The rest of the story.
The city of Edmonton, Alberta, trembled with excitement at the news.
The triumphant athletes were returning home.
Twenty thousand admirers overflowed market square and jammed the streets.
Traffic came to a standstill.
In fact, the hometown celebrities themselves had to get out of their cars and
plunge into the throng escorted by scores of mounted police and then
at last to the chanting of Canadian sports fans
of the world. A championship Edmonton team reached the platform in the middle of the square.
The 49th Battalion band saluted them with a rousing anthem.
A host of dignitaries, including the provincial premier,
proclaimed their praise.
And as the glow of a dozen bonfires and a shower of dazzling fire,
works illumined the falling night.
An impressive parade was launched into the brimming boulevards.
And never before in the history of that capital city
had there been such grand festivities.
For Edmonton had been the home of some spectacular sports teams,
a national hockey league team that claimed back-to-back Stanley Cups in 84 and 85,
a Canadian football league team with a record holding five consecutive
break-up victories to their credit, but the athletic organization whose joyous
victory is 1924 homecoming you've just relived
was Edmonton's basketball team, the Edmonton grads,
which the inventor of basketball, Dr. James Naesmith,
called the finest basketball team that ever stepped out onto a floor.
Their record-shattering accomplishments comprise the rest of the story.
The Edmonton grads dominated their sport through all of the years they were
a ball club from 1915 to 1940.
Of the 522 games they played in those 25 years,
the grads won 502 of them.
That's better than 96 percent.
At local provincial national and international levels they won 108
championships. Not once did they ever lose a Canadian championship contest.
Before basketball became an Olympic sport, the grads went to the Olympics anyway
and played 27 exhibition games and they won all of them.
When a US University basketball team wins more than 60 games,
anything more than 60, that's headline news.
The Edmonton grads once won 147 consecutive games,
then they lost one game and then they retaliated with a spectacular 78 game winning streak.
In all of the 25 years they played only 48 names appeared on the team
roster and all but two of those players had something remarkable in common.
They were graduates of the town's commercial high school.
They had played for the high schools basketball team and so the name
the Edmonton grads.
The history of basketball is yet in the writing,
but there may never be another team like this one.
Not only because of their stratospheric statistics,
for the invincible Edmonton grads,
the team deemed best ever by basketball's own inventor
was exclusively comprised of former members of the commercial high school
girls basketball team. In a sport ordinarily identified with sky hooking,
slam dunking, court pounding, supermen, the best ever
for women and now you know the rest of the story.
and now the rest of the story six blocks from the Capitol building in Jefferson
City on 48 acres of land is the Missouri State Penitentiary and therein resides
the notorious Joe cybert the man no prison could hold or so Joe says and his
escape record is an impressive one beginning in May 12 of 1955 he broke out of
the Shawnee County jail near Topeka, Kansas when they finally caught up with
an incarcerated slippery Joe in Gordon City he vowed there and then that no
jail would ever hold him again eight years later Joe robbed a supermarket
killed an employee and he was sent to the Oklahoma State Pen escape while he was
on the run he held up a bank in West Tennessee Joe was apprehended since to
the Missouri State Pen for life but once again he declared that he would soon
be free well after his arrival there October 1964 Joe made numerous escape
attempts but each one failed little things went wrong like the time Joe
tossed a homemade fire bomb through an open window in a guard tower seems the
guard had also left their rear window of the tower open and the bomb just
sailed in one window and out the other and dropped harmlessly into the street
below but slippery Joe grew more determined with each failure when he put into
action his most daring and ingenious plan Joe cybert had a private pen in the
pen he had a cell to himself so when guards made bed check they saw Joe sleeping
there they just went on by but that was not Joe in the cot rather a dummy that
Joe had made of his own clothing the real Joe was long gone and he had procured a
hacksaw from somewhere had spent an interminable time secretly cutting through
two cell bars and then he removed the severed at bars when the time came and broke
out down the hall was a 60 foot cell block window with no bars on it Joe lowered
himself out that window on a bed sheet rope 25 feet to the training office roof
from that roof it was another 20 feet to the ground and Joe made it safely and
there he found a trash truck used to haul sawdust from the prison's furniture
factory and Joe hid in the undercarriage until morning when that truck drove
straight through the main prison gate to freedom and then Joe had but to crawl
from the truck undetected and on foot he followed the railroad tracks that led
toward Kansas City that night the cunning convict spotted several machine
sheds and large stock tanks for feeding cattle so he's still in prison clothing
so he climbed a fence and crawled into one of those stock tanks for a good night
sleep next morning Joe was discovered and sent back to the state pen and he's
there right now today I think I mean he'd probably still be on the lamb had he
not chosen that stock tank to sleep it because you know Joe has always bragged that
no jail could hold him well now that may be but if Joe ever hopes to stay free he's
going to have to seek his refuge more selectively you see the stock tank hiding
place he had found was on the farm grounds of the Central Missouri Correctional
Center slippery Joe cybert had slipped out of one prison and directly into
another and now you know the rest of the story
