Syl Sobel - Boxed out of the NBA: Remembering the Eastern Professional Basketball League

Syl Sobel and Jay Rosenstein , both originally from Scranton, Pennsylvania, have been close friends for nearly 60 years. They were seven years old when their dads first took them to watch the Scranton Miners of the Eastern Professional Basketball League play in the 1962/63 season, and that led to their lifelong fascination with the league and its players. Syl and Jay continued to follow the same path as they went to college together, became professional writers in Washington, DC, and in 2017 teamed up to coauthor this book.

Syl is an author, attorney, journalist, and former senior government executive. He has written several childrens books on U.S. government and history, including titles on the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and presidential elections, and has spoken at the National Archives, on C-SPAN and NPR, and at schools, book fairs, bookstores, and libraries. Syl is also an award-winning high school sports reporter for the Town Courier in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and has had op-eds published in several newspapers including the Baltimore Sun . He is a graduate of Georgetown University and the University of Wisconsin Law School, and is active in alumni programs for both institutions.

Jay is a writer and editor, mostly about banking and consumer finances. He started in 1977 as a reporter for the daily financial newspaper American Banker for 12 years, primarily covering Congress, federal agencies, and consumer issues. For more than 30 years, Jay was a senior writer-editor for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), where his accomplishments included creating, writing, and editing a financial newsletter for consumers for 25 years. He also is a graduate of Georgetown University.

F irst and most important, we want to thank the former Eastern Leaguers who agreed to share their stories with us. Speaking with athletes and officials whom we idolized as children has been a special thrill. Learning about them as people and hearing their stories of their careers, the league, and what they did with their lives after basketball made this a much richer, more personal story. We are so grateful for their cooperation, assistance, candor, and enthusiastic support. In alphabetical order, they are: Walker Banks, Dick Bavetta, Waite Bellamy, George Blaney, Jim Boeheim, Hubie Brown, George Bruns, John Chaney, Rich Cornwall, Joe Crawford, Charlie Criss, Jim Drucker, Carl Green, Tom Hemans, Bobby Hunter, Harvey Kasoff, Steve Kauffman, Joe Lalli, Howie Landa, Maurice McHartley, Swish McKinney, Arthur Pachter, Stan Pawlak, Charley Rosen, Ray Scott, Willie Somerset, Tony Upson, Whitey Von Nieda, Bob Weiss.

A special thanks, too, to Art Pachter, the former owner of the Scranton Miners and Apollos, for not only sharing his inexhaustible collection of stories, but also his collection of photos that he had taken over the years. We recognize that Arts photos have given our photo spread in the center of this book a decided tilt toward Scranton, but his was the most substantial set of original photos that we could find using the various research tools available to us. And, having grown up in Scranton, we confess that the pictures of players we worshipped as kids had a special appeal to us. We are also obliged to disclose that Jay Rosensteins father, Paul L. Rosenstein, was a longtime employee of Art Pachters auto supply company in Scranton, and that when Jay and his brother Bruce were in high school they worked as statisticians at Scranton home games.

We were fortunate to find former fans from other Eastern League cities who remembered the league as fondly as we did. Weve long admired Bob Ryan of the Boston Globe for his writing and his work as a television commentator. But who knew he had a similar childhood as ours and lived for Saturday and Sunday nights in Trenton the same way we did in Scranton? We are honored that he agreed to write the foreword for this book. Steve Kelley of the Seattle Times offered memories from his childhood as the son of one of the Wilmington Blue Bombers owners. Imagine having Swish McKinney at your high school games yelling at you to shoot and spending a weekend in New York City with Art Heyman!

We talked to Hazleton fans turned sportswriters Ron Marchetti and Rev. Connell McHugh, who shared memories of their beloved Hawks, especially during the early years. Eddie White III, Brian Maloney, and Tim Maloney entertained us with stories of their respective grandfathers, who promoted pro basketball in northeastern Pennsylvania, magnified the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton rivalry, and were the kind of larger-than-life, small-town characters who built the Eastern League. Atty. Marvin Salenger and Felicita Pitt offered reflections on their friend and colleague Stacey Arceneaux.

We have talked or emailed with wives and family members of several former Eastern Leaguers. Mark Johnsons biography of his dad, Basketball Slave: The Andy Johnson Harlem Globetrotter/NBA Story , has been an especially valuable resource on the history of African Americans in professional basketball. Lee Pachter has welcomed us into her home and added her perspective to many of Arthurs stories. Their partnership is a thing of beauty.