BARTLESVILLE ATHLETIC HALL OF FAME PREVIEW: GERALD THOMPSON AND 1969 DOENGES FORD INDIANS
Longtime Bartlesville coach and educator Gerald Thompson will be inducted into the Bartlesville Athletic Hall of Fame on Friday.
By Mike Tupa
Oct. 3, 2025
BARTLESVILLE AREA SPORTS REPORT
It's been 17 years since the Bartlesville Sports Commission — newly formed in 2007 — pulled up the curtain on a new institution called the Bartlesville Athletic Hall of Fame (BaHOF). The first induction ceremony took place in 2008 and — with the exception of the COVID challenges in 2020 — has become a prized annual event on the Bartlesville social calendar.
This year’s induction celebration is set for next Friday at the Bartlesville Community Center.
Three individuals and a team are part of the BaHOF’s Class of 2025 — the 17th edition of honorees. The individuals include Mike Epperson, Noah Hartsock and Gerald Thompson and the 1969 Bartlesville American Legion Doenges Ford Indians will be enshrined as a team.
This will bring the number up to approximately 70 individual inductees and 20 teams/organizations.
Following is a closer look at this year’s honorees.
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GERALD THOMPSON
“May your mountains rise into and above the clouds.”
— Edward Abbey
To try to summarize the impact of Gerald Thompson on the thousands of youth that have come into the sphere of his influence is like trying to paint a sun ray.
Whether as an educator, coach, or simply a friend, Thompson is reminiscent of the poem “The Bridge Builder,” penned by Will Allen Dromgoole.
It starts out with the scene of an old man building a bridge to span a tide he had just crossed. An observer asks him why he is wasting his strength in building a walkway that he will never walk.
The bridge builder answered this way to conclude Dromgoole’s poem:
“There followeth after me today
A youth, whose feet must pass this way.
This charm, that has been naught to me,
To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be.
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I am building this bridge for him.”
A Bartlesville native, Thompson’s life journey took an unexpected curve back to his hometown, where he has helped mold the lives of his students and players for the better.
It was in 1986 — when Thompson was still around his mid-30s — when he returned to his original roots. He hasn’t wandered away since.
Thompson — a long-time Bartlesville High School basketball coach, with long stints in both girls’ and boys’ programs and retired educator — graduated from Bartlesville College High School in 1970.
That began a character-enhancing odyssey that prepared him as a mentor with his doctorate earned from the School of Hard Knocks.
It started out at Coffeyville (Kan.) Community College with an emphasis on basketball.
“I played a little bit, but I got a little frustrated,” Thompson said.
He altered his direction “and decided to concentrate just on my school work.”
After earning his degree at Coffeyville, Thompson moved on to Central State University in Edmond to finish his final year.
Thompson began his education career in an Oklahoma City school district before transferring to Tulsa Public Schools, where he taught for seven years.
“That’s when I kind of dabbled in coaching a little bit,” he said.
Thompson didn’t feel completely satisfied in secular education, and “I just felt led by the Lord to make a change and go into working at a Christian School,” he said.
He began at Faith Christian Academy, where he segued into serious coaching, working with the softball, volleyball, and basketball teams. From Faith, he went to work in the early 1980s at Grace Fellowship Christian School, also in the Tulsa area.
This is where Thompson enjoyed his first major success as coach — his girls' basketball team finished 30-1 and won the tri-state conference title, the equivalent of a state championship.
Unlike OSSAA girls basketball — which was still playing the six-on-six half-court game, the Christian schools played full-court five-on-five ball.
That year’s team started out at 8-0, suffered a loss, and finished up with 22-straight triumphs.
“That was quite a year,” Thompson said. “We had a great bunch of young ladies that just came together and let a young coach them.”
In 1985, Grace closed and Thompson went to work as an aid in Tulsa Public Schools.
In 1986, Thompson’s journey of destiny took a circular bend, leading him back home.
“At the end of 1986, I got word there was a job opening in Bartlesville,” Thompson said.
One of his former classmates — and good friends — was Earl Sears, the principal of Central Junior High. Sears was instrumental in Thompson’s going to work for Bartlesville Public Schools. Thompson has remained in Bartlesville since.
His most visible public contribution has been as a coach — primarily as an assistant for many years in girls’ basketball, first under Carol Green and then with Rob Berger, followed by his years as the girls’ varsity head coach and as a boys’ varsity assistant.
He blazed a new trail in 2000 when he became the first Black head varsity coach in Bartlesville High history and led his first team to the area consolation finals. A few years later he became a boys’ assistant, a role in which he continues to serve in 2025.
