The Pride of Price Hill: Cincinnati's West Side and the Elder Mystique

In The Dawn Of Queen City athletic time, what would become known all over Ohio as 'The Pit' was exactly that--a dusty cow pasture on Cincinnati's West Side adorned with a manhole on the 50-yard line. It was the only known playing field in Ohio where a manhole was the home field advantage, and its sewer-lid icon became a kind of trademark for the school's rough-and-ready working-class play. From that inauspicious beginning nearly eighty years ago was born one of the Midwest's most storied prep traditions: Elder High School athletics. In its steady procession of stellar teams and athletes, Elder became a West Side phenomena. Along the way, this all-boys parochial school, nestled in a residential corner of blue-collar Price Hill, acquired a following of loyalists found in no other school in Cincinnati, maybe in no other school anywhere. This is the mystique that created back-to-back basketball state titles, a cross country dynasty, an un-precedented eleven baseball championships, and a football team with a national ranking. Its football field was named by USA Today as one of the best places in America to watch high school football, and its graduates have populated programs from Division I all the way to the professional ranks. With over 250 photographs, The Pride of Price Hill is, finally, a story about an old-fashioned neighborhood--a neighborhood most of us wish we inhabited. Over 400 photographs.Bill Koch is the author of 'The Pride of Price Hill: Cincinnati's West Side and the Elder Mystique' with ISBN 9781882203864 and ISBN 1882203860.