Fifty-two years ago today, in a tiny Appalachian gym, a scrawny 17-year old set a national record that brought him a lot of pride and a little bit of shame.

The boy was Danny Heater, then a senior at Burnsville High School in central West Virginia. Like many coal country kids, Heater came from nothing. His dad, a miner, was furloughed repeatedly by different bosses at the local mines. One day during his junior year, the family’s apartment (and the poorly-constructed department store on which it sat) burned to the ground, incinerating everything they owned except the clothes on their backs. The Heaters could barely afford food, much less put money into a college fund.

By most appearances, their son didn’t look like university material anyway. Weighing just 153 pounds and sporting a cropped haircut and toothy grin, a reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette later described Danny as “a shy, clumsy kid who ... once broke his wrists running into a wall at the gym.” But “Shotgun,” as his classmates called him, was the best athlete at a school (enrollment 175) with an unassumingly talented basketball team. His senior year, the squad rattled off wins in 17 of its first 18 games, scoring 99.5 points per contest. An inside-outside threat who could knock down shots from the perimeter and dunk when slashing to the hoop, Heater was the primary offensive weapon. Head coach Jack Stalnaker was convinced that his shooting guard could secure a Division 1 scholarship, and get out of Burnsville, if a big-time college scout would ever swing through their isolated town to watch him play.*

On January 26, Stalnaker devised a controversial gameplan to raise the profile of his unheralded star. His club was scheduled to host Widen, a school that taught just 25 boys in the entire top four grades and that Burnsville had torched by 50 earlier in the season. Burnsville, in other words, could score at will. And Stalnaker saw no reason why Danny shouldn’t take every one of his team’s shots, all night long, until he broke the state’s single-game scoring record of 74 points, an achievement the newspapers in nearby Morgantown and Charleston would have to cover.

Heater’s teammates loved the idea, but the tactic made the humble star anxious. On the first several possessions, he didn’t look for his shot once, riffling passes across the court whenever the ball landed in his hands. Stalnaker called a timeout to reiterate his strategy: his boys were to force turnovers by running a full-court press and feed Heater the basketball whenever they could. After some additional cajoling, plus individual promises from each Burnsville player that he would not be bothered by the selfish display, their star finally bought in.

In front of a standing-room crowd of 200** and on a floor 20 feet shorter than regulation size, Heater started hoisting up shots. And he didn’t stop. Because his side was applying so much defensive pressure, he got plenty of easy buckets around the rim. By halftime, Heater had tallied 53 points, and a neighbor ran to his house to alert his family, who had stayed at home, confident their son would play just one quarter against hapless Widen. His sister raced to the gym in time to watch Danny blow past the state record early in the second half, a feat that drew booming cheers from the Burnsville faithful. Stalnaker called timeout to take Heater out of the game, but his own team sensed the national record of 120 points, set eight years before in Ohio, was within reach. They convinced their coach to stay the course. Over the final 10 minutes, Heater dropped in another 55 points, though the hometown scorekeeper -- who needed help from the timer because of the ridiculous tempo -- counted two extra baskets. ("I feel sure our guys were right,” Stalnaker later told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (January 5, 1997). “They had about 40 years' experience.”) Widen’s head coach Robert Stover, meanwhile, complained two days later to the Charleston Daily Mail that the clock “ran about three minutes extra." Minor discrepancies aside, it was beyond doubt that Heater had recorded one of the most ludicrous lines in basketball history: 32 minutes, 135 points on 53 of 70 field goals and 29 of 41 free throws, 32 rebounds, and seven assists. His squad won 173-43. “It didn't feel like high school history,” Paul Hendrickson wrote in his classic 1991 retrospective for the Washington Post, “it felt like raw, open slaughter.”