He continues in 2025 to assist with Bruin boys’ basketball although he’s been long retired from teaching.
Thompson cherishes his time in the classroom — which ended with his retirement about a decade ago — most of all.
“I think of myself as an educator,” he said. “I was an educator first and foremost and I see myself as a coach second. I took my role in the classroom as priority.”
His main areas of teaching were social studies and geography, although he taught other subjects as well.
Thompson achieved a large measure of professional fulfillment when he was inducted in 2018 into the Bartlesville Educators Hall of Fame.
At that time, Thompson told the local newspaper he wanted his legacy to be “that I cared about my students. I challenged my students, even in middle school. I think that’s another layer where it impacted their lives.”
His impact on sports plays a major role in his being selected for the BaHOF.
Thompson has been intensely interested in local sports history and honoring its legends.
“Every year I turn in a … long list of potential inductees,” he said. “It was quite surprising when I was chosen this year. I tell people they flipped the script on me this year. I’ve always enjoyed being in the background. I think there are so many who deserve to be considered for the Hall of Fame.”
He’s looking forward to his daughters Essence and Tia joining him for the honor, as well as other relatives, some of his former players and other long-time friends.
“I have an aunt and uncle coming from Colorado,” he said, noting they also attended the BaHOF in 2013, when Thompson’s uncle Venson was inducted as part of the 1956 Douglass High School football team.
“I’ve also got a cousin coming from Arkansas,” Thompson added.
In addition, he was teammates in basketball with members of the 1969 Bartlesville Doenges Ford Indians baseball team which also is being inducted Friday, one of them being the team’s point guard Bill Berryhill.
Among Thompson’s favorite memories as a Bartlesville High coach are working with the girls’ basketball team in the early 1990s with Berger as the head coach.
“We had that group of seniors and we made it to state, that was pretty special,” Thompson said. “There was the ’92 team that finished runner-up in state. I still consider them the greatest team in Bruin girls basketball history.”
He also retains bright recollections of the Bruins boys basketball team in 2011-12 that qualified for state.
Some of the athletes he recalled from that team were Jakob Hartsock, Quinton Smith, Ramon Benson, Kolin Tribble, Richard Courtney and Demarco Hudson.
It’s been nearly 40 years since Gerald Thompson came home to mentor generations of Bartlesville youth and to help elevate them to their educational and character potential.
Friday, Thompson will step out of the background and into the spotlight of completely deserved recognition.
Legendary baseball manager Leo Durocher was credited with saying: “Nice guys finish last.”
Leo obviously didn’t know Gerald.
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The 1969 Doenges Ford Indians will be inducted into the Bartlesville Athletic Hall of Fame on Friday.
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1969 AMERICAN LEGION BASEBALL TEAM
This story actually started in the 1950s and early 1960s on the Little League fields at the Price Complex.
One-by-one the flowering boyhood of Bartlesville was drawn to those diamonds — with no less wonder than Dorothy and her entourage entering the City of Oz — by the magnet of baseball.
The story behind the story is the 1964 Bartlesville Little League National All-Star team that battled all the way to the Little League World Series in Pennsylvania.
Bartlesville — the North Region Champion — would finish 2-1 in the tournament, including beating teams from California and Canada, and win the consolation championship.
That achievement would be a stepping stone, of sorts, to even greater national baseball horizons in the decade of the 1960s for Bartlesville.
The year 1964 also coincided with a changing of the guard in the Bartlesville American Legion Baseball leadership. The new coaching staff of the team would be manager Al Solenberger and coach Vic Baginski — Bartlesville’s baseball version of Damon and Pythias — to guide the 18-and-under team known (then) as the Bartlesville Doenges Ford Injuns, although the Injuns name was changed in the early 2000s to Indians, which will be employed the remainder of this article.
So how did the destiny of the 1964 Bartlesville Little League National All-Star team intersect with the fate of Bartlesville American Legion Baseball?
Three of the players on the 1964 LLWS team — Donnie Shelton, Bill Berryhill, and Jimmy Lee — would play major roles five years later in helping elevate the 1969 Indians’ team to the American Legion World Series — the first (and only) time Bartlesville has qualified for it.
Perhaps more than that, the impact of the ’64 team perhaps had a psychological boost to the expectations of Bartlesville players.
Whatever the factors, on Friday, many members of the '69 team, along with relatives of the now-deceased Solenberger and Baginski, will be inducted into the BaHOF and receive perhaps long overdue public recognition for their remarkable feat.
