When you think of high school, what fills your mind?
The older we get, it seems to me, those four years can become a comfort. Fading are the insecurities and fears. Brighter every year are the good memories. It’s all the more vivid for those who played or watched sports in high school, for those memories are not only more plentiful and vivid than classroom recollections but they are also inflated, untrustworthy, yes, but pleasing.
The ordinary becomes triumphant. Four points in that basketball game is now 26, including the winning shot at the buzzer. I have come to feel that such thinking is a defensive mechanism of sorts against sagging skin, gray or vanishing hair, bones that have begun to creak. The mirror tells one story. The past a kinder one.
Vincent Johnson is 51 years old and still going to high school — or many high schools as he works as a successful freelance photographer, shooting for the Tribune and other publications the games that teenagers play.
He takes photos of other things and events too, and lives in Bronzeville and has two sons: 16-year-old William, a student at Mount Carmel High School, and Alexander, at 12 still a couple of years away from his next academic stop. You can see their photos on the pages of their father’s spectacular book, “Illustrious: The Best High School Basketball Gyms in Illinois.”
Johnson grew up in Joliet and was a student at Joliet Catholic High School as it was transitioning from all-boys to coed with the 1990 merger with all-girls St. Francis Academy. He attended Joliet Junior College and studied psychology before transferring to Columbia College, determined to become a radio disc jockey. But having had his first camera in high school, he wound up taking photo classes and being inspired by such teachers as former Tribune shooter Charles Osgood and John White, the Sun-Times’ Pulitzer Prize winner.
Amid what was then an increasingly deflating print publishing realm, there were few full-time jobs, and so he began working in the software business but “never gave up my dream of becoming a working photographer.”
Freelance opportunities began to come his way and high school sports began to dominate that work over the last decade.
The concept for this book was seeded then and in some years he had a publishing deal with a large university press. As is often the case in the book business, the deal fell apart due to “creative differences” but, as Johnson says, “no hard feelings at all.” Spurred by the free time that was a result of the pandemic, he personally bankrolled the publishing of the book, fashioning it after his own aesthetic visions, starting with a printing of 2,000 copies (soon to be gone).
The book’s “Foreward” (misspelling intentional, get it?) is by the Sun-Times’ high school sports editor Michael O’Brien, in which he writes, “The best gyms, the most memorable, and the ones in this book are so much more (than utilitarian). They were built as basketball theaters, designed to put the game on a stage.”
Johnson writes in his very frank (and frankly inspiring) introduction in the book, that he was an underachiever in high school, “a child of divorced parents, who was a troublemaker at worst and acting out frustrations at best.”
And so. Off you’ll go on a surprisingly satisfying journey. There are 126 photos of 120 gymnasiums (Steinmetz College Prep on the Northwest Side, of all places, has three). Some will be familiar to those spread across the Tribune subscriber area —Hinsdale Central, St. Ignatius, Oak Park-River Forest, Marshall, DuSable, Lane Tech, Evanston Township — or who closely follow high school sports. But others will introduce you to locations that are as remote as Mars, many of them charming.
One such is in Brussels. Know where that is?
Of course you don’t because, as Johnson writes on some of the four pages devoted to its high school gym, “You’d have to be a completely kind of lost to end up in Brussels,” Johnson writes. “It’s the last town, on the last stretch of land of a peninsula carved out of the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers. … A statistical anomaly, this town of 116 is in Illinois’ third least-populated county.” In order for him and his cameras to get to the gym, north of St. Louis and named The Pit, “the best gym nobody has ever heard of,” they had to take a ferry boat.
Some of the other gyms have names too: Crater (Central High School in Clifton, Illinois), The Nest (Brown County High School), Pioneer Dome (St. Francis de Sales), Panther Pit (Quincy Notre Dame High School).
Some photos have people in them, some don’t. Each is accompanied by “Gym Shorts,” a list of quick facts such as year built, capacity, notable alums and such information as, in the case of Regina Dominican in Wilmette, “One of a handful of all-girls high schools left in the area” or, with Harrisburg, “Coolest press box in the state.”
Over the last couple of weeks, Johnson has been burning up miles across the state covering games and selling books. He tells me, “Some of the gyms are really inspiring. No, I don’t know how many miles I’ve driven. I’m not counting. But Illinois is a big state and I can see and feel that these gyms are places of pride in most communities and neighborhoods.”
In a sense he is capturing and has captured what might be snapshots of a vanishing America, as high school enrollments plummet across the land, small towns evaporate. In that sense, this is an essential document, though Johnson is not proselytizing. He’s on the high school beat, time enough later to get all serious.
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
