Editor’s note: This is the fifth in a six-part series chronicling the history of high school football in Warren County.

Disco music, bellbottoms, afros and leisure suits are just a few of the things people would love to forget about the 1970s.

For Warren County’s high school football fans, however, it was a decade they’ll remember forever.

It was a golden age for football in the county. Three of the area’s four high schools won a conference championship and the fourth, Porters Chapel Academy, went 22-7 from 1974-76.

Individual stars abounded on both sides of the ball. Heavy hitters like Vicksburg’s Mike Dottorey and Warren Central’s Mike Hudson lit up opponents on the defensive side, while running backs like St. Aloysius’ Mike Ray and PCA’s Earl Johnson lit up the scoreboard on offense.

Of the four 2,000-yard rushing seasons in Warren County since 1970, three came between 1974 and 1979. Four of the eight 300-yard rushing games in the county since 1923 occurred in the same span, and the all-time leading rushers at three of the county’s four high schools also fit their entire careers into those five years.

Vicksburg High quarterback Ernest Moore broke nearly every passing record there was, while Carl Blue, Leo Cage and Dale Erves helped Warren Central start a 35-year tradition of great running backs.

Joining them on the sidelines were a stellar group of coaches that included hall of famer Lum Wright, Houston Markham and St. Al greats Glenn Rhoads, Les Bumgarner and Joe Edwards.

&#8220We had them and we used them. I don’t know what it was,” said Wright, who won 125 games at WC from 1971-84. &#8220There was a wealth of talent.”

The &#8220modern era” of Warren County football also started in the 70s – specifically, in 1973.

That was the year when true integration began and Vicksburg High opened its doors as VHS. The building on Drummond Street had previously housed all-white Cooper High from 1959-71, and then South Vicksburg in 1971 and ‘72. The old Temple building served as North Vicksburg during the transition years, and it was hard for students to abandon their loyalties to Cooper and Temple.

&#8220I always considered myself a (Temple) Buccaneer, but then I had to catch myself and remember that I graduated from North Vicksburg,” said Ernest Young, who played defensive back at Temple and North Vicksburg from 1970-72. &#8220It was hard on us, because we had played our hearts out as Temple. Then the name was changed and we didn’t have anything to do about it.”

By 1973 integration was complete and white and black students finally left Cooper and Temple – or South and North Vicksburg – behind to join forces as Vicksburg High. On the football field, it was a perfect match.

Led by Moore’s passing and the play of wingback Michael Sweet, VHS ripped off 10 straight wins to start the season. Moore threw for 1,900 yards and tied the county record with 28 touchdown passes in ‘73, while Sweet caught 44 balls for 862 yards and 11 TDs.

The defense, meanwhile, allowed just 26 points and posted six shutouts – all of them in the first seven games of the season. No opponent scored more than seven points against them. The effort put VHS into the Red Carpet Bowl against Greenwood for the Big 8 Conference championship.

The game was a sloppy affair, with the teams combining for 12 turnovers and less than 300 yards of total offense. Each team scored once in the first half, and it ended in a 7-7 tie that left the Gators at 10-0-1 and Greenwood at 9-1-1. The next week, Vicksburg finished atop the final Associated Press poll and claimed the mythical state title.

&#8220It was agony. We felt like we should have won the ballgame,” Ricky Mitchell, a junior running back for the 1973 Gators, said of the wait to crown a champion. &#8220Even though they say a tie is like kissing your sister, we had a pretty good sister. We felt like it was vindication because of the way we demolished everybody on our schedule.”

Porters Chapel also fielded its first football team in 1973. While the Eagles didn’t enjoy immediate success – they went 1-8 that first year – it wasn’t long before they did.

Johnson, nicknamed Earl &#8220The Pearl,” scored more than 300 points over the next three seasons. His 2,037 rushing yards in 1975 was a county record, until Ray broke it by three yards in 1978 and Blue smashed it by 131 yards in 1979. Johnson’s career totals of 4,079 yards and 39 touchdowns are still school records.

Like Johnson’s county records, PCA’s success in the mid-70s was fleeting. PCA won 22 games from 1974-76, then went 1-9 in 1977. The school didn’t have another winning season until 1981.

As Johnson’s career was wrapping up, Ray’s was just beginning. The St. Al speedster became the second Warren County back – after Johnson – to top the 4,000-yard mark for his career.

Ray culminated his stellar three-year run by rushing for 2,040 yards and 19 touchdowns in 1978. That year also capped a remarkable decade for the Flashes. They won six Capital Athletic Conference championships and went an astonishing 86-19-3 during the decade.

Mike Jones, an offensive lineman at St. Al from 1970-73 and now an assistant coach at the school, credited former coach Glenn Rhoads with the team’s success in the 70s. Rhoads, who guided the Flashes to a 33-9 record from 1970-73, took the program from independent status and into a conference where it was better able to compete.

&#8220We had decent enough athletes, but we were coming out of years of playing Little Dixie schools. Glenn Rhoads saw getting in the Capital Athletic Conference was a chance for us to play schools our own size,” Jones said. &#8220He saw that we needed to play those types of teams.”

The Flashes continued the success into the 1980s by advancing to the Class B championship game in 1981.

