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Date with fate post 35 part I - A chance to play football; the sandlot 1966-'68
This entry was posted on 3/9/2011 1:30 AM and is filed under Fate Fairies, Lima Center, Football Blue Collar Wisconsin.
Pretty much the same dozen or so boys played sandlot football for those two school years. To the chagrin of their teachers, they played tackle - full speed. They were ten, eleven, and twelve years old - Fifth and Sixth Graders. They played from fall, through the bitter Wisconsin winters, into the spring, taking a small diversion from time to time to play some softball on the first warm days. They played at noon lunch and recess out on the old lot behind their school. Big-city kids sentenced to their asphalt playgrounds would have loved the old weedy and rolling plot of earth surrounded by corn fields on two sides and a few houses on the other two. If I had to guess, I would say it was about five acres. I was one of those boys.
It was once a one-room school in the little village of Lima Center, Wisconsin. Liiimah, pronounced like the bean - and the locals just dropped the "Center." Pronounce Lima with an "ee" like the capital city of Peru and folks knew you were some kind of outsider. It is a community of used-to-be places. Over the years the school added two more rooms. It used to be its own school system, at some point encompassing the students of a half dozen other one-room schools of the 1800s construct; those back-road rural schools had eventually deferred to the Lima school - the age of school buses.
Lima Center was also a place of cautious speculations. Many coversations often started or ended with the anecdotes, "I guess;" "I suppose;" "well, they say;" and, "I imagine so."
My dad had spent his first eight years of school in the same building. I am guesssing back then it used to have just two rooms - basically two buildings side by side. And it used to have eight grades instead of six. As an adult, my dad was once on its school board. Eventually, the Whitewater School District absorbed the Lima Center School. My dad seemed relieved.
There was a basement with a kitchen and a lunch room under the original building. Those that played band instruments took their training down there from the band teacher that came once a week. Some strange sounds came out of that basement on those days. We were mandated to practice "Duck and Cover" nuclear war drills in that same basement from time to time. The Cold War and its perennial symbiotic hot war in Vietnam loomed constantly in the backdrop. There were hushed mentions of big brothers and uncles that had returned from strange places in the World. One older cousin would never return home. His dad was a big farmer with big rough hands from a former era of the horse-drawn plow. The distraught man sat in mourning every Sunday for a year in the church up the road and cried. Nowadays, the old school building is a ruddy apartment. An old swing frame we played on sits to the side of the front yard to this day.
By the time I arrived at the school at six years old, each of its then three rooms had two grades and one teacher per room. There were about 10 kids in each grade. In those days there was no kindergarten. In the Fifth and Sixth Grade room the old roof bell rope hung from the ceiling. They used to pull that rope and ring that old bell that sat in its bell tower on top of the roof. That was back during the first couple years I attended; but, somewhere along the line they installed an electric bell. When the school closed down a few years after I left, they took the bell and put it in front of the high school (now junior high) with a plaque like it was some kind of damn antique....I am thinking that then makes me some kind of damn antique too.
Each school day, two chosen Sixth Graders put up the flag in the morning and took it down at night. This task was assigned the whole year to the same two boys. I was one of those boys. So well I learned to fold the flag, years later while in the Army I once showed a couple of mooks the right way to do it before they had to pull honor guard duty.
Except for a small gaggle of children from the village proper, these students were mostly farm kids. They were tough and wise at their young ages. Many came to school with their barn work cloths on. On the farm, many had experienced life, death, heart break, injury, responsibility, and hard work, all before the age of 11.
Some of their dads had been in the most egregious combat in World War II - The Pacific, Europe, and Africa. My dad was one such dad. There was a general timbre hovering amongst us kids like fog, that there was a much worse world out there somewhere than little Lima Center, Wisconsin. And our dads were sometimes emissaries of that realization - with first hand knowledge. It was all the more reason to play football with abandon and "appreciate the good life and fate afforded us."
It never dawned on us in the least that playing tackle football with no equipment on might be a tad dangerous. But the games had to be faithfully played. Someone had built a baseball back-stop with four used telephone poles and chain link fence. It was about fifteen feet high. It made a dandy goal post for field goals. On a recent drive by the old school, I noticed the old treated phone poles still standing their ground. The fencing has long rusted away.
We refereed ourselves. By the Fifth and Sixth Grades we had mastered most of the rules of the exclusively American sport. We followed the pro rules for the most part. And, it was the mid-1960s - the era of Vince Lombardi and his Green Bay Packers. We were used to living in a state with a national winner. The country looked to Wisconsin for a master template of their special game that was rapidly challenging baseball as the national pastime.
