THE TEST OF TIME : After 78 Years, Arthur Worthy’s Record Still Stands

Seventy-eight years ago, not quite 20 years after the game of basketball was invented, a boy in heavy leather shoes went out on a wind-swept court in Huntington Beach on a Saturday afternoon in late October.

And he set an Orange County scoring record that has withstood the battering march of time, the technological advances in the game of basketball and the physiological changes in athletes over the past 78 years.

Arthur Worthy scored 58 points in a single game in 1910. The record is pressed so deeply in the pages of county history that it has been forgotten by many. But broken by none.

Arthur Worthy, known as Bob to his family and friends, was born in Ozark, Ark., on Sept. 13, 1892, the second son of James T. and Sarah Caldonia Worthy.

Just nine months earlier, the game of basketball had been invented by James Naismith at Springfield College in Springfield, Mass.

Naismith’s game was created as an alternative to routine calisthenics and other indoor winter activities. The game was an immediate success, spreading initially to YMCAs and colleges around the Northeast. In 1893, W.O. Black, a graduate of Springfield College and a contemporary of Naismith’s, brought the game to Stanford University.

In 1904, the sport was played at the Olympic Games in an exhibition tournament held as part of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. By that time, iron rims and nets had replaced the peach baskets that Naismith originally used; the team size had been standardized at five players, and backboards had come into existence to prevent fans from grabbing the ball.

But the teams would still jump center after every basket scored, players would scramble for possession even after a basket, and the balls had leather laces.

Most players were not proficient scorers. Typical collegiate scores in the early 1900s were 37-4, 16-15, 23-12. In just one-third of the scores published in the Reach Sporting Goods Basketball Guide of 1910-11 did a team’s total exceed 50 points.

“What (Worthy) did was very amazing,” said Wayne Patterson, research specialist at the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.

The young man who stares out from the brown-tinted photograph of the Huntington Beach High School basketball team looks serious, capable. And the arms that protrude from his sleeveless jersey are as strong and muscular as those of athletes today.

The muscles are not from weight-lifting, but from farming. They are the result of pushing a plow through rows of celery and lima beans.

When Worthy was 5 years old, he and his parents--along with his older brother, Elmer, his younger sister, Vernie, and his younger brother, Lawrence--left Arkansas to come west. His father’s brother, Jess Worthy, already had come to California as part of the land boom in the 1880s and had written to his brother about the fertile land and farming potential in Orange County.

So, in November, 1897, the Worthy family stepped off the train at the Smeltzer stop, now the corner of Edinger Avenue and Gothard Street at the southeast corner of Golden West College.

At the turn of the century, Huntington Beach was called Pacific City. The Worthy family settled outside the main town, one mile east of the Smeltzer stop in a single story, wood-frame ranch house near the corner of what is now Edinger Avenue and Newland Street.

On that site, where the street corners are now fortified by the walls of subdivisions, the Worthy family raised seven children and James Worthy set about farming celery and lima beans.

Arthur was a quiet boy. When he started school, at the Ocean View Grammar School near the corner of Beach Boulevard and Edinger Avenue where the 405 freeway now roars overhead, he was so bashful that he wouldn’t tell a classmate what his name was. The older boy decided that, if Worthy wouldn’t say his name, he must not have one and so dubbed the youngster “Bob.”

Though Worthy’s mother continued to call him Arthur, she was the only one. The name Bob stuck with Worthy the rest of his life, keeping him in line with the rest of his family. Older brother Elmer was known as “Pete.” And the younger siblings were “Boots” (Lawrence), “Coon” (Conrad) and “Bib” (Viva). The baby of the family was Vanona, or “Nonie,” now 80 and the only Worthy child still alive.

Worthy apparently grew out of his shyness. By the time he got to high school, in 1907, he was confident enough to run for freshman class president.

The school, then called La Bolsa, opened in 1905 in the old Armory Building on what is now Warner Avenue. In 1907, with its enrollment at 29, the school moved to its present site at Main Street and Yorktown Avenue. The name was changed to Huntington Beach High in 1909, the year Huntington Beach was incorporated as the sixth city in Orange County, taking its name from Henry Huntington’s Pacific Railway that was extended to the area in 1904.

Worthy, who spent his time away from school plowing the fields with his father, spent his time in class enriching his mind and excelling in several areas.

