Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a six-part series chronicling the history of high school football in Warren County.

The 1960s were a time of turmoil and change in America, and the football fields of Warren County were no different.

An old legend rode off into the sunset and a new dynasty arose – one that gave a glimpse at what the sport would be like in the future. Schools that had played almost since the inception of high school football closed their doors, but a new tradition was born. Longtime rivals became teammates, and the entire decade had the look of a program in transition.

By 1973, only one of the teams that had played football in the county in 1960 still existed. Carr Central became Cooper – and later Vicksburg High – while Culkin, Jett and Redwood merged to become Warren Central. Temple, as well as North and South Vicksburg, came and went.

St. Aloysius remained a constant, but the Flashes did not have an easy time of it in the 1960s.

After the glory years of the late 1950s, when it went 21-2-1 in a four-year span from 1955-58, St. Al won only seven games in the next two seasons. In 1960 head coach Joe Balzli retired after 20 years at the helm. Over the next 10 years St. Al won five games or more just three times.

The county schools – Culkin, Jett and Redwood – trudged through a few mediocre seasons before becoming Warren Central and suffering through a few more. WC, opened in 1965, did not have a winning season until 1971.

In the city, all-white Carr Central closed in 1959 and brand-new Cooper High School opened that fall. All-black Bowman High also went through the process the same year, with Rosa A. Temple opening in the fall of ‘59.

In football, Cooper followed Carr’s legacy pretty closely. The Greenies enjoyed modest success, were usually competitive, but ultimately failed to get over the hump in the competitive Big 8 Conference in most seasons.

From 1960-69, Cooper had six winning seasons but won eight games only once. The Greenies challenged for the Big 8 title several times, but a few key losses ultimately derailed their championship hopes.

&#8220It had to wear a little on you, no question about it,” said Gene Allen, the head coach at Carr and Cooper from 1956-63. &#8220One year we lost the starting guard, another year we lost our starting quarterback. Those kids got well about five weeks into the season and we were OK. I always liked to say, ‘Now we’re ready to play.’”.

While mediocrity seemed to be a fact of life for Warren County’s football teams of the 60s, there was one glaring exception.

Temple High School parlayed an insatiable hunger for success, a string of great coaches, and an administration that knew how to combine sports and academics into an athletic machine that produced the greatest run ever seen on the area’s gridirons.

Bowman, Temple’s predecessor, had fielded a team for years but never had a lot of success. Little was written about the Bowman Tigers’ football teams, but the few records that are available indicate an average team over the years.

After a few seasons of hovering around the .500 mark, Temple started to roll. The Buccaneers went 6-3 under coach Hylon Adams in 1963 for their first winning season, then posted an 11-1 mark in 1964. The only loss came against Hattiesburg Rowan in the Negro Big 8 championship game – when Hattiesburg scored on a 49-yard screen pass with 50 seconds to play to take a 26-21 victory.

&#8220Hylon Adams was the first guy to put in the winning tradition. He was the first guy to get us moving forward,” said Ronald Queen, a star receiver at Temple from 1961-64.

The tradition was kept up over the next decade by a string of legendary coaches and an atmosphere of success. Players said anything less than winning was simply unacceptable, an attitude that was passed down from class to class.

&#8220Everybody became teachers and instructors and helped each other. It was called passing the ball, and it worked,” said Queen, who caught 17 touchdown passes in his high school career.

Adams left after the 1964 season, and was succeeded by three coaches who went on to greater fame in the college ranks. Mason Denham guided the Bucs to an 8-1 mark in 1965, and W.C. Gorden led them to their first Negro Big 8 title in 1966 with a perfect 11-0 record. Houston Markham and Cardell Jones later coached at Temple, before they went on to college careers.

A decade later, Gorden embarked on a hall of fame career at Jackson State. Denham later served as an assistant coach at Alcorn State, and Jones – an assistant at Temple and later the head coach at Vicksburg High – eventually became Alcorn’s head coach in the early 1990s. He was inducted into that school’s athletic hall of fame in 2005.

Markham and Adams also coached in the Southwestern Athletic Conference.

&#8220I didn’t know how good I was until I went to Alcorn and there were guys who didn’t know how to do a drill. We were so far ahead of everybody,” said Alonzo Stevens, an offensive lineman at Temple from 1966-69 who went on to play at Alcorn and is now the head coach at Vicksburg High.

