LAPWAI — In the living room of Bob and Loretta Sobotta’s home, about a mile north of this small town on the Nez Perce Indian Reservation, a framed black-and-white photograph evokes an aspect of Lapwai that no longer exists.

It shows Bob Sobotta’s parents standing proprietarily outside a cafe on Main Street where, as it happened, his mother had formerly worked for $1 a day.

By the time the photo was taken, the family’s fortunes had brightened to the point where Anna and George Sobotta could buy the business. It included a small pool hall, along with a barber shop run by George, and they called the place Ann’s Lunch.

According to residents old enough to remember, the cafe was part of a small downtown commercial hub that, at various times, included a grocery market, a butcher shop, a humble movie theater, a gas station and two or three taverns.

One by one, beginning perhaps in the early 1960s, those businesses disappeared, leaving an austere town center that’s scarcely distinguishable from the rest of Lapwai. More than ever, the town’s civic identity has less to do with commerce than a sense of community.

The tight bonds can be found in abundance on any given day at the Pi-Nee-Waus Community Center, and at nearby Lapwai High School. Most palpably, it can be found in the basketball gyms in those buildings and elsewhere.

Other photographs on the walls of Bob and Loretta’s home tell the story of that shifting identity, starting with a team photo of the 1956 Lapwai High Wildcats, prominent on the wall behind the desk in Bob Sobotta’s office. He was a starting guard for that team, which claimed the school’s first-ever Idaho small-school championship.

There would be many more. These days, Lapwai is first and foremost a basketball town, and the Sobotta family has played a central role in making that the case.

Four of Bob and Loretta’s six children — Bob Jr., Pat, Mike and Christa — played significant roles for Lapwai High basketball teams, and 10 of Bob and Loretta’s grandchildren have also played high-school ball. Together, the family has contributed to 10 state championships, including eight for Lapwai. The other two were for Clarkston.

If you include their extended family, particularly the descendants of Loretta Sobotta’s seven siblings — her birth name was Samuels — the family’s impact on Lewiston-Clarkston Valley basketball has been enormous.

The descendants of those siblings include numerous athletes who’ve gone on to play at the college level, including Clarkston graduate Trevon Allen, who’s carrying the University of Idaho men’s team on his shoulders these days; Emmit Taylor III of Lapwai, a North Idaho College sophomore who recently signed with Idaho State; Lewiston High graduate Kiki Edwards-Teasley, a former NIC standout who went on to Oregon State; and the late, celebrated Littlefoot Ellenwood, the wizardly Lapwai point guard who played for the College of Southern Idaho.

On a recent afternoon, Bob Sobotta patiently brooked an interviewer’s request to verbally draw the family tree as it relates to basketball. He reeled off, with relative ease, the hoops credentials of his brothers, his children, his grandchildren. As if on cue, he received a phone call from a niece, Karin Sobotta, who said she’d call back but meanwhile provided a detail or two about her career at the University of Idaho (1978-82), where she still holds the women’s career assists record.

Another descendant on Bob’s side of the family is Donaven Santana, who starred for Lewiston High and now plays at George Fox in Oregon. Yet another is Jan Webb, who was part of the Lapwai girls’ first state championship team, in 1976.

For his wife’s side, Bob summoned some help. For several minutes, Loretta stood at the door of his office and recalled the names of nieces, nephews and cousins of three generations who had played roundball, many of them with distinction. She and her husband, fit-looking at age 79 and 82 respectively, both speak in a precise, low-key manner typical of their family.

This has been a season of culmination for several of their young relatives.

Trevon’s younger brother, Tru Allen, capped his high school career with a 26-point performance Saturday night in Clarkston High’s 56-53 loss to North Fremont in the title game of the Washington state 2A boys’ tournament in Yakima. And Trevon, a senior averaging 21 points a game, leads his Vandals into the Big Sky Conference men’s tournament starting Wednesday at Boise.

“Trace through that family, it’s just amazing,” said longtime area basketball connoisseur Darrel Olson, who played against Bob Sobotta Sr. in the 1950s and later. “These kids are playing everywhere, whether they’re named Sobotta or Henry of whatever. And then you follow their careers, not only in basketball but also in education and administration, and they’ve produced some outstanding citizens.”