I found that I was good at this uniquely American game. There was no shame in mastering it. Almost everyone appreciated the sport of football. Our dads would sit on Sundays right along with us and watch the Packers....on black and white televisions. Besides farming lingo, it was an activity both fathers and sons could talk about. We all knew the names of the many players - Chicago Bears as well as the Packers. You played this game, you learned fair play, respect, teamwork, strategy, and honor. What more could a dad ask for out of a kid? If we were lucky, we could move on to the high school program on down the scholastic road.
I have no memory of the smallest of injuries among the bunch of us. I still remember the names of the rugged troupe of boys: Wayne, Donny, Bobby, Rodney, Geno, Billy, another Rodney, Randy, Doug, Johnny, David, and Steve. One of the Rodney's and Johnny have since past away.
I remember the aches and pains from the daily pounding. I learned I could play almost every position on the field. A few years later I got to play four years of high school football. A couple of us made it out of that school yard sandlot to the organized team culture. The coaches found they needed to un-teach us our sandlot bad habits. I played all four years injury free in the organized realm of high school and I ultimately determined that my experience was successful. Apparently so did some others as there was a couple of awards bestowed me of which at the time, I am now thinking, I did not necessarily take seriously.
But, the caveat is this. It is unlikely I would have fared as well as I ultimately did in the very competitive, organized, and cliquey culture of football had I not played those two wild years in that old school yard in Lima.
Note: If you would like to see all six sections of this story together as a finished publication, go to the Cool Dadio Media Website's "Stories Page" by clicking on the following link. A chance to play football .
Wisconsin Military Service Person Special Mention of the Week
(each week Cooldadiomedia mentions a Wisconsin service person killed in Iraq or Afghanistan)
Army Private First Class Keith Everette Lloyd, 26 of Milwaukee, Wisconsin died on Saturday, January 12, 2008 in Tal Afar, Iraq. He was killed when his vehicle was hit by an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Troup, 1st Squadron, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, out of Fort Hood, Texas. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel noted Lloyd as a Milwaukee South Sider. When he was younger Everette was a fan of professional wrestlers, loved Nintendo games, and enjoyed playing outdoors. Keith's younger brother had also served in the Army in Iraq. Keith was born on May 6, 1981, in Milwaukee. He attended Lincoln Avenue Elementary School. The Journal Sentinel continued that later his family moved to Oak Creek and then South Milwaukee. Lloyd had an interest in volleyball and played for South Milwaukee High School. He graduated from South Milwaukee in 2000. He had worked at Farm & Fleet and also Pick 'n Save stores. He took courses at Milwaukee Area Technical College in Oak Creek and ITT Technical Institute in Milwaukee. The Journal Sentinel went on to mention the Lloyd was deployed to Iraq in November of 2007. Lloyd had mentioned to his family he had met some former WWF wresters, now World Wrestling Entertainment, who were visiting troops in Iraq. Keith had also hoped to get married.
The Web site madison.com via an article by the Associated Press mentioned Keith Lloyd joined the military as a food service specialist in March of 2007. The Web site legacy.com via an obituary from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel noted that at the time of his death Private First Class Keith Lloyd was survived by his mom Cynthia Allam; dad and step mother Gary Lloyd and Joanne Lloyd; fiancée Amanda Apollo; sister Christine Piper; sister Cora Lloyd; brothers Thomas, Kraig, Gary, and Joshua; and, grandparents Keith and Gertrude Lloyd.
Private First Class Keith Lloyd was the 87th Wisconsin military service person to be killed in Iraq since the spring of 2003.
As of this blog entry's posting date:
99,901 Iraqi civilians have been killed in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
9,830 Iraqi Security Forces have been killed in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
4,442 Americans have been killed in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
1491 Americans have been killed in Afghanistan since October, 2001.
318 Coalition soldiers have been killed in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
861 Coalition soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since October, 2001.
32,049 U.S. troops have been wounded in action in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
10,468 U.S. troops have been wounded in action in Afghanistan since October, 2001.
103 Wisconsin soldiers have been killed in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
28 Wisconsin soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since October, 2001.
146 journalists (several nationalities) have been killed in Iraq since Spring, 2003.
21 journalists (various nationalities) have been killed in Afghanistan since October, 2001.
Wisconsin military service person special mention of the week, military casualty, and journalist casualty information sources: Committee to Protect Journalists; cnn.com; Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; washingtonpost.com; thehighground.org; Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs; iraqbodycount.org; www.defense.gov/news/casualty.pdf; and, icasualties.org.
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