Bee Basketball

The quest to find the origins of a unique basketball jersey.

A few years back, I was helping some dear friends clear out their parents’ house so they could set up an estate sale. To thank me for my help, they invited me to take anything I wanted before the sale opened. Naturally, I took the vintage athletic jerseys that belonged to their dad back in the 1950s.

As I held up a particularly petite rayon jersey, one of the brothers commented that it was so small, it “must have been Dad’s from grade school.” It was bright yellow and black with stripes down the sides and the number 28 machine-stitched to the front.

So I set out to find where the jersey originated, knowing only that their dad had grown up in the Los Angeles area. After thumbing through one particular yearbook, I started to see…STRIPES!

I could tell I was getting warmer, and then TA-DA! There they were: the elusive Tigers jerseys.

It turns out the jersey belonged to their dad when he was a freshman at San Fernando High School and playing on the Bee Basketball team. The jersey is the equivalent of a women’s size small, so apparently those freshman boys still had a lot of growing to do!

While I never found a photo of their dad in the jersey, I did find another player wearing it in a previous yearbook.