ALBANY — A smaller Cook County High team scored single touchdowns in the first, second and fourth quarters on a Friday night in December to beat Newnan, 19 to 7, and win the Class B state championship, the Atlanta Constitution reported. The paper counted 3,500 “frozen” fans at Municipal Stadium. [imagined: breath smoking under the lights, orange and black scarves pulled tight]
Halfback Charley Maloney was the name on everyone’s lips. The AP has him running 83 yards for a fourth-quarter touchdown; the Constitution starts him from his own 17-yard line and has him weaving through would-be tacklers. Quarterback Billy Burt passed 24 yards to Carroll Hayes[?] for the first score in the opening minutes, and Bobby Daughtrey[?] kicked the point. Newnan’s only touchdown came in the last quarter, on a 70-yard drive.
The two papers tell the second-quarter score differently. The AP has Maloney catching a pass and racing 27 yards; the Constitution has him running one play after a punt went out at the Newnan 27. Both may be describing the same drive. That is on the Review Desk.
The road to Albany
Cook came in as South Georgia “B” champion, having beaten Jesup, 26–13, in Valdosta the week before. Newnan, called a “giant killer,” had lost in the regular season only to LaGrange and had nosed out West Point, 7–6. The site was settled at a meeting in Macon on Saturday, Dec. 3. Newnan’s people wanted Griffin; Albany was Adel’s choice; a coin was tossed, and the Newnan paper reports, “Adel won.” Kickoff was set for 8 o’clock. There were to be no radio broadcasts, no student tickets at the gate, and, in the event of a tie, co-champions.
The season behind it
Ten regular-season games, 414 points scored, 12 allowed. That is the figure in the Turpentine Bowl preview, and Charles Shiver’s 2019 Cook Centennial magazine piece gives the same. Twelve points would be two touchdowns with no extra points, which would fit the preview’s remark that Adel had been scored on twice, both times through the air. That is arithmetic, not something either source says.
Early on the Hornets were unscored upon, with just 20 net yards rushing allowed in four games. Maloney scored five touchdowns against Sylvester in one game. Cook beat Ocilla 63–0, “consecutive win number seven,” with Maloney returning the second-half kickoff 80 yards and Daughtrey[?] running his extra-point total to 30, which the paper said tied the state record. At Valdosta’s Cleveland stadium the Hornets beat unbeaten Quitman 20–0 and held the Pirates to 85 yards of offense.
The man in charge
Head coach Knuck McCrary, “the short, sturdy[?] Georgia graduate” in the Constitution’s words, had finished, it said, “a perfect season.” Shiver’s article says McCrary took the school, then Sparks-Adel, to 8–2 in 1948, and that it went unbeaten the next year after it became Cook High.
One more night
In mid-December the Hornets were booked for the first Gum Turpentine Bowl at Cleveland Field in Valdosta, sponsored by the VFW, against Fernandina, Fla., champion of Florida’s B class, unbeaten and untied and led by Eugene “Bull” York. The clippings on file preview that game but don’t report the result. In an Aug. 25, 2025 group post, Alan Parrish, quoting Lynn Bennett, says Fernandina won, 19–14, and that the Cook players were given watches: “My watch ran for two weeks, then died forever.” [not yet confirmed by a clipping]
After the whistle
By late January the same boys were on the basketball court. The Macon paper noted that several of the quintet played on the football team that won the Class B title, and it called Allen “Head” Parrish one of the tallest boys in Georgia high school basketball, at the head of the Adel scoring parade with better than 15 points a game. Adel had won eight of ten, and one clipping has Perry beating them at Adel on Jan. 20. The 1949 Hornets held a 50th reunion in August 1999, Shiver reports. [imagined: a room of gray heads, and somebody, sooner or later, saying “remember the cold in Albany?”]