The 93-year-old Indiana Hall of Fame basketball coach....who almost wasn't

ELKHART — First, he was a basketball coach with a fresh-faced charm, not much older than the teenage players he ran through two hours of drills. An industrial education teacher, instructing boys to build shoeshine boxes while the girls learned how to bake apple pies. A bachelor out of the Army Air Force who agreed to meet a girl at Indiana State University.

And then Hymera High's Keith Dougherty was married.

It was 1953 and her name was Jackie and she was beautiful. They met through a mutual friend, on a date at Indiana State's campus where she was going to college. And as his school year at Hymera ended and the summer rolled around in 1954, Dougherty started thinking. He needed to make some extra money.

He spotted an advertisement in the newspaper. Sears, Roebuck & Co., one of the nation's largest retailers, was looking for salesmen. Dougherty didn't know if he'd be selling bicycles or refrigerators or televisions or baseball  bats, but he applied.

In the interview, they told him they were looking for an outside sales team to peddle encyclopedias door to door.

"That shocked me at first," said Dougherty, now 93. "And then I thought, 'Well, being in education, maybe I can sell encyclopedias.'"

Sell, he could. By day, he would knock on the doors of the homes of housewives asking for an appointment that evening. He was allowed to make a sale only if the man of the house was there.

Dougherty's not sure what it was that he did right, but people started buying the books that filled his trunk, those books packed with information people find on the internet today.

After three months as an encyclopedia salesman, Dougherty was making about $200 a week. He did the math; $10,000 a year was more than triple his annual $3,300 teaching and coaching salary.   

And so, as the school year approached in 1954, Dougherty resigned from the career of his dreams. He would give up coaching, his first true love. He would leave it all behind and, as he knocked on those doors, not once would he let himself think about what might have been.

A basketball escape

Maybe if he hadn't been born in 1926 and seen the financial destruction the Great Depression had on his family, maybe the money wouldn't have mattered.

Dougherty was born in Vigo County in a "pretty primitive environment," he said. His mom, Ethel, and dad, Waldo, lived on a farm, acres and acres of land filled with dairy cattle and fields of grain. His only sibling, Kathryn, was three years older.  

When Dougherty was barely four years old, his family lost their home and just about everything else during the Depression. They found themselves renting a two-room house, one bedroom, one living room and a tiny kitchen detached from the home.  

The rental came with 40 acres of land, but it wasn't as big as the farm they had lost. Waldo had to get a job in road construction and tend to the farm at night and on weekends.

That left Dougherty, as he grew older, with chores to do. As a teen, he milked the cows and farmed with two horses. His dad would put the harnesses on and Dougherty would hitch the horses up to the plows.

At his tiny country school, Pimento High, Dougherty found an escape playing basketball. His senior class was made up of 12 students, six girls and six boys. Five of the boys were on the basketball team, Dougherty was a guard, and the sixth was student manager.

The team wasn't great but the experience was. Dougherty remembers his coach, so disciplined and focused on the players, not just who they were on the court but how they behaved off it.

The team was like a close-knit family, and the members needed one another. It was a scary time, World War II raging and military service in most of their futures.

When he graduated in 1944, Dougherty enlisted in the Army Air Force but wasn't needed right away. His mother, who had to leave school as an eighth grader to take care of the house when her own mother died, was determined her children would go to college.

"My mom said that was the saddest day of her life," Dougherty said. "She always said, 'You kids are going to get an education.'"

A dream to play

He started at Indiana State with a solid plan for his future. Dougherty knew he wanted to have a career as a teacher, as a basketball coach and he knew -- at that moment -- he wanted to play. 

Indiana State's basketball coach was Glenn Curtis, who had coached John Wooden. He was a bit intimidating and Dougherty was nervous as he tried out for Curtis. And then came the final practice before a list was to appear the next day on the gym door revealing who made the team.  

As Curtis brought players on the court in groups and then sent them to the shower to head home, Dougherty found himself the last one in the stands waiting. Instead of calling him down, Curtis told Dougherty to take a shower and go home.

"I remember I was depressed that night," he said.

But the next  day on campus, people started telling Dougherty his name was on the team list. He went to see for himself and couldn't believe it.

Being on the team that season was a dream, he said, though his time was cut short as he headed off for the Air Force.

A couple of years later, the war over and his service complete, Dougherty was back at Indiana State, not to play basketball but to finish his degree so he could coach basketball.

After a year as an assistant coach at Lewisville High, Dougherty landed the job at Hymera, the job he stayed at for four years before he gave it all up for encyclopedias.

'I was kind of tired'

As the months wore on, Dougherty realized he did not like selling encyclopedias. This wasn't him. 

There was the canned pitch. The odd hours. The evenings away from Jackie, almost every evening. The cold calls. The one- and-done nature of selling books.

"It wasn't like you could build a relationship," he said. "It was a one-time, hard-sell kind of thing."

He had to push people to buy. He had to sit in front of them with the sample encyclopedia, flipping through the pages. He had to ask if they could pay a certain amount. If they could, there was a special bonus, a Holy Bible.

And it was straight commission, so the pressure was immense.

"I worked hard. I did well,"  Dougherty said. "But I was kind of tired."

With almost a year of sales behind him, in the spring of 1955, the phone rang. It was Hymera High.

"Would you like to come back?" Dougherty was asked. The coach who had replaced him had left and the position was open. Dougherty didn't have to think twice.

"I went back," he said, "and never regretted a day of it."

'The dream year'

That's what it says at the top of the yellowed page in the scrapbook Jackie Dougherty has put together chronicling nearly a century of her husband's life.

"The dream year." It was 1971 — the year Dougherty took Elkhart to the state championship game at Hinkle Fieldhouse, the year they took on East Chicago Washington, the all-time best team in Indiana boys basketball history.

Dougherty remembers the magic of playing at Hinkle. He remembers the devastation as the game got away from them.

"At half, we were way down," he said. "I'm sure a lot of people went home."

Elkhart rallied to within two points twice in the second half, but then ran out of gas. They had beaten New  Castle in triple overtime in the afternoon game and were worn out. They lost to East Chicago Washington by 10 points.

"I don't look too happy," Dougherty says of the photo in the scrapbook of him coaching that game.

But he was happy, he said, so very happy about that tournament run. On the same page is a photo of the team hanging off of a truck coming down the streets of Elkhart as crowds of fans gather to meet them after the championship game.

It was a wonderful season. The next year, Dougherty retired from coaching.

He retired after 21 years, eight at Hymera, nine at Nappanee and four at Elkhart. During his career, he had 287 wins, four sectional titles, one regional title, one semistate trophy and state runner-up. He spent the next two decades working in school administration

In 2004, Dougherty was inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame, which lists "Hymera 1950-58," for his time spent there. No mention of that year he was absent, the year he spent as an encyclopedia salesman that almost eclipsed his ascent to hall of fame coach.

And that's just fine with Dougherty.

"I chose to go back to coaching," he said. "And I'm glad I did." 

Follow IndyStar sports reporter Dana Benbow on Twitter: @DanaBenbow. Reach her via e-mail: dbenbow@indystar.com.