Cummings, a star at Dunbar, had spent his adolescent years at the Linden Center, which was right next door to his grandmother’s house in West Dayton.
“One day Jerry said something about a Mr. Taylor and I said, ‘Well, we had a Mr. Taylor, too,’” Blaine remembered with a bit of a chuckle Friday afternoon. “And Jerry said, ‘Well, yeah, but your Mr. Taylor wasn’t OUR Mr. Taylor. Ours was special.’ And I said, ‘So was ours … And by Mr. Taylor, do you mean Thomas Taylor, whose wife’s name is Frances?’”
As it turned out, both had laid protective claim to the same man.
Thomas Taylor, who died earlier this month at 104 and whose funeral service will be today at 11 a.m. at Wayman Chapel AME Church on Hoover Ave. in Dayton, was a Hall of Fame athlete at Hamilton, a Wilberforce University basketball player, a World War II hero and once had run the BTW Community Center in Hamilton and, after that, had been an assistant director of the Linden Center.
At both places — as well as during his many years as the director of municipal athletics in Dayton — he took a special interest in children.
“You know how sometimes grownups adopt children? Well, I adopted Mr. Taylor,” the 72-year-old Cummings, a CSU Hall of Famer, full-time professor at Texas Southern University and former dean of the school’s College of Education, said Friday during a layover in Atlanta as he was flying from Houston to Dayton for the funeral.
“I grew up without a father and Mr. Taylor became a father figure to me. We were together just three years before I got into high school, but it seems like we were connected a lot more. His counsel was very important to me in terms of how I set my priorities in life. A lot of the success I had is due to the connections I had at the Linden Center.”
The 73-year-old Blaine, who would end up running that same community center in Hamilton and now is retired, was similarly influenced by Mr. Taylor.
“He taught me four things I really adhere to today,” he said. “Before you could come into the community center back then you had to take off your hat, have your hair combed, your shoes shined and you had to respect the rights of others.
“Those are the principles, basically, I grew up with. Mr. Taylor started out as a mentor who taught me about sports and later, after I got out of college and had my owns kids and all, he became my friend.
“And I think most guys who knew him would tell you the same story. He was just a sincere person who always had your best interests at heart.”
Trailblazing career
A few years back I sat down with Taylor at the Ellison Community Center on West Third Street in Dayton and he told me about how his parents — neither of whom had gone to school beyond the fourth grade — left the cotton fields of Alabama for Hamilton because they wanted a better life for their family.
He said he became the first black basketball player at Hamilton High School.
“Tell the whole story,” needled his late pal, Fletcher Powers, who was there the day we talked.
Taylor told how he was initially discouraged by the coaches and was given an old practice jacket while the other players got “fancy” warm-ups.
“They made one mistake,” Taylor had said quietly, his face brightening with a smile. “They put me in a game and the first three times I touched the ball, I scored.”
He went on to have such a trailblazing career that he was inducted into the school’s hall of fame five years ago. Following his 1930 graduation he went to Wilberforce University, where he played basketball and ran track for 2 1/2 years before temporarily dropping out to work because he had run out of money.
He served in the U.S. Army in World War II and participated in the Normandy Invasion and the Battle of the Bulge.
In June of 2004 — commemorating the 60th anniversary of that D-Day assault — Taylor and four other black veterans of World War II went to France to revisit the places they had fought and take part in the filming of a documentary about the under-celebrated efforts of African-American combat troops in the war.
As they retraced their steps and visited battlefields and villages, they were celebrated by the townspeople, took part in parades and were embraced by school children.
“Taylor was the oldest one with us, he was over 90 then, and he kept up with everybody,” said 92-year-old Harry Johns, a WU grad and former Central State vice president, who was with the 999th Field Artillery Battalion.
That day at the Ellison Center, Taylor — who always looked far younger than his years — told me part of his secret was regularly doing exercises on the kitchen floor of his home.
‘Kids respected him’
If you noticed his lengthy obituary in the newspaper the other day, you saw all he did in his life and yet you didn’t get the whole measure of the man.
You read that Frances, his wife of 65 years, had preceded him in death and you saw mention of lots of cousins, godchildren and friends, but you saw no mention of kids.
“Mr. Taylor and his wife didn’t have any children of their own,” Cummings said, “but really they had a whole lot of children. They were a wonderful couple and you just felt a lot of love from them.
“I remember back at the Linden Center, a lot of people there, if they caught you doing something wrong, they put you out. But then you had no place to go. But he always found a way of handling disciplinary actions without being punitive.
“He talked to you in a certain way that you thought about your actions and corrected them. As a result, kids respected him so much and they tried to do right. And by the time they left, they had learned lessons that served them a lifetime.”
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