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 is 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 there 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" and "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 lineman 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 caused by 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 - smoldering ash trays overflowing on cluttered 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 who would later be a teammate of mine on the high school football team and play linebacker, 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 nowadays 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.  The building is still across from the old city fountain. I smile every time I drive by it.

    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 Junior High court.  The small inside 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: This blog "Fate Fairies" - book version Category is a work in progress. The original vignettes are being edited for book form. Go to the Cooldadiomedia Web site and the Fate Fairies Page for an ordered chronology of the book vignettes (chapters).