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Date with fate post 35 part II - A chance to play football; the wait 1968-'70
This entry was posted on 3/10/2011 1:30 AM and is filed under Fate Fairies, Football Blue Collar Wisconsin.
Part Two of my lucky foray into football is more about waiting for Part Three than actual football talk.
Franklin Junior High School in Whitewater, used to be the high school. My dad went there from 1932 to 1936. All that remains of the joint now as a plot of grass with a couple of chunks of cement sticking out of the ground. They tore it down almost 20 years ago, hauled off the rubble, and that is where the project ended. I can only imagine how much asbestos loomed in its old walls and ceilings. It sat in the middle of the residential neighborhood on the old west side of Whitewater.
To think of it now it could have readily been a school building in the inner city of Milwaukee. It also could have passed for a minimum security prison building. The east or front side of the infamous three-story structure had a lawn, but no one ever played catch or touch football there. There was a mild slope from the street up to the school. One lonely park bench sat along the sidewalk to the front doors. No one ever sat on it. On the west side sat an athletic field that was so hard it might as well have been asphalt. In fact after I came back from the Army I noticed it was officially paved over with asphalt. To the north was marginal space for a few teachers to park. To the south was a very utilitarian outdoor basketball court.
Upon arriving at Seventh Grade the culture shock was stunning. The girls were still required to wear dresses; the Lima girls had often worn slacks. The boys were expected to wear pants other than jeans. T-shirts were taboo. Gone were our comfortable work jeans and t-shirts that we never thought twice about wearing at Lima. And too, gone was our marvelous endless Lima playground and its delightful nooks and crannies. Gone was our former Lima freedom and comfort zone, now lost in the maze of bigger school anonymity. We were now the new kids among city kids that had known each other since kindergarten. Us kids from Lima felt like we had boarded the wrong ship and then we suddenly turned to look back at there was the fleeting shore, moving off to the distance - it was too late to return to Lima.
There was no organized football back then in our junior high. I had been lead astray with hope by an older farm kid who had sung some praises for the gym class flag football program. It turned out to be rather brief and lame. A bleak option found a gaggle of boys sometimes gathered on that hard lot to play touch football for about 15 minutes at our short "modern," "modular lunch." In the free-for-all it always ended up being, one day I remember pushing a speed demon named Jesse, out of bounds. I saved a touch down. He turned and said an odd word I would hear for the first time in my life:
"You're a prick, kid."
My dreams of football were becoming as melancholy as the news from the Vietnam War. The breaks at lunch were so short we could not play any type of sports much. I missed my Lima football games, and even our occasional softball games.
I remember playing our brief couple of weeks of flag football in gym class. A big guy who I would later play next to on the high school varsity football team was quarterbacking the other side. He had no business touching the football let alone throwing a pass. I intercepted it and ran for a touch down. For a brief moment the old Lima feeling came back. It was short lived. The next day in gym class we were to join up with the girls to begin... the square dancing module.
Then too, the Packers were hitting a sudden decline. Lombardi was now in the front office, and soon to move to the Washington Redskins. In retrospect, we were being introduced at our young age to a thing in life called..., "change."
The then Wisconsin State University of Whitewater was a block away. The Vietnam War protesting timbre was now within hearing distance. It brought the war ever closer to us farm kids. By early 1970 the Old Main building on the university campus burned down. The cause was never known, but with the national war protests still in high gear and sometimes violent, it was always thought a possible source. My take is that the building was so old there was probably an electrical fire of the Civil War era wiring. Or, someone left a cigarette burning in an old dusty office. Younger readers will never have experienced the culture of smoky offices and work places - ash trays overflowing on desks.
The whole mood of the era rubbed off on our school. There were numerous threats to the Franklin school that first year I was there that sent us all home early. I am not sure if any perp or perps were ever caught.
It is amazing I made it through those two years. There was a private college campus book store a block away. We were not supposed to go there but we sometimes did anyway on our short lunch break. A guy I would later linebacker along side on the high school football team got tossed out of the place on his nose one day in Eighth Grade for suspicion of shop lifting. When he pulled himself off the ground, he flipped off the store manager, cursed him with colorful expletives, and pulled the stolen candy bar out of his shirt and chowed it down.
The school experimented with a smoking lounge for students. Can you imagine the outrage by the nanny state at-large today regarding dozens of 12 to 14 year olds puffing away at their fags and butts in a sanctioned area - all under the watchful eye of the mother state?
Once on a weekend visit to town, as a friend and I walked to the hamburger joint at lunch for a break from playing basketball at the Armory, some drunken college guys in Indian costume came out of their private dorm and shot us with rubber-tipped arrows. Nowadays they would book'em for assault and battery. We just ran - they were too drunk to catch us.
We spent a lot of time at that old Armory gym on weekends. Our moms would take turns driving us in. In the summer they would drop us off at the outdoor Franklin court. The small gym at Franklin had a floor that was so loose the ball often would not bounce. In lieu of football, we were introduced to organized basketball. Back at Lima we had a bent rim with a dirt court area. I noticed that after I left Lima, they finally put a patch of asphalt and a new rim behind the school. Some of us Lima kids spent a good couple years using that court after hours. On the farm my dad put up two rims in the barn haymow and one out back of the barn on the cement pad. I made the Franklin team in Eighth Grade. I was so pumped up when my dad actually was able to break away from his farm duties and come to one of my basketball games. Franklin's old gym had a circular balcony around it and onlookers lined the railings, looking down at us like Christians being sent to the lions. It is a wonder it did not collapse. Perhaps if I had tried just a little harder, basketball could have taken me somewhere. But I longed for my football.
In gym class we were introduced to wrestling. They actually had an ad hock intramural tournament segueing off the gym program. I fared average. It just was not my cup of tea.
During that whole long two-year football drought in our junior high setting, I thought and wished about the high school gridiron team. That wait seems like an impossible task now from the perspective of an old guy. But perhaps it was like wishing for years for that 16th birthday; to finally be able to get behind that steering wheel in the car and the freedom it promised.
Youth affords us a matter-of-fact perseverance that often abandons us in old age.
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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