Donna Childers Suttle’s passion for all things Ashland Tomcat is well established.

She has been a mega-fundraiser for the razing and rebuild of Putnam Stadium, a place she holds dear to her heart, and she has done so much behind the scenes for Tomcat athletics that the team mascot should blush when he’s around her.

It was Donna who raised the money to rebuild the trophy cases inside Anderson gym. It was Donna who during the past Christmas season wrapped presents at Corbie’s three to four days a week – for any sized donation to Putnam Stadium. She works tirelessly if it’s connected with the Tomcat name on it. Cut her and maroon would come gushing out.

Donna also saved a scholarship that was going to Ashland Tomcat basketball players for more than 30 years around 2000 with a public plea. Without her efforts, there would be no Joe Franklin Memorial Scholarship and a part of Tomcat history would have gone with it. The scholarship was going bust and Donna would have none of it. She contacted me and we put together a story for the newspaper about the Franklin scholarship’s dire need for money and why it was important. The donations began rolling back in and it has been running strong ever since, with $500 donated just the other day. (Contributions to the scholarship are always appreciated).

Here’s something you might not have known: When the scholarship was fading in the late 1990s, with not enough funds to give the scholarship, it was Donna and husband Jeff and the late David Payne who supplied the funding to keep it going.

It has honored more than 50 Tomcat players over the years with scholarships between $500 and $1,000. The first one was issued to Greg Salyer in 1968. It is given to seniors who are of high character first and foremost. It’s not decided on statistics but on life superlatives. It’s the best honor any Tomcat senior basketball player can receive.

There were a lot of reasons for Donna to do what she could to save the scholarship. For one, the memorial scholarship is one of the longest running in the state, going on now for 52 years. For another, it’s a Tomcat scholarship, and we know what that means to her. But, most importantly, she was a friend of Joe Franklin, a Tomcat basketball player who tragically died in a car wreck the day the Ashland Tomcats won the 1967 state football championship. Donna, a 1970 Ashland grad, was a sophomore in the fall of ’67 and she knew the handsome 16-year-old well. A lot of the girls had crushes on him (not saying Donna did or didn’t).

Joe was a basketball player, and a good one, but he was much more. He was also the epitome of the All-American boy, squeaky clean, a member and active in youth activities at First Methodist (Chocolate) Church downtown, a great son and brother, and a one-of-a-kind athlete who put teammates first. He was on the football team as a sophomore but stepped away to concentrate on basketball, his best sport.

Franklin, three other players and a manager were traveling by car to a scrimmage game in Frankfort the day of the football championship. They were heading over to Louisville after the scrimmage to watch the Tomcats hopefully win a title.

But a tragic morning accident just past Morehead ended that and took the life of Franklin while severely injuring one other passenger. It was a tragedy of epic proportions for the Ashland community.

I was a 10-year-old Tomcat fan who traveled to Louisville that day with my brother and father to watch Ashland play Elizabethtown. The dark and dreary gray day always stuck with me, so much so that in 2012 I wrote a book about it, Tragedy and Triumph, that told the story of the 1967 season that will be forever linked to Joe Franklin’s death.

The football team, in its travel to the game that night, stopped in Mt. Sterling for a planned rest stop. When they parked, an Ashland man pecked on the window of the rented bus — Ashland Independent Schools didn’t have school buses at the time – and shared some startling news about the accident with Tomcat coach Jake Hallum.

Hallum gathered his assistants and collectively decided they wouldn’t tell the team until after the game. Typically, the state finals were played at University of Kentucky’s Stoll Field. This particular season, Kentucky and Tennessee scheduled a late game and thus the field was unavailable for the high school event.

It was payed at the Louisville Fairgrounds, which had bleachers on only one side of the field. Ashland’s bench was on the vacant side, so no fans could reach the field to inform the players of the tragic event that had transpired earlier.

Many of the band members, cheerleaders and fans in the stands heard the news in various ways before kickoff. The team still knew nothing about it.

Ashland rolled to a 19-0 halftime lead before hanging on to beat Elizabethtown 19-14 for the first official football state championship in school history. After some celebration in the locker room, Hallum informed the team about Franklin and another classmate who was injured badly in the accident.

On their way home the next day, Hallum called co-captains Paul Hill and John Radjunas to the front of the bus around Grayson. He told the guys he didn’t think they should experience their normal celebration, which included a fire truck ride, upon arriving home out of respect for the Franklin family. So they didn’t.

The ’67 Tomcats never got their fire truck ride. The bus zoomed past an awaiting crowd on U.S. 60, pulled in front of the school gym and everybody filed out. They never celebrated the championship, even days later, and that was the impetus behind the book – it would be their firetruck ride.

Donna had a book signing for me at her florist shop, complete with a firetruck from the Ashland Fire Department. As the players jumped up on the truck to pose for a photograph, they were transported back 40 years ago with the smiles of boys 16 to 18 years old celebrating a championship season.

It was a fitting way to complete the story.

Ashland was one game from a perfect season in 1961.

Those Tomcats, still considered one of the greatest teams in Sweet 16 history, will celebrate a 60^th anniversary next March.