Stover, not surprisingly, was pissed about the outcome. "If I hadn't been a young coach and afraid of getting suspended, I would have taken my kids off the floor at halftime," he admitted to the Post-Gazette. "It was a farce." Even in the face of criticism from local reporters, Stalnaker defended his decision. “I don't believe in running up scores,” he said in his post-game interview. “But we decided in advance that we had to do something to get him [Heater] some publicity.” Heater, on the other hand, dealt with conflicting emotions. "I was happy and sad at the same time,” he told another reporter from the Post-Gazette (January 23, 2000). “I was embarrassed. I wasn't raised that way to embarrass people."

As silly as it was, Stalnaker’s plan worked. Once news spread about the scoring outburst, a scout from powerhouse West Virginia University -- which had made it all the way to the NCAA title game the previous season, thanks to the play of superstar Jerry West -- scheduled an appointment to watch Danny play the following week. But the following night, Heater came down awkwardly from a jump ball and twisted his ankle. By week’s end, the pain had not subsided. And when the Mountaineer scout visited Burnsville, Heater could barely jump and had trouble moving laterally. He poured in 27 points on his gimp leg, but it wasn’t enough to secure a roster spot at his state’s best program. The final words handed down from Morgantown? “Boy was slow.”

There is an interesting coda to Danny’s story. While his chance to suit up for the in-state power vanished, a retired state senator from Virginia with a keen eye for out-of-state talent offered to pay Heater’s tuition and housing costs if he came to play for the University of Richmond. A local plumbing company kicked in $26 so Danny could buy two shirts and two pairs of jeans, and in the winter of 1961, Heater packed up what few belongings he owned and traveled to the old Confederate capital. It was the hooper’s first time away from Burnsville, and it did not go well. Because he arrived at the start of the second semester, the only uniform the team had left was three sizes too big. That was an apt metaphor for Heater’s entire experience in the mid-size city, a place where he never felt comfortable. "I didn't know basic things like Room 201 means a classroom on the second floor,” he joked to Hendrickson years later. “I wasn't stupid, I was just naive." He played in five games, never more than 10 minutes, "and was so homesick I couldn't stand it." After six weeks, he moved back to Appalachia and eventually found a job loading bags and taking tickets for Pan Am Airlines, where he worked for 39 years before retiring in 2005.

Since that cold night in West Virginia, roughly 26 million young men at the high school level have stepped onto the hardwood. Only 10 of them have posted over 100 points in one contest, and nobody has scored more than 110. It’s possible, even likely, that Heater’s record will never be broken. Yet it was Stalnaker, the mastermind behind the outrageous performance, who later came to regret the experiment entirely. “It was a real stupid thing to do," he said in his 1997 interview with the Post-Gazette. "I'm sure it hurt the kids we played, and it went against everything we try to teach kids - not to humiliate an opponent, not to run up the score. I still feel badly about it."

*If only they could make a mixtape.
*“The crowd,” according to the Washington Post story, “was ganged four and five deep in the stairwells; was pressed against the sweating concrete walls; was leaning down from the balcony, which really wasn't a balcony at all, just an open hallway leading to classrooms.”  

Next summer, fans of New York City’s intimate and historic Big Apple Circus will bid adieu to Barry Lubin and his iconic alter ego, Grandma. In her hallmark black sneakers and gaudy pearls, the androgynous clown has headlined the Lincoln Center spectacle for 30 seasons, charming circus-goers with a combination of “feistiness, mousiness, acrobatic grace, [and] prankishness.” Lubin isn’t retiring the character; he’s planning to take Grandma across the pond and unleash her anarchic streak in front of more adventurous (and savvy) European audiences. It’s a bold, albeit understandable move for a 59-year-old performer hoping to stretch his creative limits and broaden his fan base during the twilight of his storied career, which already includes induction into the International Clown Hall of Fame, one of just 67 clowns to receive that honor.

Lubin (class of 1974) honed his craft at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Clown College, an influential institution with a badly misunderstood popular reputation. When I think of “clown college,” my mind digs up images of the classic "Homie the Clown" episode of “The Simpsons,” in which Homer enrolls in Krusty’s makeshift training program and subsequently losses his polka dot pants riding a tiny bicycle. On the contrary, Ringling's Florida-based enterprise was one of the most selective and intense performing arts schools in the nation.