When he was just a sophomore, he was elected class president and student body president. As a junior, he was re-elected student body president and established himself as a fine orator, winning the Santa Ana debate. As a senior, he was the student body vice president, editor of the school yearbook, “The Cauldron,” the head of the debating team, a track team member who set records in the hurdle and the baseball throw, the captain and third baseman for the baseball team and the captain and star forward of the Huntington Beach basketball team.

Basketball was always important to Huntington Beach High School. Although other schools, such as Santa Ana, concentrated more on football and baseball, basketball was the premier sport in Huntington Beach.

The school’s first principal, Edward Solomon, introduced the sport in the school’s first year. There were six boys enrolled in school, and all were on the 1905 team, which was undefeated.

That initial success continued. The team’s regular competition included Fullerton, Orange and Santa Ana high schools, as well as the Orange Athletic Club, the Long Beach YMCA and the University of Southern California. Huntington Beach won the Orange County championship eight times in the school’s first 10 years.

But Huntington Beach never had been as successful as it was in 1910-11, Worthy’s senior year.

The 1911 Cauldron described the season: “In boys’ basket ball the team has achieved greater success than ever before. All of the players were experienced. They had played together so long that they developed team work that made them almost invincible. Every one was a star, and played his position almost perfectly.”

The team, composed of Worthy, Lewis Blodget, Irwin Farrar, the three Livernash brothers--Leo, Leonard and Locksley--and coached by Fred M. Lee, outscored its opponents, 758-327.

Arthur Paine, the high school principal, praised the team in his weekly “High School Notes” column in the Huntington Beach News.

“The Huntington Beach teams have always had a high reputation for gentlemanly and ladylike conduct and they are maintaining that reputation this year,” Paine wrote on Nov. 25, 1910.

After the team clinched the Orange County championship, with a 55-21 drubbing of Orange on Jan. 15, 1911, Paine wrote: “After the close of the game, sandwiches and hot chocolate were served to the members of both teams by the girls of the local school. Songs and instrumental music followed and a very pleasant time served to engender a kindly feeling between the teams of both schools.”

Huntington Beach finished the season 17-8, but lost the Southern California Championship to Azusa, a team that Huntington Beach had beaten, 40-26, during the season. The championship game, played at USC on March 4, 1911, was tied 22-22 at the end of regulation. But Huntington Beach lost, 24-22, in overtime on a basket tossed in from center court by an Azusa player.

After the game, Paine wrote: “We still believe that Huntington Beach has the best high school basketball team in the South.”

It undoubtedly had the best player.

There were lots of other things going on in late October, 1910, besides high school basketball.

Republican William Howard Taft was president, though Theodore Roosevelt continued to battle him for headlines. There was an uprising in the Philippines. Hiram Johnson was making a final push for votes before the California gubernatorial election in early November.

And in Huntington Beach, there was local news. The Huntington Beach News noted that Ray M. Oliver and his family visited Orange, Arthur Meyers and his wife of Santa Ana enjoyed a weekend in Huntington Beach. A classmate of Worthy’s, Ray Overacker, was seriously ill with typhoid fever. And the biggest scandal of the season was about to hit. Mrs. Thomas B. Talbert, wife of the prominent local businessman, was fixing to elope with William Bushard, a development that would make headlines.

It was in the shadow of these events that Huntington Beach opened its league basketball season against Santa Ana, on Oct. 29, 1910. The game lasted 40 minutes, though it was slowed by the center jump after every basket.

Despite that, Huntington Beach defeated Santa Ana, 111-3, with Worthy, 5-feet 11-inches and 18 years old, scoring 58 points.

Santa Ana forfeited its next game against Huntington Beach and disbanded its team.

Paine, writing about the game, understated its impact and made no mention of Worthy’s achievement.

“The boys’ basketball team won the first game of the season by the unparalleled score of 111 to 3. The Santa Ana High School team were the victims. . . . A rally was held at the high school Tuesday morning in celebration of the fine showing made.”

At the end of the year, the school yearbook paid a bit more attention to the game and to Worthy. About the game, the Cauldron staff wrote: “The season was started by a practice game with Santa Ana which was won by the CLOSE SCORE OF ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN TO THREE. A WORLD’S INTERSCHOLASTIC RECORD FOR A SCORE.”

And about Worthy: “Arthur Worthy who plays forward is undoubtedly the most sensational and consistent player in all the South. He has thrown more goals than any other player in the South, making a total of 425 points in 14 games played this season.”