Hence a busy grandparenthood for Bob and Loretta Sobotta, who watch as many Lapwai and Clarkston games as they can. Since the towns are in different states, this can be challenging.

Most of the athletes in their extended family are members of the Nez Perce Indian Tribe. And although many people assume Bob Sobotta Sr. has Nez Perce blood, that’s not the case. His father George, a barber, had grown up in Wisconsin and was of Polish Catholic descent. George and Anna met in Wyoming and moved to Idaho to be closer to her family in Genesee. Because Lapwai needed a barber, they decided to settle there, in 1937, the year the youngest of their seven children was born. That was Bob.

The name Sobotta has several possible meanings in the Slavic languages, but the one Bob Sobotta mentioned was “Saturday,” which he said was assigned to his peasant ancestors because that was the day they’d leave their rural homes and show up at the city market.

As far as tribal member Leroy Seth is concerned, the name has been adopted.

“That’s a Nez Perce name — Sobotta,” he said wryly.

Nonetheless, the Slavic meaning is apropos. In present-day Idaho and Washington, Saturday is the day the Sobottas — the Saturdays — claim state championships. It happened again three Saturdays ago when the Lapwai girls won their 10th state basketball crown, matching the total the Lapwai boys had reached two years ago.

Bob Sobotta retains vivid memories of early boyhood in that more bustling incarnation of downtown Lapwai. He remembers gathering empty beer bottles in his wagon and wheeling them down the street, selling them to the taverns. This was when his mother was earning $1 a day, a wage that decreased by a nickel on days when young Bob insisted on getting an ice cream cone.

“He was like the rest of us reservation boys, because he grew up with all of us,” said Seth, another starter for Lapwai’s state-title team in 1956. “I told him, ‘We should get you a tribal ID card.’

“His mom and dad, they were great people — good to everybody,” Seth said.

Before the Sobottas’ arrival in Lapwai, according to Bob, there had been a Ku Klux Klan presence in the area, and it wasn’t just tribal members who could expect to be harassed. So could Catholics, and the residue of that attitude may have enhanced the empathy between the Sobottas and the tribe.

So did the family’s color-blind hiring practices at the cafe. Among their employees was an aging Josiah Red Wolf, who as a young boy had survived the devastating Battle of Big Hole, in Montana in 1877.

“He ran the pool hall, and he was very difficult to beat,” Seth said of the man for whom the Red Wolf Crossing bridge, west of Clarkston, was named.

Anna Sobotta, who had bought the cafe after inheriting money from her Genesee family, kept the business until Bob left for college and George moved his barber shop a block east to U.S. Highway 95.

Sobotta and Seth were briefly roommates at Washington State before both transferred to what’s now called Lewis-Clark State and played basketball for the Warriors. Sobotta later played at the College of Idaho, among other places.

“In fact, he got to play with us on the Nez Perce Nation team a couple of times,” Seth said. “He was the only white guy on our team.”

Like many other members of the extended Sobotta family, Bob specialized in an elusive brand of backcourt play.

“Bob and Ed Madsen (at Lapwai High) were so quick and so skilled,” said Olson, who grew up in Orofino. “I was a pretty good shot-blocker — I took great pride in it — and I don’t remember ever blocking either one of those guys’ shots. They were too quick for me.”

Lapwai High’s state title in 1956 capped a surge that had produced three straight district titles, and Bob Sobotta attributes this success largely to a lighted outdoor basketball court that one of his relatives had constructed. Players of all ages, Native American and white, would play 2-on-2 and 3-on-3 tournaments that often raged until midnight. The style of play, both in that setting and on the Lapwai High teams coached by Harley Williams at the time, foreshadowed the flamboyance and inspired passing that would later distinguish the stellar Wildcat teams of the 1980s.

But it didn’t necessarily take root immediately. After Sobotta and the others graduated, the Wildcats’ athletic emphasis began shifting to football.

In 1965, Bob Sobotta married Loretta Samuels, who had grown up in Orofino and, although she didn’t play basketball, had been a much-admired cheerleader at Orofino High. With the progress of the civil-rights movement in recent years, marriages between whites and Native Americans were becoming more common. But Loretta drew snubs from certain stores in Lewiston, which would wait on her and accept her checks only if Bob were present.

