Emerson Applegate

Kokomo High School has a rich athletic tradition that includes 19 IHSAA state team championships and as many as 79 individual state title holders. That run of success started with the school’s first state champion — Emerson Lowell Applegate.

In 1910 at the IHSAA State Track Meet, Applegate won a pair of titles, the 100-yard dash (10 3/5 seconds) and long jump (20 feet).

The following year, Applegate, who also excelled in football and basketball at KHS, owned the sprints as Kokomo won its first team state championship in any sport. He won the 100 yard dash (10 3/5 seconds), 220 (23 2/5) and 440 (54 3/5). To this day, no other male athlete has ever accomplished a state meet sweep in those events.

Applegate lettered three years in track and field at Purdue before graduating in 1915 and was later inducted into the Indiana Association of Track and Cross Country Coaches Hall of Fame.

He served in World War I and was commissioned a second lieutenant before his discharge. He was superintendent of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company of East Chicago, Ind. when he died in 1945 and is buried in a family plot at Kokomo’s Crown Point Cemetery.