Enos Martin grew up in Selinsgrove, Snyder County.

He didn’t know anything about the history of Lehigh Valley sports until he moved here to work at PPL and joined the Allentown Jaycees, an organization that for years ran the LARC Basketball Classic and later the Via All-Star Basketball Classic.

“I didn’t know much about anything,” Martin said. “I think it was 1979 when I joined the Jaycees through Joe Bierman. I played fastpitch softball with him, and he got me involved with the LARC Classic and assigned me to the Hall of Fame selection committee. And I started doing research on who should be in the Hall of Fame.”

Martin said he would walk on his lunch break from his job at PP&L to the Allentown Public Library to look at the microfilm,

“I spent hours and hours looking at the microfilm; how many hours I could never count,” he said. “I would go there just to research the names of those who made significant contributions to high school basketball. I would do it to create a list for the selection committee to pick candidates for the Hall of Fame. Prior to that, it was just guys like Milo Sewards, Bob Mushrush and Mike Koury going into a room and it was kind of like the selection of the Pope with the white smoke coming out. They would have five names and that would be it.”

Martin wanted to dig deeper for more names, and that’s how he began his visits to the library, going over past basketball stories and box scores.

“It was a laborious task, but as I did the research on the Hall of Fame candidates, I found some stuff that might make for a good book at some point,” Martin said. “That kind of evolved into what I have today.”

And that is a 580-page book called “Fifty Years of Turmoil and Titles: A History of the Eastern Pennsylvania Basketball Interscholastic Basketball League 1926-1975.”

It is the 50th anniversary of the end of what was primarily known as the East Penn League. The following year, the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference began, and that continued until 1997 when that turmoil referenced in Martin’s book title rose and caused a breakup of the league as several teams left for the Mountain Valley Conference.

After four years, many of the schools came back together again to form the Lehigh Valley Conference, and since the fall of 2014 we’ve had the new version of the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference, which is sometimes called the EPC18 because there are 18 schools involved.

But Martin’s book details a very different time in the history of area high school sports when there was much more hometown pride in each school, and the rivalries were often white-hot in intensity.

Martin’s book focuses solely on basketball, starting with the first EPL games on December 18, 1925, on the courts of Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton high schools. The other three teams in the six-team league were Coatesville, Pottstown and Pottsville.

The only three to maintain their membership in the league for all 50 years were Bethlehem, Easton and Pottsville. Allentown, later known as Allen after Dieruff came into existence, would have been a fourth school involved for all 50 years except for the fact that the PIAA penalized the Canaries for using ineligible players in 1946 and ’47. Not only were two state titles vacated due to the infraction, but Allentown was kicked out of the league for three years before being reinstated in 1951.

Allentown/Allen won the most games in league history, 444, while Bethlehem/Liberty played the most games, 648, and won 402. The team with the best winning percentage? Dieruff, which won 213 of 293 games for a 72.7% winning mark.

Among the other schools who participated in the league at various points were Doylestown, Hazleton, Mahanoy City, Phillipsburg and Tamaqua.

Martin’s book has each team’s record against each other EPL member. Dieruff, for example, was 18-0 against Bethlehem Catholic and 24-0 against Phillipsburg.

Martin’s book also details what local basketball looked like prior to the league’s start. Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton competed in the Lehigh Valley League from 1921-25. That league included Catasauqua, Northampton, Palmerton, Slatington and Tamaqua.

According to the book, the games were often contentious. On Feb. 10, 2022, Martin writes: “Allentown defeated Slatington 22-12 at Slatington. Boisterous Slatington fans charged the referee for scaling the wall.”

Much later during the heated Hazleton and Allentown rivalry, a scuffle broke out.

“The intensity of the competition and the rivalries were what caught me by surprise,” Martin said. “Especially with Allentown and Hazleton, there was such hatred and so many things that occurred over the years were mind-boggling. There was one situation, I think it was the 1950s, where Hazleton and Allentown were playing, and one of the Allentown players got fouled. At one point, Hazleton coach Frank Serany ran on to the court, and Milo Sewards ran on the court behind him, and the next thing you know they were on the ground wrestling. Those are some of the things that fascinated me.”

That’s just one of hundreds of interesting tidbits that Martin included among the game recaps he has from each EPL season.

He also remembered a situation where too many tickets were printed for a game and that produced an overflow crowd.

“It was at Hazleton in the 1930s when they used a plate for a printer to print up tickets for a big game and the printer left it out and some boys who were helping him out came in and saw the plate he used and they decided to print a couple of hundred extra tickets and they sold them,” Martin said. “But the boys didn’t reset the counter on the number of tickets, and the people taking the tickets figured out that the numbers they were seeing were well beyond the tickets that should have been printed for the game. So they caught on and stopped letting them in, but there were more people there than seats.”

Martin details all of the great players, coaches, and teams, including legends such as Allentown’s Bob Heffner and Bethlehem’s Billy Packer, Al Senavitis and Pete Carril, Central Catholic’s Jeff McGeehin and Dieruff’s Bob Riedy, Skip Kintz and Ross Moore. It includes all of the postseason games as well.

He also discovered that many of the league championship games were played at places like the Penn Palestra and Convention Hall in Philadelphia because the demand for tickets was so great.

“It was incredible,” he said. “When I got into this, I just never imagined all of the different little gems I would find. The format is set up to do each season by year and by week, and for each game, I would get the writeup from The Morning Call or the Hazleton Standard-Speaker and see what was written in the story on the game and then just do a little capsule of it myself,” Martin said. “It took me a long time to put this together, but I am glad I did it.”

Martin said the book is available on Amazon, and he will sell it at the upcoming Lehigh Valley Old-Time Athletes and Friends Reunion at the Agri-Plex at the Allentown Fairgrounds on June 1, which is scheduled to run from noon to 5 p.m.

He said all profits from the book, which sells for $25, will be given to the Kiwanis Club of Allentown for their programs and charities. To order a copy directly from Martin, call him at 610-509-5918 or email him at us4martins@yahoo.com.