There’s too little space here to go into detail about the 1969 season. In 2019 — on the 50th Anniversary of the achievement — this writer produced a lengthy multi-part feature on the team for the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise that is available on microfilm.
The team’s primary four-man pitching rotation included Ron “Cubby” Chissoe, Alan Barnes, Roger Teat and Lee — each of whom won at least 10 games that summer.
Other players included Berryhill, Shelton, Mike Yount, Terry Fisher, Dan Thorneberry, Don McClure, Brian Swearingen, Wayne Lowery, Keith Craighead, Mark Johnson, Tim Baker, Dean Scullawl, Tom Horton and Kent Martindale.
As mentioned, 1964 was a sort of bellwether year for youth baseball, between the hiring of Solenberger/Baginski to coach the Indians and the shining exploits of the town’s Little League National All-Stars.
Solenberger inherited an American Legion program defined by mixed success since its founding in 1936 by Clark MacGregor. Until Glen Winget took charge in the late 1950s, the scheduling had often been erratic, the program had even splintered into different teams with different sponsors and the newspaper coverage had been spotty.
Winget kind of consolidated all of that — but then he passed away in 1961 as a result of acute leukemia.
When Solenberger — nicknamed Solly — and Baginski took charge in 1964, it proved a new dawn for Legion baseball in Bartlesville.
The pair brought organization to program, demanded commitment from players and parents, spruced up the stadium, improved the revenue stream and elevated the quality of play on the field.
Each brought a unique personality that formed a symbiotic resonance with the boys.
“It was a perfect blend of coaching dynamics,” said Solenberger’s grandson Christopher Solenberger. “You had a coach with a serious tone in my grandfather and almost the jokester with Vic Baginski. … It was a good blend of nose to grindstone, so to speak, and being able to let up with the other coach.”
During an interview in 1969, Lee recalled the differences between the two leaders.
“Solly was the kind of a guy that if a parent came to him to ask why his kid wasn’t getting more playing time his answer was, ‘Go ask your son,’” Lee recalled. “Vic Baginski had the biggest personality on the team. … He had a crazy personality and he loved those kids and he loved baseball.”
Christopher retains happy childhood memories of Baginski — which are sweetened by a family relationship.
“His son married my mom’s sister,” Christopher noted. “Vic was almost like a second or a third grandfather to us. We would help him do paper routes. He was a great, great man and we loved hanging out with him.”
Both coaches brought a family-like dynamic to the team and each demanded the boys represent well the town of Bartlesville, Lee added.
Solenberger and Baginski would work together for 11 seasons (1964-74), navigating the program to 363 victories and setting the foundation for a perpetually-successful independent self-sufficient program as long as it stuck to the same pattern.
Although a power shake-up in the late 1990s destroyed the independence of the team, it still survives into the mid-2020s and should keep on going.
Solenberger passed away. Baginski had preceded him a decade earlier.
So what would Solenberger think about the BaHOF induction?
“He would be celebrating in his head,” Christopher said. “I don’t think he would be showing it outwardly. He was pretty humble. He would have liked to pass along the glory to his players instead of himself. That's the kind of guy he was. … It’s definitely an honor that I think was a little bit overdue. I would have liked to see him alive instead of a family accepting it on his behalf.”
Solenberger likely also would have saluted the woman who made it all possible — his wife Madeline.
“With my grandfather came my grandmother,” said Christopher. “She was definitely the woman behind the scenes. She worked hard on helping to get sponsorships so they had things and were able to travel. She worked as hard as my grandfather for the program.”
Solenberger also didn’t speak often about his successful minor league baseball career that brought him to Bartlesville in the first place in the post-World War II 1940s. Solenberger had been deprived of his prime due to military service but still displayed exceptional talent after.
“That’s part of the story that still resonates with the family,” said Christopher. “He was robbed of a few years, being in the military, and he still had all the talent in the world. I think he didn’t go as far partly because he was a little shorter in stature and back then a lot of pro teams wanted you to be six-foot-or taller.”
Solenberger led the Kansas Oklahoma Missouri League in hits while playing for Bartlesville. He remained in Bartlesville after his playing days, largely because he met and courted and married Madeline here.
Christopher is looking forward to Friday’s induction.
Some of those planning to represent his grandfather and Baginski will be Christopher and his wife, his father Alan and Christopher mother, Christopher’s two daughters, Evelyn Baginski and Mike Baginski, who was the batboy for the 1969 team.
To his understanding, a couple of the 1969 players have been asked to accept the main award on behalf of the team, Christopher said.
It will be a night to celebrate youthful dreams that came true and have brought a lifetime of happy memories and fellowship.