They were farm girls — sturdy sharecroppers’ daughters — and they were obsessed with basketball.

In spare minutes between feeding chickens and working the shriveling cotton fields, they’d practice barefoot on dirt, doing their darndest to throw whatever stood for a ball into a splintery peach basket.

Then, on Friday nights at the high school gym, they’d lace up their canvas shoes, tuck their sackcloth dresses into knee-length bloomers, and play their hearts out as their friends and neighbors hollered.

The farm girls of Oklahoma loved basketball for the game itself, with no idea, at the height of the Great Depression, that it could ever lift them out of the dust.

But for a talented and lucky few in the early 1930s, it would do just that, starting with the very moment that a broad-shouldered stranger in a black suit and a flattop haircut would show up at their games.

He was Samuel Foster Babb, the charismatic basketball coach of tiny Oklahoma Presbyterian College, and he was scouting for stars.

“Welcome to OPC,” he’d tell those who took his amazing offer: a full college scholarship.

Babb’s investment would be repaid generously.

From March of 1931 to March of 1934, the OPC Cardinals’ women’s basketball team — comprised almost entirely of Babb’s farm girl recruits — won 89 straight games, including two national championships.

Along the way, they’d make basketball history, proving wrong a legion of detractors — including from the White House itself — who called them unladylike and lobbied hard to stop them.

“These farm girls, who at one time never thought of lives beyond the cotton fields, got to be heroes,” writes Lydia Reeder in her new book, “Dust Bowl Girls: The Inspiring Story of the Team That Barnstormed Its Way to Basketball Glory.”

It’s hard to overstate the poverty of Depression-era Oklahoma.

In 1932, 14 dust storms swept the land, and unemployment was at 30 percent.

“Everybody was desperately poor,” Reeder said in a recent interview with Garden & Gun magazine.

“When I talked to the women, they all said they didn’t live in houses; they lived in cabins that didn’t have running water or electricity,” the author said.

“That way of life also gave them a lot of freedom in that they were very physical, athletic girls, used to certain hardships and lots and lots of work.”

So the college town of Durant, Okla., with its population of 7,500, seemed like a bustling metropolis to Sam Babb’s talented, just-plucked-from-the-cornfield recruits.

Likewise, the before-dawn drills in the frosty gym — the women’s practices were squeezed into the unpopular, unheated hours before the men’s team took over the space — seemed a luxury.

They already knew the game, and after endless hours aiming at peach baskets they were sure shots.

But it took Babb, a preacher’s son and himself a farm boy, to hop in his roadster and find them.

“He often traveled the roads alone, rambling down Oklahoma highways and back roads, from the Arbuckle Mountains to the Wichitas, the Red River to the Arkansas, humming ‘Livin’ in the Sunlight, Lovin’ in the Moonlight’ or ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’ in his tone-deaf way,” wrote Reeder.

Back at the Oklahoma Presbyterian College, he’d forge an unstoppable team.

“The girls I write about grew up playing ball in junior high. Everybody in the South and the Midwest—in the rural towns—played basketball back then,” Reeder told Garden & Gun.

“It was a huge part of the culture, and in some places, the Friday night basketball games were as important as going to church on Sundays.

“Sam learned about the girls from high school coaches, and he was able to offer them financial aid to play in college.

“So Sam didn’t have to teach them how to play basketball — but he taught them discipline.”

Babb was a farm boy himself, a preacher’s son who came to Durant to teach psychology and sports.

He was also the author’s great uncle.

Reeder never got to meet her Uncle Sam, but her great aunt, who was Babb’s sister, lit the spark that would become “Dust Bowl Girls” some ten years ago, by handing her great niece an old and yellowed manila folder.

“For safe-keeping,” explained Lydia Babb Thomas, who was about 90 at the time.

The folder the elderly woman passed to Reeder bulged with newspaper clippings, letters and photographs about her brother’s team, the Cardinals.

She’d collected the artifacts during her successful 1978 campaign to get her brother posthumously inducted into the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame.

“You might want to tell their story some day,” the great-aunt told the author.

The folder “spurred my curiosity,” Reeder writes in her website.

She’d spend the next decade traveling across Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas, meeting the stately ladies who were once Dust Bowl Girls, or drawing memories from their surviving family members.

Soon, she fell “head over heels for the team of scrappy farm-girls heros and their tenacious basketball coach, my Uncle Sam,” Reeder said.

One treasure unearthed in Reeder’s research was the unpublished autobiography of Lucille Thurman, who was just 16 when she started with the Cardinals.

With her intense playing, and her insecurities and jitters, Thurman takes a starring role in the book’s narrative.

