One reason why Lincolnton does not schedule Cherryville in football.
At one time Lincolnton and Cherryville had quite a rivalry. After Coach Harris came around 1958 Lincolnton began beating them every year. Then in the very early part of the 1960's some incidents happened that for lack of a better word "inflamed" this rivalry and caused it to take a turn off the path of school spirit and good old competition. One of the things I better not tell about on here, but there was another that some of the old guys remember to this day. Us Lincolnton sorts think of it as maybe a prank that toed the line but Cherryville didn't like it one bit.
I have told this before and don't mean to bore you if you've seen it: One night, back then, some of the Lincolnton guys, who were typically good people and standout athletes decided to go to Cherryville and well, steal the Ironman. This thing was a complex metal structure about 8 feet tall that stood on a chariot with a heavy metal T-bar so they could push and pull it out to the edge of the field. Can't remember what the wheels were but it seems like they had spokes and weren't nothing simple.
They found it, took it and drove it thorough town in C'ville, then back down NC 150 to Lincolnton. The T-Bar was being held by two guy who were riding in the trunk. Down about Black's Grill one of the wheels flew off and when the axle touched the pavement it created a shower of sparks, since they were doing about 80 MPH. AT that time, a lot of the Cherryville guys hung out in the parking lot of Black's after hours and they see this.
I've had two of them who were in the car tell me about it, but the one said by the time he got home his father told him the police had been there and wanted to know what he had done. He said they ended up at city hall and told what had happened and that they had done some disassembling to it. The police told them that several officials, there, were wanting them arrested, and that they were furious about it. I heard that Mr. Kiser, Lincolnton's principal who had at one time coached and taught at Cherryville, was able to mediate the situation on certain conditions: 1. That they restore the Ironman to it's original condition, quickly, and 2. That they come to Cherryville and apologize to the student body.
The guy telling me this said when they went there to make their apologies a few days later, that the CHS principal told them he appreciated them coming over but to go in, tell them your sorry and get out of there, and to not stop at the Shake Shop, or Black's or the Triple-H, but to get back to Lincolnton in a hurry. I asked him if the student body seemed forgiving. He told me they had to go up on the auditorium stage to apologize, and that there was almost a kind of hum in the room that sounded like standing near a hornets nest. He said he was very relieved to get get back here... My cousin married someone from there and he said the ironman got stolen a second time, again in the early 60's. I asked where they were from and he said, "where else, Lincolnton !"... Well, go Wolves.
In the 1970's we left the old Southwest conference, but still played them some and were even in the same conference a time or two, even into the 2000's, but eventually stopped, I'd think mostly because of conference and classification.
Postscript: Some of the Lincolnton guys might have seen the Ironman, before. He still might be over there. The last time I saw him was a good many years ago. They had managed to put him on the flat part of the roof over the entrance to Nixon Gymnasium. I guess they thought the Lincolnton sorts couldn't get to it. Always wondered how they got him up there. It was something to see. You could tell there was a lot of work put into building him. I always thought it looked like Gort, on the movie The Day The Earth Stood Still.