It was an amazing team with future college stars all around, including Rupp’s Runt Larry Conley, who was a junior on that Tomcat team who helped take them back to the state finals in 1962. He was a stud, an all-around player with a high basketball IQ and a determination to win that inside him like fire. He could be summed up in one word: winner.

But he wasn’t alone. It was a team of stars: Harold Sergent (Morehead), Gene Smith (Cincinnati), Bob Hilton (West Point) and Steve Cram (LSU). Dale Sexton, Larry Fairchild and Jerry Daniel completed the top eight.

Taskmaster coach Bob Wright was the architect of an Ashland team that finished 36-1 with that one blemish. They were so close to perfection.

Just how dominant? Only one of the 36 victories was less than double figures – 63-59 over Maysville in a January home game – and 20 of the wins came with margins of 20 or more.

By contract, so far the 30-0 Tomcats of 2019-2020 had eight games of less than 10-point margin and six of those by less than five, including 66-65 over Mason County and 57-54 over West Carter on a 60-foot bomb at the buzzer. Forty percent (12) of their wins have come by 20 or more.

The 1961 Tomcats rattled off 21 victories to begin the season including clobbering favored and top-ranked Louisville Seneca 79-50 in the championship game of the Ashland Invitational Tournament. A crowd of 1,561 watched the game that was played in what is now Alumni Gym on Lexington Avenue.

Can you even imagine? The gymnasium seated only 800 so that announced total seems a little inflated. But from what those who say they saw the game reflect, there was hardly room to breathe. Bill Lynch said he and his brother, Bobby, went to the AIT with his father who found a seat. They were relegated to the top of the bleachers, leaning against those red-hot radiated heaters.

With everybody stuffed inside, they would open the large windows in the top of the gym and let cool winter air flow down. It had to be a sight to behold!

Seneca was ranked No. 1 in the UPI (United Press International) and the Tomcats were ranked No. 2. It was supposed to be a battle to the end but turned into a runaway.

Conley scored 28, a season-high for him, but more importantly fouled out George Unseld and others by using a shot fake that Dean Church, a former Tomcat before him, had taught him. It was an up-and-under move after the shot fake and Unseld bit on it every time.

Seneca was stunned and mad. They would get another crack at the Tomcats in the Sweet 16.

The AIT also included Wheelwright, the eventual 15^th Region champions, and Ashland hammered them in the semifinals 79-62 as Sergent scored 28 this time around.

Wheelwright, like Seneca, would get a rematch with the Tomcats in the state tournament.

Ashland basketball was the talk of town (sound familiar?) and rolling along with a 21-0 record. They looked unbeatable and were maybe feeling a little too good about themselves.

On a cold February night in Morehead, the Tomcats felt the sting of defeat. Lexington Lafayette won 59-58. It was shocking to watch the Lafayette fans storm the floor like they’d won the state championship. The perfect season was over.

Coach Wright, some say, allowed the Tomcats to lose. He didn’t substitute much and even left Sexton, who was sulking before the game, out of the game completely. Sexton had decided he’d go to the end of the bench before the game and when Wright needed him, he could just come and get him. But he never did. Sexton said he learned his lesson, too, and never sat at the end of the bench again.

Conley fouled out and then Smith, which is when momentum shifted. Ashland was leading 52-47 at the time. The Tomcats scored only once in five possessions over the last 2½ minutes, a one-hander by Cram with 1:25 remaining that put them ahead 58-57. Lafayette scored with under a minute to play for a 59-58 lead and Ashland missed a hurried jumper at the end. Jerry Daniel rebounded the miss and laid it back in but it was clearly after the buzzer. The unthinkable had happened.

The Generals won because they were able to handle Ashland’s devastating zone trap and because the Tomcats were uncharacteristically off their game.

Wright told me during an interview for the book Teamwork, “We just didn’t play. Seventeen-year-olds get overconfident. Sometimes, as a coach, you let things happen because you have to learn instead of me telling them. What they learned was much better than me telling them.”

Ashland was shocked by the defeat and many of them cried all the way home from Morehead. But the Tomcats also circled the wagons and said it would never happen again.

Wright said the loss was good for the team, that “we might have lost a game that really meant something” down the road. “In all probability, that would have happened. I don’t know if I allowed (the loss) or not.”

Ashland poured it on in the next four games prior to the postseason winning by margins of 33, 13, 40 and 18.

The 64^th District was much the same with wins of 34, 38 and 37. Then they scored 95, 97 and 90 in the three regional tournament victories. In the semifinals against Grayson they outrebounded the Yellowjackets by an astounding 87-21 during a 97-49 victory. Ashland defeated Clark County 90-73 in the championship as Conley collected 27 points and 23 rebounds in a remarkable performance.

It was more double-figure wins in the Sweet 16 with margins of 17 (Covington Grant), 26 (rematch with Seneca), 11 (rematch with Wheelwright) and then 69-50 over Lexington Dunbar in the championship game.

The stomped on the gas pedal after the loss to Lafayette, leaving every opponent in their wake, wiping away the bitter taste of defeat by bringing home the state championship trophy in one of the most dominating performances in Sweet 16 history.