Triopia 50th Anniversary
2009 · Triopia Jr.-Sr. High School, Concord, Illinois
In 2009, Triopia marked the 50th anniversary of its founding, and Ken Bradbury set out to recover the story behind the school's distinctive name. This archive gathers the correspondence and source notes he collected from alumni and area families as he traced how three small western Illinois communities — Arenzville, Concord, and Chapin — came together as one school in 1959–60.
The folder is not a script but a piece of local history. As the records explain, the consolidation joined the limited resources of the three towns to give their students the best education possible. Before Triopia, Arenzville students attended the Zuschka School, named for John Zuschka, who donated the land; their high school teams were the Raiders, in purple and white. In the first year of consolidation the high school met at Chapin and the junior high at Arenzville, with shuttle buses ferrying students between towns.
The heart of the story is the naming itself. In the spring of 1959 a committee of soon-to-be seniors from Arenzville — Mark Abernathy, Mervin Beets, and Bob Clark, remembered as the "ABC boys" — was asked to brainstorm a name, mascot, and colors, under two rules: nothing that favored one community over another, and no reuse of the predecessor teams' colors or nicknames. Bob Clark recalls how the "Tri" came easily for the three communities; digging through a Latin textbook from Homer Dahman's class that year, the students found oppidum, the word for town, and coined "Trioppidum," which a brainstorming session shortened to the more pronounceable Triopia — an invented word for the three communities. The student body voted, and the Trojans, in columbia blue and white, were born; Mike Abernathy is credited with proposing the name "Triopia Trojans."
Not everyone was sold at the time. A Bob Clark letter recalls a local paper's editorial dismissing "Triopia" as meaningless and unrecognizable, arguing the school should have taken a name like VIT — for Vermont, Industry, and Table Grove — though the committee was sure the "I" actually stood for Ipava, not Industry. Alumni still remember a discarded joke suggestion, too: the "A/C Spark Plugs" (Arenzville/Chapin, a nod to Allis-Chalmers), in black and orange, which the coach reportedly hated. Margaret Ginder, who served on the nominating committee, and committee members Bill Alexander and Mike Abernathy of Arenzville, along with Gary Baise of Chapin, are among those named in the recollections; Chapin and Arenzville held a joint 50th class reunion in June 2009.
Songs
Among the materials Ken collected are the fight songs of the predecessor schools the consolidation replaced. The old Chapin High fight song survives in his notes:
We're loyal to you, Chapin High! / We're crimson and gray, Chapin High! ... So shoot for that goal, Chapin High!
Production Notes
This is a research and remembrance file rather than a stage production. Ken Bradbury's true role here was as researcher and collector: he solicited and gathered first-hand recollections for Triopia's 50th anniversary (1959–2009) from Arenzville, Concord, and Chapin alumni and families. The folder holds six 2009-dated letters and emails — from Bob Clark (Sept 3, 2009), Becky Clark (Sept 8, 2009), Connie N. (Aug 24, 2009), and Jeff, whose mother Margaret Ginder Weiss was on the nominating committee (Nov 18, 2009) — together with a history page from the Village of Arenzville's burgoo.org site and the words to the old Chapin High fight song. As several contributors note, the events were already fifty years old and no one remembered every detail with certainty — a fittingly human portrait of how a community names itself.
These research materials later fed Ken Bradbury's 2015 play Breakin' Through and Bleedin' Blue.