This is the first of a 2-part series about the Rabe Tennis Club in Leavenworth. Part 1 takes a look back at the nearly 50-year history of the club. Later this week the Times will publish Part 2, regarding what some of the players are up to today.
Behind the house at 600 S. Broadway lies an old tennis court.
There isn’t a net any longer, or a fence. The lights that once hung above it are no longer there either. Most are unaware it’s even there.
Decades ago, however, that court was host to some of the best tennis never seen.
Dick Cray, who was the No. 1 player at the University of Kansas and led them to a Big 7 title in 1949, played there. So did Mary Johnsen, who played at the US Open and on the Virginia Slims Tour. So did Leavenworth attorney Ethan Potter, now 90-years-old, who might’ve been able to beat them all.
Those days are but a memory now. But, unlike those that would’ve recalled the exploits of the Colosseum or the Hippodrome or the Huntington Avenue Baseball Grounds, the memories of these ruins are still with us. Right here in town, in fact. And some of those men who gathered there still meet to play elsewhere in Leavenworth. They meet at the same times, on the same days of the week, and they’ve done so for nearly 50 years.
So what happened all those years ago that has continued until today?
Pull up a chair.
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When Ethan Potter moved to Leavenworth in 1951, its only tennis courts were at the country club. They were made of chat, a fine stone on top of a layer of clay. When it rained they had to roll them again and string binder twine to re-mark the lines with lime powder.
Dr. Melvin Rabe donated some of the money to build those courts. But if those two courts were unavailable, you were probably out of luck unless you had access to the courts at Fort Leavenworth. So in the early 1960s, Rabe bought a house that had an old dirt tennis court behind it.
That plot of dirt would one day be the gathering place for some of Leavenworth’s most distinguished citizens whose names would still ring familiar to the locals. Rabe, one of the most renowned surgeons in nation, and many of his friends from the country club pitched in to turn the back yard into a concrete oasis. One of them was JV Oliver, the president of Missouri Valley Steel who helped lay a base of steel over the concrete that would become the surface of the court, where they played fiercely yet cordially.
“We had a great time,” Potter said. “You didn’t get any hostilities or animosities built up because if you called the guy an SOB, he might your partner the next time. ... You played with whoever showed up and that was mandatory. You didn’t have a choice. If you were next up I couldn’t turn you down ... and you may not have been worth a damn. But it worked out real well.”
Dr. Tom Hood from the VA was part of that group. So was the postmaster, Walt Kane, as was Spike Meyer, who owned Meyer Dairy along with his brother in Basehor. RB Whittaker, who owned a bookstore in town but later became a stockbroker with EF Hutton in Kansas City, made the drive to play. So did dentist Dr. Ralph Atchison, and Bob Brown, and Don Spratt, and Ralph Last, and Col. Bob Salisbury, and Potter, and Cray and Oliver.
In 1965 there was a new tennis fanatic in town. You might know him since he became Leavenworth’s first tennis coach and eventually started tournaments in town that have been going for more than 37 years, but back then Jim Mathis was just a guy looking for someone to play. And the rest is history.
“I went out to Fort Leavenworth and played ... and they were doing a bunch of work on Rabe’s court, so a bunch of men came out and played at Fort Leavenworth on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon,” Mathis said. “And they invited me over, I was like 25 and here these guys were 48 or something.”
No matter, Mathis soon became a fixture in Leavenworth tennis and started not only the tournament in late spring for the locals, but also the open Labor Day tournament which has been going since 1973. Mathis would later say he simply wanted a way to get his players playing during the off-season and to get a way for himself to play — he and Potter took the doubles title that first year — but the bottom line is that his tournaments and the reputation of their group spread interest in tennis in Leavenworth.
That, and of course the construction of the David Brewer facility that could have more than four players at a time, unlike at Rabe’s house.
“It didn’t spread until they built these courts because it was kind of isolated and they only had the one court, and you could only play over there if you were invited, you know,” said Al Tayrien, who at age 74 has now been playing for 44 years and played alongside Rabe. “They couldn’t invite too many people because then they’d just sit around. So it wasn’t a big group, but it kept a real core of people going.”
“There’s men around town ... and we’re like, ‘All right, who’s the best player?’” Mathis said. “And I said, ‘OK, let’s find out.’”
Find out they did.
