A letter winner for three years in football and two in track, a Class of ’49 graduate, Stanley Knight is inducted into the Salem High School Sports Hall of Fame as a former football lineman.

Knight, a real estate salesman in Norman, Oklahoma, was a tackle on the 1947 North Egypt Conference Champion Team and on the 1948 team which finished with a flourish, scoring 13-12 and 14-13 victories over Lawrenceville and Mt. Vernon.

An All North Egypt Conference selection in 1948, Knight handled the kickoff for the Wildcats, consistently sending booming kicks inside the opponent’s 10-yard line. He earned two track letters for competing in the shot put.
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Louie Donoho, the anchor for the line of the 1938 SCHS football team was also a discus thrower and low hurdler for the track team. He went on to play varsity football at the University of Illinois.

After high school, two years at St. Louis University and military service in World War II, Donoho enrolled at the University of Illinois where he played center and linebacker on the 1945 and 1946 Illini varsity. The Illini won the Big Ten Championship in 1946, the first Big Ten team to play in the Rose Bowl under the current Big Ten-Pac 10 post season pact.

During his freshman and sophomore years at St. Louis University, Donoho was a heavyweight boxer and captain of the Billiken freshman football team. He entered the military in 1942.
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Lettering three years in football, Bill Hooks had an exceptional year his senior season for the Salem Community High School football Wildcats, helping Salem to an 8-1 record. Hooks, attended Grinnell College in Iowa after graduation from high school, where he played two years of football.

He was the principal ball carrier on the 1946 Wildcat team, netting 1593 yards from scrimmage, scoring 22 touchdowns and kicking four extra points. He had two 5-touchdown games, one against Mt. Carmel which Salem won 73-0, and one against Olney in a 52-0 Salem victory. The 1946 Wildcats posted an 8-1 record, outscoring their opponents 21625, and out-gaining them from Scrimmage, 2594 yards to 1052. The only loss was 13-0 to Flora.

Hooks was an All-North Egypt Conference selection his senior year and gained All-State Special Mention. He had been an All-State honorable mention selectee his junior year. He was a fast, explosive runner, breaking for many long runs in his career. He also played defensive halfback. In 1947, he was named to the National Star Athletes Society, nominated by Athletic Director, M.E. Lenich.
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A 1950 SCHS graduate, who earned two varsity football letters at the University of Illinois, Bob Bishop was one of the kingpins of the line of the Salem team that compiled a 7-1-l record as Co-Champions of the North Egypt Conference.

An All-Conference guard in 1949, Bishop was also selected for All-State honors by the Champaign News-Gazette and the Chicago Daily News. He was selected to the 1939-49 SCHS “All-Decade” team picked in 1950.

Bishop played football all four years at the University of Illinois – on the freshman team in 1950, the JV team in 1951, and lettered with the varsity his junior and senior years. A member of the 1953 Big Ten champions, he was selected for the prestigious “George Huff Award for Scholarship and Athletics.”
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In 1947 Bill Larimer began his career as a sportswriter for the Salem Republican, predecessor of the Times-Commoner. This career was to span four decades ending with Larimer’s retirement in the Spring of 1977. It should be noted that when his career began it was on a voluntary basis. Later he not only wrote sports, but developed his own column, “Knothole News’ and became a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, the Decatur Herald and the St Louis Globe-Democrat.

When Larimer began writing, the sports program included football in the fall, basketball in the winter, and track and field in the spring. Baseball was added In the early 50′s, and golf, tennis and cross country were initiated later.

One of the major developments late in Larimer’s career was the beginning of girls’ athletics. Volleyball began in 1974; basketball in 1975; tennis and softball also started while Larimer was writing sports. Larimer strongly supported the development of a girls’ athletic program in his column “Knothole News”.
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It wasn’t an uncommon sight to see a kid tooling around town on his bicycle with a baseball mitt hooked on the handlebar, looking for a game. That “kid,” who always wanted to play professional baseball, missed participation in high school sports because in the early 1940′s Salem didn’t have a baseball program his sport He went on, though, to become one of the nation’s premier and most versatile sportcasters, Merle Harmon, a 1943 SCHS graduate, was inducted into the Salem High School
Sports Hall of Fame in 1988.

He broadcast major league baseball for 30 years, spending seven seasons as the voice of the Kansas City A’s prior to their departure for Oakland, two with the Milwaukee Braves, followed by three seasons with the Minnesota Twins and then back to Milwaukee to become the voice of the Milwaukee Brewers. Bob Uecker joined Harmon in the Brewer booth and over the next ten years they became one of the hottest broadcast teams in baseball.

Meanwhile, Harmon joined NBC Sports, first as an independent and then exclusively, and handled the Major League Baseball Game of the Week, NFL Football, NCAA Basketball and special assignments for Sportsworld. He was named as one of the anchors for the 1980 Olympic telecasts in Moscow but President Carter banned the U.S. teams from participating.

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