YATES CENTER – On the west side of the courthouse square is an unpretentious store front, identified without fanfare as “Steiner’s.”
Inside, the old sundries store is anything but unpretentious. Row after row, stack after stack and box after box filled with memorabilia document the world of sports, locally and in a broad brush stroke of collegiate and professional teams and stars in exhausting detail back to the 1950s.
“It’s a lifetime of memories,” said Jack Steiner, retired teacher, coach and part-time barber, as he described much that’s visible, and some that isn’t.
How one person could accumulate all Steiner has boggles the mind, until he mentions that he started early, in 1952 “when I was in first grade,” and never quit.
A history lesson begs telling.
Steiner was born in Wichita in 1946 and before he was toddling, his parents, Bill and Evelyn Steiner, moved back to Yates Center – they were Yates Center High grads married in 1943 and gone to Wichita for wartime jobs – to work at a prescription drug and general merchandise store.
The Steiners liked what they were doing and in 1949 purchased the store. A condition was that Bill would be taught pharmaceuticals well enough to be licensed. The promise evaporated when the former owner and pharmacist ducked out for elsewhere.
Not to worry. The Steiners concentrated on sundries and over-the-counter remedies, including some for poultry and small animals.
Meanwhile, Jack and brother Bill, a year ahead of him in school, made the store a second home. Their parents often worked into the evening and as late as midnight on weekends. Small-town merchandising in those days went well beyond 9 to 5, and stores stayed open as long as there were sales to be made.
The brothers spent many evenings at the local theater, when admittance for a scamp was 9 cents, and Jack, with his father as a role model, took to collecting sports magazine and cards.
Availability was a big part of the reason. Bubble gum cards were much in demand for kids who had only radio otherwise to connect to sports heroes, with monthly magazines giving more in-depth contact.
“Every time cards came in, I got some,” Jack said. Same with magazines, and his father made a point to put back each new edition of Street and Smith’s Baseball Yearbook. His father’s collection today is a part of Steiner’s accumulation.
Young Steiner filled boxes with hundreds of cards. His collection grew and soon filled a good portion of his closet at home.
Both of the Steiner boys also became crackerjack athletes.
“YEAH, I WAS a pretty good athlete,” Steiner answered the question.
He ran the fastest 100-yard dash ever, at 10.2 seconds, for a Yates Center High athlete in winning the event in the Tri-Valley League meet in 1964.
In 1963, when Yates Center was 1-5-2, he was the leading rusher for the YCHS football team, and earned TVL honors. He started at guard for the basketball team as a junior and senior and was on the varsity squad as a sophomore.
That was when Earl Seyfert and Steve Honeycutt, both of whom later started for Kansas State, were winning games by grotesque margins for Humboldt High’s basketball team, the mention of which leads Steiner to lapse into one of his many recollections of local sports.
Humboldt crushed Yates Center by 30 points in their first 1963-64 season meeting. When the two teams got together in Humboldt for the second league game, Yates Center’s coach, Galen Rogers, decided to follow Eureka’s lead of a few games earlier with the Cubs and slow down play.
The Wildcats stayed within striking distance by holding onto the ball each time they got it and with three minutes to play, they were down by three points, 8-5.
“Coach then told us we had them where we wanted them and to go for it,” Steiner recalled. “He figured that was our only chance. We started shooting and when the game ended, we had lost 24-5. We got outscored 16-0 the last three minutes.”
After high school, he went to barber school, cut hair for a while and during a time working in Topeka got a call from his mother.
“She was putting new carpet in the house and told me to come home and do something with all the boxes of (sports) cards I had in my closet,” Steiner said.
He didn’t, which leaves him today with the familiar lament of kids who didn’t realize their collections’ values until years later when the card market exploded. Mom deposited the cards in a 55-gallon drum used as incinerator out back.
“Up in smoke” isn’t a phrase Steiner likes to hear.
“Thank goodness I had some pasted in a notebook,” 1950s football cards including the likes of Frank Gifford, “and I still have those,” tucked in a showcase in the sundries store that he refers to as his sports museum.
After shearing locks for a while, Steiner, back in the area and working in Iola, decided to give higher education a whirl. He enrolled in Iola Junior College and eventually earned a degree in education from Emporia State in 1975.