Coincidentally or not, their three sons helped relight the Lapwai basketball flame. In 1984, Bob Jr. and Pat Sobotta helped guide the Wildcats to their first state championship in 28 years, and Mike Sobotta provided sparkling defense through the first 50 games of the school’s astounding 81 consecutive wins and three consecutive state titles from 1987-89, animated by the inspired play of the Sobottas’ cousin Littlefoot Ellenwood. Also a part of that dynasty was another member of the Samuels tree, Emmit Taylor II.

Eventually, the Sobotta basketball show hopped the state border to Clarkston, partly through Pat Sobotta’s marriage to the former Debbie Johnson. They both played at Lewis-Clark State in the 1980s and both broke a school assist record — he for a career total of 466 that remains No. 2 in school history, and she for a single-game splurge of 15, a record that still stands. These days, Pat assists Debbie Sobotta in coaching the Clarkston High girls, who are coming off a state-tournament appearance last week.

The Sobotta brothers’ children, nieces and nephews have continued the family hoops tradition. Three of the offspring of Bob Jr. and Angel Sobotta have played integral roles for Lapwai state-championship teams. Payton Sobotta was a key member of the Wildcat boys’ clubs, coached by his father, that nabbed crowns in 2017 and ‘18, and his sisters Glory and Grace helped escort the Lapwai girls back to the throne this season.

Before that, Jett Sobotta, son of Pat and Debbie, extended the family’s knack for breakthrough titles by helping the Clarkston boys to their first- and second-ever Washington crowns, in 2015 and ‘16.

Bob and Loretta’s three daughters have also been close to the family hoops phenomenon in various ways. Christa helped a Lapwai team win a state banner; Georgia’s son Davian contributed heavily to those two Clarkston titles; and Kim’s son Doug, though he never tasted a state championship, was among the family’s elite players.

Bob Sobotta Sr., when his playing days were done, launched into a lengthy, varied career that kept him close to sports and academics. At various times he was a teacher, a coach, a school principal, the mayor of Lapwai, a game official in multiple sports and a superintendent, including for a governing body, Idaho Catholic Schools. These gigs took him throughout the Northwest, but he maintained a base in Lapwai.

For a spell, the Lapwai hoops show moved to Lewiston as Bob Sobotta Sr.’s two eldest sons retraced his path to Lewis-Clark State. Bob Sobotta Jr. once drilled nine 3-pointers in a game, still an L-C record. But like most of his relatives, he doesn’t view the game in individual terms.

“It’s not all about shooting, it’s not all about 3-pointers and scoring,” he said last week. “If you watch and play enough basketball, you want to play with passion and try to play the right way. It’s about being part of a team.”

Pat Sobotta, for his part, turned defensive-mindedness into an art form. Olson said he used to drive from Orofino to Lewiston merely to watch Pat play defense.

It’s as if the Sobottas, during this stretch, were turning LCSC into Lapwai West.

“Growing up in the ‘80s, watching Bob and Pat and Johnson Leighton and Paris Leighton when they were all playing for Lewis-Clark State — you’d go there on what they’d Call Native American Night, and old Warrior Gym was packed like a Lapwai basketball game,” Gabriel Bohnee said. “L-C games were very fun back in the day in old Warrior Gym.”

Bohnee, who is related to the Sobottas on the Samuels side, was playing pool last Friday at PK’s Place, one of the few businesses left on Main Street in Lapwai. He was waiting for the TV broadcast of the Wildcats’ semifinal game in the state 1A Division I tournament in Caldwell. The Wildcats would lose that contest before bouncing back to defeat Potlatch on Saturday for third place.

The semifinal loss created a dilemma for Bob and Loretta Sobotta. Do they stay in Caldwell to watch a third-place game or do they hightail it to Yakima to watch the Clarkston boys play for a championship?

In the end, they split their forces. Loretta stayed to watch the Wildcats, and Bob hitched a ride with his daughter Georgia for the five-hour journey to Yakima.

Why not? It was a Saturday.

Grummert may be contacted at daleg@lmtribune.com or (208) 848-2290.