The college opened in the late 1960s after Irvin Feld, the entrepreneurial owner and producer of Ringling Brothers, realized that his cast of jesters was aging rapidly. Instead of spending resources scouring the country for new talent, he decided to train a fresh generation right in his own backyard. The sessions spanned 13 weeks initially and tuition (roughly $10,000 per student) was entirely free. Not surprisingly, the competition for entry was fierce; psychologists and admissions officers waded through extensive personality questionnaires -- “What has given you pleasure during the past year?” -- and auditions to identify a small group of performers with the most promise. In just the second year, 500 would-be clowns applied for 29 spots. By 1989, the ringmasters received 2,100 CVs for just 56 open slots, a matriculation rate (2.67 percent) on par with most Ivy League universities.

The coursework was just as intense as the admissions process. One graduate, speaking to the Jerusalem Post in 1989, described it as “a gruelling round-the-clock regimen of juggling, stilt-walking, pie-throwing, clown psychology, makeup, and lessons in how to spit water and deal with crowds.” Unicycling, improvisation, and daring acrobatics were also central to the curriculum. And meticulous instructors like Glen Little reinforced a strict clown code of honor, an unwritten pact that ensured clowns were always dressed in full costume in a professional setting and did not engage in any “un-clownlike behavior.” “It’s not like summer camp, I can guarantee you,” the school’s director, Steve Smith, told the Chicago Tribune in 1989. “We’ll put 56 people in a pressure cooker ... so we don`t need any prima donnas.”

Of the Ringling students who survived, a select number of graduates were offered one-year contracts with the troupe. These jobs were equally prestigious and grinding; for a tiny salary, clowns crisscrossed the country on trains, performing 13 shows each week for 11 straight months. Other alumni entered different entertainment venues entirely. Penn Jillette, actor David Strathairn (best known for his portrayal of Edward Murrow in Goodnight and Good Luck), and “Jackass” veteran Steve-O all earned diplomas from the American Mecca of clowning. All saw value in the professional skills many of their friends and family wrote off as foolish or childish. From a 1979 Washington Post piece:

“Joining the circus is not as far-fetched as some people think," [clown college hopeful Jack Tobin] said. Tobin drives a forklift for a brick company sometimes. During his one-semester stint in school he spent his time in the library reading magic books. "It's the same as trying to become a chemist or anything else," he said. People say to me, 'what are you gonna fall back on? What are you gonna do if it doesn't work?'" He shrugged and laughed a little. "I don't know. What the heck? What is anyone gonna do if whatever else they've got falls through?"

After training 1,5000 students and spawning replica schools across the nation, Ringling’s clown college officially closed its doors in 1998, just shy of its 30th anniversary. When it was shuttered, a spokesperson for the circus told the Las Vegas Review Journal that “the number of college programs and workshops nationwide that teach clowning basics have rendered the original Clown College unnecessary.” These days, entertainers who want a job with the Greatest Show on Earth need only send a portfolio, head shots, and a performance DVD to company headquarters for consideration. To get a call back, though, they still need to be damn funny.

There was a time in Alexander Graham Bell’s life, before he was awarded the first patent for the telephone, when he worried about paying the bills. Like scores of freelance entrepreneurs who succeed him, the inventor was forced to pair his creative work with a job that provided a modicum of financial stability. Bell choose deaf education.

That decision was not as random as it initially appears. Both Bell’s mother and his eventual wife were deaf, and his father was a renowned researcher and teacher of speech and elocution who developed a writing system -- Visible Speech -- he thought could help deaf students learn spoken language. The younger Bell went to Boston in 1871 to train teachers in his father’s methods and was quickly hooked. “My interest in the Deaf is to be a life-long thing with me,” he wrote in a letter to his wife. “I see so much to be done, and so few to do it.”

Bell’s pedagogy, however, proved controversial. The inventor was a proponent of Oralism, which restricts children’s use of sign language in favor of lip reading and breathing techniques that approximate verbal speech. Roughly analogous to the contemporary “English-only movement,” Oralists like Bell considered American Sign Language “foreign” and a barrier to the full integration of deaf youth into American life.

