The time Darrell Royal played catch with the kids in El Reno
Sports gives us heroes. Growing up in El Reno in the ‘40s and ‘50s as the son of a sports hero, I only knew him as “Dad.” Jenks Simmons is not the hero this story is about — there are many other stories for another day.
El Reno was a sports town as I grew up. The neighborhood kids had a game running at any given time: basketball, football or baseball. Whether neighbors had children or not, it was not uncommon that they had a basketball goal mounted at the end of the driveway for El Reno was a basketball town.