Historic photos show Maine’s century-long love affair with high school basketball
By Troy R. Bennett, Bangor Daily News Staff
Six boys stand on a snow-dotted waterfront, wearing what appears to be football attire. One of them holds a basketball. Another’s stockings are held up with garters.
None are smiling.
At the far left, a bespectacled coach strikes a confident pose, hands in his coat pockets, wearing a necktie, starched collar and black bowler hat.
The 115-year-old image, recorded on a glass plate negative, shows the 1908 Warren High School basketball team. It’s the oldest basketball related image in the Penobscot Marine Museum’s massive collection of historic Maine photographs. It proves Maine’s love affair with wintertime high school hoops is nothing new, it goes back more than a century.
Many of the basketball photos in the museum’s archive predate the state tournament.
OLD SCHOOL — Greenville and Guilford basketball teams duke it out on the hardwood in a January 22, 1966 photo by Everett L. “Red” Boutilier, taken at the Moosehead Lake Carnival in Greenville.
South Portland beat Bangor by a score of 24-21 in Maine’s first boys basketball championship game in 1922. Bangor redeemed itself a year later, beating Portland in a best-of-three game series, 2-1.
One photo in the museum’s collection comes from the Machias Historical Society. It shows the town’s boys high school team posing for a formal portrait with their trophies and a banner proclaiming them the 1931 champions of Washington County.
A 1940s-era boys basketball photo shows a Waterville High School team draped artfully across two ladders, the backboard and one player even sits on the hoop.
Another picture, taken by prolific Maine photographer Everett L. “Red” Boutilier, records the action in a game between Greenville and Guilford’s respective high schools in 1966.
Girls didn’t get to play in statewide championship games until 1975.
That year, Gardiner High School took the Class A crown, besting Morse High School by a score of 70-62. Also that year, Lake Region High School beat Van Buren High School for the Class B title, Hall-Dale High School overtook Katahdin High School in Class C and East Grand High School beat Richmond High School for Class D bragging rights.
But Maine girls were definitely playing basketball long before the state let them in on tournament action.
A museum photo shows the 1924-25 Machias High School girls basketball team posing with their coach for a formal portrait. The team wears canvas shoes and baggy, pantaloon-based uniforms.
A photo taken 40 years later for the Vinalhaven High School yearbook shows the girls team in tall socks, low sneakers and shiny, satin uniforms.
The entire online photo collection at the Marine Museum can be searched by keyword, location — or even sport.