Manualists saw both practical and cultural problems with Bell’s approach. For starters, lip reading is incredibly difficult; only about 40 percent of sounds in the English language are distinguishable by sight. When students struggle to pick up the practice quickly, it leaves less time for actual academic studies. And while Bell considered deafness a disability to be overcome, most folks in the Deaf community viewed their inability to hear only as a difference in identity, one in which the use of sign language is central.

Bell didn’t do his side any favors when he incorporated into this legitimate debate his theories about Eugenics. In 1884, he published a loony paper  -- “Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race” -- that characterized the formation of deaf clubs and the possibility of deaf marriage as “a great calamity” for the nation. If ASL and deaf teachers were removed from the classroom, Bell argued, America would not dilute its stock.

While those charming theories were eventually discredited, Bell’s oralist legacy lives on through the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, a non-profit organization (initially financed by profits from the Graphophone) that advocates in favor of spoken language and hearing technology for deaf kids. In the end, it was Bell’s creative inventions that supported his forays into the world of education.

Few Americans have done more over the past half-century to advance civil rights than Jack Greenberg. Now a professor of law at Columbia University, Greenberg was a member of the small legal team that successfully argued Brown v. Board of Education, the monumental 1954 decision that explicitly outlawed de jure racial segregation of public education facilities. He later succeeded his colleague Thurgood Marshall as director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, a position he held from 1961 to 1984 and that afforded him the opportunity to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court in 40 separate anti-discrimination cases. In his spare time, he helped establish Human Rights Watch and the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund. And now, at the age of 86, he’s waging a new fight on behalf of an oppressed population halfway around the world: Eastern European Romani schoolchildren.

It’s difficult to comprehend the human indignities visited upon the Roma (more commonly known by the pejorative descriptor “Gypsies”) since the ethnic group migrated to Europe from northern India in the 14th century. Enslaved for 500 years and then butchered by Hitler (an estimated 1.5 million perished in Nazi death camps), most Romani who survived the Holocaust fell under Soviet control, where they were provided low-skill jobs and housing but not the tools necessary to thrive in a market economy. When the wall came down, prosperity did not follow; the roughly 10 million Roma who still make their home in Eastern Europe live in decrepit buildings where plumbing and electricity are scarce, are largely dependent on government aid for survival, and fare poorly on every social welfare measure. What’s worse, only 20 percent of Roma have finished primary schooling, and those that have did so in intensely segregated institutions. Aid workers have likened the situation to “tacit apartheid.” And absent political reforms, the future looks endlessly bleak.

In 2003, Roma leaders serious about breaking their population’s cycle of deprivation enlisted Greenberg to help “uncover the reality of school segregation” in the region. After seven years of research, and several trips to Eastern Europe, the veteran lawyer published his fascinating findings in the Columbia Law Review last May. Roma activists have already secured some impressive legal victories, he observed, most notably a 2007 decision by the European Court of Human Rights deriding the disproportionate and dubious placement of Roma kids in “special education” schools. But those rulings haven’t led to the implementation of substantive integration policies. “National governments have committed to the European Union that they will integrate” Greenberg wrote, “but for almost a decade they have done little but pass laws that remain unenforced, conduct studies that provide little usable data, and turn desegregation over to NGOs on an ad hoc basis.”

In his article, Greenberg lists several proposals European bodies could enact to help correct the injustice: the EU could hire an Inspector General to collect and distribute information about the scale of the problem, for instance, and make preschool available to all Romani youth. Most importantly, though, Greenberg compels Roma citizens to launch their own civil rights movement, one that “makes clear, and does so forcefully, that they cannot continue to tolerate subordination.” On that front, the desegregation crusader is less sanguine; spread across multiple countries, Romani lack a shared church, social infrastructure, or even language from which to organize.

Solving this humanitarian crisis, in other words, will be no easy task. But the social and economic benefits of integration are obvious. And the leaders across the Atlantic are consulting with the right guy.