Tried to cross-reference any photos I found with the one I had, which was a long shot, I knew.
I did find a few mentions of various local championships, but nothing quite matched the vibe of the photo I was holding. Sometimes the uniforms in the paper were clearly different, or the sport itself seemed wrong. My first few days of this “practice” felt like a total bust. I almost gave up right then and there, figuring it was probably a lost cause. My brother even told me, “Just frame the photo, who really cares what exact team it was? It’s a cool pic of Grandpa.”
A Tiny Glimmer of Hope Appears
But I guess I’m just a bit stubborn when I get my mind set on something. I decided I needed to widen my search parameters. Maybe the “58” on the back wasn’t the exact year of the championship itself, but perhaps the year the photo was taken, or maybe it referred to the ’57-’58 season, which could mean the championship might have been reported earlier in ’58 or even in late ’57. So, I rewound my efforts, went back to the reels for late 1957. More microfilm. More eye strain. More lukewarm library coffee.
And then, tucked away in a mid-November 1957 issue, in a really small column about local industrial and merchant leagues, I saw it. A super grainy photo, much smaller than the one I possessed, but the stance of one of the players, the distinct type of collar on the jersey… it looked incredibly familiar. The article itself was tiny, just a few sentences: “Centralia Merchants League Concludes Thrilling Season: Miller’s Hardware Clinches Title in Final Game.” Miller’s Hardware! That was it! That was the name of the hardware store Grandpa had worked at for a couple of years right after he got out of the army!
The Payoff Was Sweet
I practically jumped out of my seat in the otherwise quiet library. The article didn’t list all the player names, of course. It was too small a league for that kind of detailed coverage back in those days. But it did mention the “annual championship plaque being presented.” I felt this huge rush of excitement. This had to be it. The photo I had wasn’t the official team photo that got published in the paper, but most likely one taken by a teammate or a family member right after they won, capturing that moment of triumph.
So, yeah, whenever I think of the Centralia Chronicle sports section now, I don’t just think of today’s scores or the latest high school heroics. I think of those dusty old archives, the distinctive whir of the microfilm reader, and the sheer, dogged persistence it took to unearth that one little piece of my own family’s history, hidden away in its pages for decades. It wasn’t about some famous athlete or a legendary team, just a regular guy, my grandpa, and his small moment of glory in a local league, thankfully captured and preserved by the Chronicle. That whole process, that deep dive and search, that was my real “practice” with their sports section. It really made me appreciate what local papers truly hold – not just the day-to-day news, but countless tiny bits of history, personal stories, and community memories, if you’re willing to dig deep enough to find them.