But Coach Babb found his star player in Doll Harris, a focused farm girl who played starting forward for her high school team, the Cement Lady Bulldogs.

“Part Irish and part Cherokee, she was petite — not much over five feet tall — with an athletic figure and thick, shoulder-length black hair.

For such a small girl, she had large hands.

“This strange attribute, the boys whispered among themselves, helped her to guide shots magically over the rim and into the basket.”

Even in high school, “Doll made almost half the field goals she attempted and nearly all of the free throws.”

For all its devotees, women’s basketball had its share of haters.
Some Durant residents were scandalized to see the female students of Oklahoma Presbyterian taking practice jogs around town.

“Doll was surprised, and then delighted, by the gossip she had elicited when she was a freshman,” wrote Reeder.

“A few distraught citizens told Babb, sometimes when Doll was within earshot, that fast running was entirely inappropriate for young college girls.

“Doll thought that was the funniest thing she had ever heard. If she could work the fields alongside her father, she could certainly run a mile.”

Even then-First Lady Lou Henry Hoover got in on the hating.

Avidly athletic as a young woman — she had played basketball for exercise in college, at Stamford University — Hoover shared in the then-widespread belief that it was unbecoming, and possibly even unhealthy, for young ladies to work up a sweat in public.

As founder of the Women’s Division of the National Amateur Athletic Federation, the first lady campaigned hard against competitive women sports.

“Using the power of the first lady, the organization began attacking competitive athletics for women, especially basketball, as being unhealthy and unladylike,” Reeder writes.

“Concerned that women’s high school and college sports would become as corrupt as the men’s, with quasi-professional rules that resulted in gambling, t“The Women’s Division endorsed sports for health purposes and outlined a plan for the more gentle intramural ‘play days’ that barred all spectators.

“Further rules forbade girls playing any sport during the first three days of menstruation, declared that any awards for sporting accomplishments have no intrinsic value, and emphasized a well-balanced sports program so that girls wouldn’t overdevelop in one particular sport.”

None of that stopped the thousands of girls and woman — in back yards and school gyms and on paid, business-sponsored teams — who loved the rough and tumble game and were playing to win.

“At school, friends and teachers didn’t give a second thought to girls picking cotton or running the buck rakes in the Johnson grass hay field, so no one ever bothered to consider if it was unfeminine for them to play basketball,” writes Reeder.

“They practiced on dirt patches behind barns or on playgrounds, in small schoolrooms, or in large converted warehouses. Their hands became filthy with the jumble of sweat and dust from handling the ball. They’d wipe their hands on their shirts, just like the boys, so they could get a true feel of the basketball.”

The Cardinals were required to do well in classes, attend weekly Bible study and services, and have lunch with the Native American children who went to the campus’ elementary school.

“Everyone ate together in the cafeteria, including the Indian children from the primary and secondary schools housed on campus,” tells Reeder.

“Since most of the freshman basketball players were required to sit at assigned tables with the younger children and help them learn table manners, the girls didn’t have much time to chat until suppertime.”

When Doll Harris joined OPC, the team was still wearing bloomers. But the next year, the team modernized its look with what little money it had.

“The bloomers had to be taken in and shortened to make their uniforms look more like the men’s shorts,” wrote Reeder.

“OPC wasn’t the only team still wearing bloomers that went past their knees, but to get attention from sportswriters and to look like a real basketball team, the uniforms had to at least meet AAU standards.

“This year, if everything worked out, meaning that Durant citizens turned out and attended games, they might even get brand-new uniforms made from the shiny satin that all the top teams were wearing now.”

In that fateful 1931-32 season, Babb took his team on a fundraising “barnstorm” tour to raise money and excitement for the team by winning as many games as possible.

For two weeks, they rode an old bus that they sometimes had to push to get started around Oklahoma and through the oil country of Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana.

They couldn’t afford a driver, so one of the players, Bo-Peep Park, took the wheel.

“Glancing back at the dorm, Lucille realized that for a few weeks, home would be the camp courts and auto courts that had sprung up along roadsides during the past few years, primitive motels or court residences named after a local attraction or the comfort they provided,” wrote Reeder.

“Dew Drop Inn, Cottage Courts, Crystal River Tourist Camp, some costing less than a dollar a night.”

As they traveled, they saw the poverty that had taken over the country and that they had narrowly managed to avoid by getting scholarships to play ball.

“While on Highway 34, they passed a few hitchhikers, men or boys dressed in shabby clothes heading to or coming from the shack towns built from tar paper, scrap metal, and wood,” wrote Reeder.

“Upon seeing the families gathered around first, their faces gaunt and clothes tattered, a few of the girls muttered, ‘There but for the grace of God I go’.”

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