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Eventually the Rabe tennis club moved their activities to Brewer Park, and they’ve been meeting there permanently since before Rabe’s death in 1995. But in the days of yore, the action all happened in his backyard, and seldom was there a dull moment.
Think of “The Most Interesting Man in the World” from recent Dos Equis commercials, that was Rabe. He may not have spoken Portuguese in Russian, or had a week that sharks dedicated to him, or had an awkward moment just to see what it feels like, but he did seem to indeed live vicariously through himself. He actually had his own airplane, owned orange groves in Texas and went on big-game hunts in Africa, but he’d later say that his most enjoyable moments were playing tennis with his friends.
“It was a great outlet for him,” Potter said. “He was under tension in that surgery, and he gets out there and he was totally loose. ... But many a time ... Rabe would get a phone call and we were playing down there. He would leave the court, go to the hospital, perform an operation, and come back and play.”
“One time he got called to the hospital and he backed his car out and hit somebody’s van,” said Brown, who has been playing off-and-on with the group for 40 years. “Then he went to the hospital and saved a life and he came back, and he was so interested in not hitting the van that he took out the right side of his garage.”
Flying generally worked out fine for Rabe, though. He once flew himself and Oliver clear to Iowa in his single-engine plane just to look at old newspapers and see that Oliver had indeed thrown several no-hitters in high school as he’d claimed.
“He’d fly across the United States and then from Florida take off across all that water and fly out to some islands,” Tayrien said. “He was a gutsy guy. I’m not even sure that thing was (a twin-engine), I think it was single-engine ... because that’s one of the things they used to kid him about, they said, ‘Doc, you’re going out 900 miles from land with a single engine?’”
“He was your basic crazy surgeon,” Brown said. “Rabe was the first board-certified doctor in Leavenworth, and he was by all accounts extraordinarily good. The story, and I’ve been told it’s true, is that years ago somebody went to the Mayo Clinic to get something done and they said, ‘Well you’ve got Rabe there, why don’t you have him do it?’”
Rabe wasn’t the only character among the bunch, though.
“Oliver, he was a great athlete,” Potter said. “He’d play 18 holes of golf and come over and play three sets of tennis in the afternoon. I had him out to the house one time ... and this old guy is about 60 years old and he did 30 push-ups with his left hand.”
“Meyer and his brother owned race horses, and they were always giving him hell that the race horses never won and they were terrible and they were a bunch of nags,” Brown said. “And they finally won the featured race, and Spike came down and had the (winners’) blanket and threw it over the net and told everybody to stick it!”
The ribbing may not have stopped coming, but it was all in good fun, even with the ladies. Johnsen, who was recently honored in a USTA Magazine article and was a regular among the group while her husband was stationed in Vietnam from 1967-69, would one day write back that her time with them was the highlight of her week.
“I will always remember those days at the Rabe Racquet and Insult Club fondly,” Johnsen wrote.
“We didn’t have very many women, but she did play, and she was good,” Potter said. “And what was funny about (Oliver), whenever a woman showed up, he’d play about twice as hard.”
For those men and women, tennis was a way of life. Potter played until he had his knee replaced in 1998 at age 78, and when he was in his early 70s he and Mathis beat a pair of army majors no older than 35 in a doubles tournament, all while refusing a proposed handicap that would’ve given the majors only one serve before a double fault was called.
“I looked at Jim and said, ‘ ... Damnit Jim, that’s just like kissing your sister. We’ll play ‘em straight up.’” Potter said with a laugh. “So we did and we beat ‘em 6-3, 6-3.”
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Wednesdays and Fridays at three o’clock, Saturdays and Sundays at two. They still meet at those times just as they did during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, and there’s no sign of stopping.
“It’s just the love of the game,” said Col. George Morton, a teaching pro who started playing at Rabe’s house in 1987. “Tennis really is a lifetime sport. I started when I was 14 and I’m almost 64, and I hope I’m playing 10 or 15 more years.”
The competition and camaraderies is always what keeps them coming back, though, no matter how old or how young.
“Potter was probably the best player over there ... and Dick (Cray) was very good,” Brown said. “(JV Oliver) died of a heart attack in the late 60s I think, and Rabe told me about a week before JV died, he told Rabe, ‘I think I understand how to hit the backhand.’ ... Better late than never.”