He returned to Yates Center to teach and soon found himself with a whistle hanging around his neck, coaching high school girls basketball and track. In six years his Yates Center High basketball teams won 115 of 140 games. He coached track for 27 years.
His 1979-80 team was 23-2 and finished third in the state tournament, one place better than the year before when the girls won 22 of 25 games and were fourth in the state. Steiner coached three all-state players, Betsy Light in 1977, Marilyn McKinsey in 1980 and Sherri Trendel in 1981.
Later, he coached junior high boys basketball 12 years and won nine championships.
Retirement came in 2002, two years before his mother died and the sundries store closed.
A YEAR after his mother’s death, Steiner began refitting the store as a repository for his vast sports collection and soon opened it to the public.
“It’s not open any particular hours,” he said, and visitors often come on invitation. “A lot of people like to stop by downtown to see our courthouse and when I see someone on the street I don’t recognize I invite them in.”
He encourages others to come during treks to the multitude of games he attends, mostly basketball, locally and in metropolitan arenas. He’s a basketball junkie, likes to track high school recruits and goes where the big boys play. In a few weeks he will be in Springfield for a tournament sponsored by Bass Pro that will feature some of the top high school players in the nation.
Steiner also journeys often to Kansas University and isn’t bashful about introducing himself to coaches and players, including those he remembers from years ago.
He still cuts hair in Iola a couple of days most weeks and patter with customers seldom strays far from sports, which often leads to gifts of more items, occasionally something obscure and not often seen.
“I like for people to come by and see what I have, especially when it’s something that involves them,” Steiner said, either individually or through association with a team or a community. They, in turn, very often add to his mental catalog with information or folklore that Steiner adds to his recitations, which flow with the slightest provocation.
Step in to the store and Steiner takes on the appearance of the Energizer Bunny. He darts about peppering visitors with pictures and score cards and magazines that he thinks will pique their interest. He also has many of the store’s old fixtures, utensils and merchandise on display, and enjoys sharing them about as much as he does the sports items.
“See that malt (mixing) machine that can make five at a time? A lot of people have asked to buy it,” Steiner said, as well as pieces for the store’s antique tin ceiling. “There are a couple of gargoyles in the ceiling’s corners that are really popular.”
None is for sale. Nor is any of sports memorabilia.
“Maybe when I’m dead and gone it’ll get sold, but not now,” he said.
If he has a favorite, it is a series of five large limited edition prints illustrating five decades of the NCAA that wife Linda surprised him with for his last birthday.
Or maybe, he added, it’s a large 100-year-old picture of his grandmother, in an antique frame.
Or maybe, there just isn’t a favorite; too much to choose from.
STEINER LONG has been a promoter of local sports figures, along with collecting artifacts that tell their stories.
Mike Peterson was a top-notch multi-sport performer at Yates Center High. He won many honors for his exploits on gridiron and basketball court, and was a two-year most valuable player when the Yates Center American Legion baseball team won state championships three years in a row.
Steiner figured he needed more recognition than local papers could give. He wrote to Sports Illustrated hoping the magazine would include a couple of sentences in its “Faces in the Crowd” column.
What he wrote had far greater impact. SI sent a reporter and photographer to Yates Center and when the Aug. 9, 1971, issue hit newsstands, a photo of Peterson was on the cover beside a headline that called him “The Greatest Athlete in Yates Center, Kansas.” Inside was a full-blown story and more photos.
Steiner caught some grief from “about 20 others who thought they were the greatest athlete in Yates Center, but Mike was deserving,” he said.
In November 2001 the Wichita Eagle had a follow-up marking the 30th anniversary of Peterson’s national exposure that included interviews with the Steiners boys, Jack and Bill, who has a barber shop in Yates Center. Today, Peterson works in Olathe for a sports equipment company.
STEINER HAS no idea how much he has accumulated, and has no intention of taking weeks – probably months – to catalog it.
“There are boxes that I haven’t unpacked,” and the only room left in the good-sized store is to pile new things on top of old.
“If I were to win the lottery, I’d buy the store next door, cut a door in the wall and expand,” he mused.
It’s not the value of what he has – most of which is sentimental – that causes Steiner to spend so much time at the store, arranging, rearranging and inviting passersby in so he can share.
It is the love of sports that drives him, just as it did nearly 60 years ago when he unwrapped his first package of bubble gum and found inside a vivid color picture of his favorite baseball player.
