Editor’s note: This is one of a continuing online series of profiles of the more than 12,000 Hoosiers who have died from COVID-19. The stories are from 12 Indiana newspapers, including The Republic, who collaborated to create the collection to highlight the tremendous loss that the pandemic has created. The series appears daily at therepublic.com.
Name: William ‘Bo’ Crain
City/Town: Indianapolis
Age: 81
Died: May 7
It was more than 60 years ago, but Ray Satterfield still remembers that booming voice in the Shortridge High School gym.
Basketball coach Cleon Reynolds had his team run 20 laps at the close of a practice during the 1958-59 season. Satterfield, a junior, and buddy Lou Williams, another junior, decided they would all-out sprint the final two laps. That was the plan, at least.
“Ten more!” a voice called out from behind them.
Satterfield and Williams did not have to turn around to figure out where it came from. It was not Reynolds, but senior Bo Crain.
“Lou and I just looked at each other,” Satterfield said with a laugh. “We were incredulous. But there was nothing Bo would ever tell us to do that he wouldn’t do himself. He was our captain, our leader.”
William “Bo” Crain, 81, died May 7, a month after testing positive for COVID-19. He was rehabilitating from a heart issue when he tested positive, younger brother Clarence Crain said.
Bo Crain was born in Grenada, Mississippi, the oldest of seven children to Jacob and Veronica Crain, but spent the majority of his life in Indianapolis after moving from Mississippi as an 8-year-old in 1947. He excelled in baseball and basketball at Shortridge, where he was named to the prestigious Indiana All-Stars team as a senior in 1959.
Shortridge was ranked third in the state that season entering the sectional with a balanced, veteran team. Crain, at 6-2 and 175 pounds, anchored the front line. Gerry Williams, who would go on to star at Butler in basketball and track and field, was a 5-9 senior guard and second in scoring to Crain.
“He was Batman and I was Robin,” said Williams, who set the state record with a 6-6 high jump as a senior. “Bo was tenacious. Some people talk about people who would run through a brick wall. That was Bo. Not me. I might jump over it. But we all followed his lead.”
Shortridge had the makings of a state championship team that year. But after beating rival Crispus Attucks twice during the regular season, Shortridge lost a 63-62 heartbreaker to the Tigers in the sectional semifinal in front of a sellout crowd at Hinkle Fieldhouse. Crain scored 21 points but it was not enough.
Attucks went on to win the state championship, its third in five years.
“I still haven’t gotten over it,” Satterfield said. “We had a great team. We were picked by many of the sportswriters to win state, but it’s hard to beat a team three times in one year, especially a team like Attucks.”
After high school, Crain went on to Weber College in Ogden, Utah, before transferring to the University of Utah after one year. He was an all-conference player in the Mountain States Athletic Conference, averaging 12.3 points and 7.5 rebounds as a junior in 1961-62 and was again the team’s leading scorer as a senior.
Crain was inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 2004.
Crain returned to Indianapolis after college and continued to play in leagues and games at the Dearborn Gym, the Fall Creek YMCA and the Dust Bowl. Clarence Crain, the youngest of the seven Crains and junior on the 1968 Shortridge state finalist team, remembers tagging along and watching his oldest brother play in some of those games.
“Sometimes they’d let me play with them,” Clarence Crain said. “Bo’s game was about hustle. He was fairly quick, but he had this mentality that nobody was going to outwork him. That’s what made him a great leader.”
That served Crain well as an adult. After returning to Indianapolis in the mid-1960s, he began a career at Chrysler Corporation that lasted until his retirement in 1994. But he went back to work as a security guard for Securitas, where he worked until a second retirement in 2018.
“He wasn’t going to stop working,” Clarence said. “That was the kind of mentality he took from sports.”
Crain is survived by his wife of 35 years, Marilyn (Morris), along with stepsons Charles and Andre Ervin, Tony Mason and stepdaughter Kathy Mason. Others left to mourn his passing are sisters Annie Cox, Rose Crain and Louise Crain, brothers Thomas and Clarence Crain. His parents and brother, Curtis Crain, preceded him in death.
Crain was involved in the community as a founding member of the Cosmo Knights social club, which developed scholarship programs for students. He was a member of the Holy Angels Catholic Church and a member of the Knights of Claver Council 109.
— Contributed by the Indianapolis Star