Worthy, six other boys and four girls graduated from Huntington Beach High in June, 1911. The next fall, he enrolled at Stanford, where he continued his athletic and extracurricular activities. He was captain of the basketball team, president of the student body and editor of the Quad, the Stanford annual.

In March, 1914, Worthy and his Stanford team traveled south during Easter vacation and played Huntington Beach High.

Worthy was not the only Huntington Beach alumnus playing for the Stanford Indians; Farrar, his high school teammate, played for Stanford, along with Ward Blodget, older brother of Lewis, another of Worthy’s high school teammates.

The captain of the Huntington Beach team that Stanford played was Lawrence (Boots) Worthy.

The game, without a score, is mentioned in “The Color of Life is Red,” a history of Stanford sports, and the author noted that Worthy sprained his ankle and was replaced by Blodget.

But Nonie Worthy Carl, 16 years younger than her brother, remembers watching him play in that game when she was a small girl. It was the only time she remembers seeing him play basketball.

Worthy graduated from Stanford in 1915 and intended to practice law. The next year he married Irene Lawrence, a registered nurse from Palo Alto. It was about that time that he changed his direction in life and decided to become a minister. He went to Bethany Bible College in West Virginia for two years and returned to California to become pastor of a church in El Centro.

Worthy eventually settled in Bell, where he served as pastor at the Bell First Christian Church from 1938 until 1960. He and Irene had seven children of their own and took in more than 200 foster children over the years.

He rarely spoke about his athletic accomplishments.

Shirley Worthy of Huntington Beach, who was married to Worthy’s nephew Norm, remembers just one sign of uncle Bob’s basketball days. When dishing up mashed potatoes for his large family, he would scoop out a serving with a spoon and toss it, with a sharpshooter’s accuracy, onto the children’s plates.

“I think he viewed his personal accomplishments in light of his work for the Lord,” said his son, Dean Worthy, a Fullerton resident.

One year after retiring in 1960, Worthy died. His wife, Irene, died in 1979.

Just as the celery and sugar beet fields of Orange County have been subdivided and paved over with asphalt, the accomplishments of the past have been slowly forgotten.

In 1953, on Feb. 10, Dick Stricklin of Huntington Beach High School scored 54 points to lead his team to a 79-59 victory over Orange. The Huntington Beach News declared the mark an Orange County record, breaking the mark of 47 points posted by Anaheim’s Houston Faulker in 1947.

But one week later, the News retracted that claim. Thirty-five years ago, people still remembered Worthy’s record and the News wrote that the record was actually held by Worthy, who scored 58 points in the opening game and averaged 31.1 points per game in the 1910-11 season.

According to Cal-Hi Sports in Sacramento, Worthy’s record was also a state scoring record that lasted until 1953. It was broken by Mike Diaz, who scored 64 points for Armijo High School in Fairfield.

The Worthy family is still going strong in Huntington Beach. The fourth generation is approaching high school age. There is a park named after Lawrence’s son Norm Worthy, the late Huntington Beach Director of Parks and Recreation. Lawrence Worthy’s home on the corner of 6th Street and Walnut Avenue has been designated a historical home by the Department of Interior. And Jim Worthy, Norm’s son, who is a firefighter in Fullerton, was captain of the Huntington Beach basketball team in 1972 and played at Orange Coast College and Biola and on the European professional circuit.

“I remember as a kid, my dad would get my grandpa (Arthur’s brother, Lawrence) to shoot around with us,” Jim Worthy said. “He would always shoot from between his legs. I guess that was the way they learned to shoot.”

“Dad never talked about the record,” Dean Worthy said. “He was a modest man.”

The game of basketball has changed in 78 years, but, despite repeated assaults, no one in Orange County has surpassed Worthy’s record.

Though the record has proved durable, Worthy’s accomplishment is still a fragile thing, now the domain of crumbling newspaper clippings and fading memories.

COUNTY SINGLE-GAME SCORING RECORDS

Player Team Year Pts. 1 Arthur Worthy Huntington Beach 1910 58 2 Mark Wulfemeyer Troy 1974 55 3 Dick Stricklin Huntington Beach 1953 54 4 Tim Gergen Rancho Alamitos 1966 53 Tom Lewis Mater Dei 1983 53 Mike Goff Magnolia 1987 53 7 Johnny Rogers La Quinta 1981 52 8 Rich Thomas Foothill 1982 51