St. Al lost to Sturgis in that game, but became the first Warren County team to play for a true state championship under the new playoff system.

As Vicksburg High was winning its Big 8 title in 1973, Warren Central was laying the cornerstone of a dynasty.

Wright had arrived at the school in 1971 and immediately turned the program around. The Vikings went 9-2 that season and routed St. Al in the Red Carpet Bowl. The program slipped to a 3-5-2 mark the following season, however, before Wright was truly able to get things going in the proper direction.

The Vikings went 39-3-1 over the next four seasons and won Little Dixie Conference championships three times. They added two more LDC titles, along with two perfect seasons, in 1978 and ‘79.

The Vikings’ success made their all-red uniforms both feared and famous, and saw the birth of a long line of talented running backs in Wright’s run-first, run-last offensive scheme.

Three different WC backs amassed more than 3,000 career rushing yards between 1972 and ‘79, and three totaled more than 30 career touchdowns on the ground.

Lum Jr. and Keith Wright, Lum’s sons, started the tradition when their father returned to his native Warren County after 17 years in Texas.

Lum Wright Jr. only played one season for Warren Central, but led the Vikings to the first winning season in school history and a Red Carpet Bowl berth. Keith Wright ran for 35 touchdowns from 1971-73, and later starred at Memphis State and with the NFL’s Cleveland Browns.

Leo Cage kept it going by rushing for 3,083 yards from 1972-74. He capped his career with a 304-yard, five-touchdown performance against Clinton in the 1974 Red Carpet Bowl.

Cage was followed by Dale Erves, who rushed for 3,350 yards between 1974 and ‘76.

&#8220We were blessed with those athletes, those tailback types,” said current Warren Central head coach Curtis Brewer, who was an assistant coach at the school in the 1970s. &#8220They came up through the junior high program and they were the ones, you could see the talent in them. As they came up, they were the next one in line.”

Wright and the WC coaching staff seemed like mad scientists when it came to the running game. They tinkered and tinkered, fine-tuning things until it was just right. And as the 1970s came to a close, they created their perfect beast.

It was a hulking 200-pound brute named Carl Blue.

Blue, who squatted 515 pounds and ran a 4.6-second 40-yard dash in high school, was a strange mix of pure physical skill and emotional frailty.

During his childhood, Blue had been standing in front of a fireplace when his pajamas caught fire. The accident left deep scars all over his body, and deeply shy about revealing them.

Then, just before his senior year, both of Blue’s parents drowned in Eagle Lake.

&#8220That child went through hell and half of Georgia,” Lum Wright Sr. said. &#8220The biggest problem we had with Carl was in practice. He didn’t want to hurt anybody.”

Feeling it was what they’d want, Blue dedicated the following season to his parents’ memory and didn’t let them down.

Blue had played half of the 1978 season at fullback and still rushed for more than 1,000 yards. The man he blocked for, Kenny Bolden, ran for 1,029 yards and 14 touchdowns.

In 1979, Blue took over as the Vikings’ primary ball carrier and never looked back.

In leading WC to a perfect 12-0 record, he ran for 190 yards or more five times. He set a single-game record that stood for 20 years with his 342-yard performance against Crystal Springs, and finished the season with 2,168 yards and 33 touchdowns.

&#8220He’d turn a flip after scoring a touchdown, and I never saw it. I was always too busy getting the extra point team ready or something like that. You’d think after 35 times, I’d see it,” Lum Wright Sr. said with a laugh.

The record-setting performances of Blue and Ray overshadowed the career of one of the best backs in Vicksburg High history.

Sylvester Stamps fell just short of the 3,000-yard mark for his career, finishing with 2,946 yards to become VHS’ all-time leading rusher. In 1978, his junior season, he led a Gators’ resurgence.

Vicksburg had had just one winning season since its Big 8 title in 1973. But the Gators won nine of their first 10 games and rose to the No. 2 ranking in the state in 1978. They advanced to the Big 8 championship game before losing 14-13 to top-ranked Meridian on a touchdown pass with 34 seconds left. The following season, VHS advanced to the Big 8 playoffs before stumbling against Callaway.

As the 1979 season dawned, a rivalry was brewing between Stamps and Blue, the Gators and Vikings. The Vicksburg Post’s 1979 football preview issue featured an article about both backs’ chances of breaking the 2,000-yard barrier for the season, and such speculation only fueled the question of which team was better.

Vicksburg was near the top of the Big 8 ranks, while WC was in the midst of a second 27-game winning streak and had clearly outgrown the Little Dixie Conference.

In those days, however, the teams did not play each other. The Little Dixie was comprised primarily of smaller schools, while the Big 8 featured Mississippi’s bigger power teams. Big 8 teams had little to gain from playing a school like Warren Central – no matter how good the Vikings were – and rarely did.

That left fans to argue amongst themselves which team was truly better. And as the 1970s rolled into the 1980s, they were about to find out. The new decade brought a new face to high school football in the state with the advent of the playoff system, classifications and districts based on enrollment.

Before long, Warren Central-Vicksburg would go from a coffee shop argument to an annual grudge match, one that would define the state of football in the city for the next 25 years.