November 10 , 2017
Saint Gabriel's basketball recalled by Joe Farley in new book "Trumpet Call to Victory"
HAZLETON, PA – Sunbury Press has released Trumpet Call to Victory: The Final Years of Hazleton Saint Gabriel's Basketball by Joe Farley. About the Book: In the spirit of the movie Hoosiers, Trumpet Call to Victory tells the story of a small parochial high school located in the Pennsylvania coalfields that reached the summit of basketball glory in the late 1960s. Glorious victories and heartbreaking defeats are chronicled on Saint Gabriel’s path to capturing multiple state championships. Unsung heroes and scholastic superstars take center stage during what, in the last five years of the school’s existence, can only be described as a ‘golden age.' The feats of the greatest player in the region’s history are chronicled as is the beginning of a career for a coach who arranged to have a young Bobby Knight address his state championship team at the school’s sports banquet. That coach, Richard “Digger” Phelps, recently recalled his first head coaching job in a tweet which read, “St. Gabes was my first step to ND. They made it happen.” ABOUT THE AUTHOR JOE FARLEY was born and raised in Hazleton, Pennsylvania. He was a member of the last class to graduate from Hazleton Saint Gabriel’s High School where he demonstrated his academic prowess by graduating thirty-seventh in his class of forty. While attending Saint Gabriel’s, Mr. Farley was the starting point guard on the school’s 1970 state championship basketball team. He then attended Bloomsburg State University where, after four dimly remembered years, he graduated with a degree in education. In 1975 Mr. Farley began a 35-year career working for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. After his retirement in 2010, he began work on the Keystone Tombstone series with his co-author Joe Farrell. To date, there are thirteen volumes in that series. Farley and Farrell also authored Gotham Graves volumes one and two. Mr. Farley also penned Song Poems in Search of Music, which was released in 2014. He and his wife Sharon reside in New Cumberland, Pennsylvania. They have three children.