&#8220We were being taught the fundamentals by the best. That’s why it was so easy,” said Stevens, the only player to earn All-State honors on both offense and defense in the same season.

After the 1966 championship season, Markham learned that coaching at Temple wasn’t easy, however. The Buccaneers slipped to an 8-2 record in 1967, Markham’s first season, and some fans called for his firing.

Markham’s solution to the demands of Temple’s rabid fans was simple. He didn’t lose again.

From 1968 until Temple’s final season of 1970, the Buccaneers were undefeated. They did tie Jackson Brinkley in 1968 and Greenville Coleman in 1969, but the 39-game unbeaten streak still stands as a Warren County record. No other team in county history has gone more than 27 games without a loss.

The Buccaneers crushed foes with a mix of suffocating defense and spectacular offense. During the four-year winning streak, they outscored their opponents 1,482-257.

Star halfback Bobby Huell scored 47 touchdowns in a little over two seasons from 1967-69 – he suffered a broken ankle early in his senior year – while the passing game hummed to perfection.

Three Temple quarterbacks threw at least 20 touchdown passes in their careers – William Triplett, Robert Sims and William Wooley. In 1970, Wooley topped the 300-yard mark three times and became the only Warren County quarterback ever to throw for six touchdowns in a game. He did it in a 51-6 rout of Lanier.

Ernest Moore, who later starred at North Vicksburg and Vicksburg High, continued the Temple quarterback tradition even after the school closed. He tied a county record with 28 touchdown passes in 1973, and set the career record with 50 TD tosses overall.

&#8220Believe it or not, we were a running team,” said Huell, who caught 12 touchdown passes during his career and ran for 35 more. &#8220If they were a hard rushing team, we ran a lot of screens.”

Temple’s winning streak led to Negro Big 8 championships in 1968 and ‘69, and culminated with a 6-0 victory over St. Augustine of New Orleans in the school’s final football game in the 1970 Red Carpet Bowl.

The game featured the top-ranked teams in Mississippi and Louisiana, a pair of squads that had outscored their 21 opponents by a combined 733-105. Temple had been held under 40 points only once, when it beat Port Gibson 28-0 in a driving rainstorm. Despite their relatively even stats, Temple was a big underdog against the Louisiana powerhouse.

&#8220It was very hyped. The saying was, they were trying to find a team to beat us. They felt like we hadn’t had any competition, so they went to three or four states to find somebody to play us,” Wooley said. &#8220(St. Augustine) looked like a college team. We were small compared to them. But we were not going to be denied.”

More than 7,000 fans – the largest crowd for a Red Carpet Bowl at the time – turned out to watch the two juggernauts battle, and they didn’t go home disappointed.

The teams played to a standstill most of the night, but Temple was able to put one drive together just before halftime. Carl Williams broke off a 33-yard run and Wooley completed a 19-yard pass to Henry Martin and a 14-yarder to Alexander Morrow to move the ball to St. Augustine’s 16-yard line with 3 seconds left. Then, as time ran out, Wooley threw a 16-yard touchdown pass to Martin for the game’s only score.

&#8220I read about Temple’s tremendous showing this season, but it was hard for me to visualize a team to be that good. But now I know there must be something to it,” St. Augustine coach Otis Washington was quoted as saying after the game.

Alas, the game was Temple’s last. It closed as a high school in the spring of 1971 – the building became what is now Vicksburg Junior High – as integration changed the face of education across the South.

Temple and Cooper became North and South Vicksburg for the next two years, before combining forces as Vicksburg High School in 1973.

Temple left a legacy of winning both on and off the athletic field. Many of its students went on to become doctors, lawyers, teachers and coaches. Its top-notch basketball and football teams produced a host of college and pro athletes.

The success, and perhaps finishing on top, has created a fondness for the school – known as the Thrill on the Hill – that has lasted for more than 35 years.

&#8220At the time, we didn’t think we lost anything. There are some good points and some bad points to everything,” said Ernest Young, a sophomore defensive back at Temple in 1970. He graduated from North Vicksburg and went on to play at Alcorn and in the NFL. &#8220The bad point is we we lost the family atmosphere. The good thing was a chance to get a better education.”

The turmoil and mediocrity of the 1960s would soon give way to a decade of football dominance in the 70s. With the speed bumps of integration and consolidation out of the way, the era of disco, afros and bellbottoms would become a golden age in the county’s football history.