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Auburn / Friday / Glomerata / history / sport — Comments Off
16
Oct 26

The 1936 Glomerata, part five

We go back once again to 1936 to see some of the people from the yearbook of my alma mater. (Part one is here. Part two is here. Part three is here. Part four is right here.) This is hardly a complete look, but there’s a lot to see from 1936.

Today, Auburn fields 21 varsity teams in 15 sports and competes in the Southeastern Conference. If I’ve counted right, they can boast 102 conference champions over the years, with their most recent titles captured by the women’s tennis team. They count 31 national championships ranging from football to swimming and diving to equestrian to track and field to golf. Sports are a lot different now, of course.

But, first, here’s the cover.

Here’s the head cheer leader, Bill McTyeire. He was studying mechanical engineering. He married Katherine, served as an engineer in World War II in Germany and the PTO. He spent much of his career after that at the Birmingham Ornamental Iron Company, where he established Meadowcraft, a furniture division that would, one-day, be one of the successful casual furniture makers in the country. He served as a general chairman of the United Way, was very active in many of the prominent civic and social organizations in his hometown. (I’d list them, but it is excessive.) He was also on the board of some of the largest business concerns in the state. He died, at 90, in 2003. He was survived by his wife of 61 years. They had five children and eight grand-children.

I include this just because it still feels creative all these years later. They wrote a cutline to accompany it.

The fact that the Auburn Spirit has continued unceasingly throughout the year may be contributed to the Cheer Leaders. This year Auburn has been represented by four outstanding Cheer Leaders in Bill McTyeire, Bill Lee, Jack Adams, and Alfred O’Donnell. It is fitting that we express our appreciation for the untiring efforts of these four.

Bill Lee was a pharmacy student, a junior from a tiny town in Georgia. He went into the army after he graduated, then went home to Newnan and joined the family pharmacy. He was the second generation in their two stores. His son would also go to Auburn, study pharmacy, and return home to join the family business. It’s still in operation today, under new ownership. Jack Adams was a sophomore business major. He became a B-25 pilot, a major in the 823rd bomber squadron of the 38th Bomber Group. In March of 1945 he ditched his plane just outside of Formosa, the modern Taiwan. He and one of his crew members died. Three others survived. His body was never recovered. He left behind a wife in Pennsylvania. Alfred O’Donnell was a business student from a small town in northern Ohio. Alfie was a junior, he had two sons, one of them was the third to share the name, and also a daughter. He went home after the war, ran a paint and wallpaper concern with his brothers. He ran for, and won, a city council seat. He ran for mayor, but was not elected. He also ran for the state legislature. He died in 1984, survived by his wife, and is buried right there in his Ohio hometown.

Jack Meagher was the head football coach. He’d been on campus for two years when this book came out. He played his college ball at Notre Dame, served with the Marines in France during World War I and had a brief dalliance with professional football in the NFL’s first year, back in 1920.

Notice how someone who was working on this yearbook has figured out darkroom dodge and burning techniques.

He coached at a small Catholic school in Texas, and then spent five years running things at Rice. He led Auburn to their first two bowl games, the Bacardi Bowl in 1936 and the Orange Bowl in 1937. He’s a critical part of the university’s sports history because he helped get the stadium built on campus (seating capacity 7,500). He was tired of traveling. In his first six years on the plains, he played only three home games.

The great Wilbur Hutsell was born in Missouri, attended Mizzou and was a quarter-miler there. He coached track at his alma mater, and then became Auburn’s first track and field coach in 1921. He stayed on until he retired, in 1963. In between, he won three conference titles, won 140 dual meets, losing only 25. He coached five Olympians: Snitz Snider, Percy Beard, Whitey Overton, and Jim Dillon. He also coached three NCAA champions, five AAU champions, and saw five of his high hurdlers win national championships.

He also served as the trainer for the 1924 Olympic wrestling team and was an assistant track coach at the 1928 Olympic Games. He was the university’s athletic director, twice. Hutsell is honored in the Helms Track & Field Hall of Fame, the University of Missouri Hall of Fame, the Alabama Hall of Fame and the USA Track & Field Hall of Fame. The track on campus is named after him (and also the coach who succeeded him).

Here’s the freshman coach, the basketball coach and, eventually, the head man. Ralph “Shug” Jordan had just finished his third year as the freshman boss.

He would win his first of four SEC Coach of the Year award for the 1953 season. In 1957 he’d win a national championship. In his long career, which ended in 1975, Jordan went finished with a record of 176–83–6 in football, including a Heisman Trophy winner in the great Pat Sullivan. All of that overshadows his respectable basketball coaching career, where he amassed a 136–103 record.

He sat near the head of the good ol’ boy network, eventually coming to serve on the university’s board of trustees, in retirement. He helped expand the seating capacity of the stadium with his name on it to seat 72,000. He died of leukemia in 1980. Six of his former football players were his pallbearers.

Posthumously inducted into the National Football Foundation Hall of Fame in 1982, he is remembered as a coach today, but he was also a father of three, and a World War II veteran. Ralph Jordan saw action in North Africa and Sicily before being wounded in the shoulder and arm in Normandy as a part of the D-Day invasion. After recovering from his wounds, he was shipped to the Pacific theater, serving at Okinawa.

A 1950s Auburn grad wrote a great piece on him.

Dell Morgan was born John O’Dell Morgan. looks like he’s seen some things.

He coached at Auburn from 1934 to 1939. The The Texas boy went home in 1940, where he’d work at Rice, coach Texas Tech for a decade. There’s a little gap in his coaching record, but he found himself back at Rice coaching baseball from 1953 to 1961. Dell Morgan died in a car accident, in Texas, in 1962. He’d spent the day watching his Rice players practice, and was headed out to go fishing with a buddy when another car crossed the center line. Four people were killed.

Boots Chambless was given the name William, and I’d love to know where Boots came from. He was one of those former players that became a coach. For the rest of his life he would be remembered as one of the best players in school history. After service during World War II he coached at LSU. He became an insurance man, and then a teacher in Florida. He died in 1977, survived by his wife, who died in 2004, and a son, William Jr., who became an All-American at Miami, earned a PhD in chemistry and traveled the world for work.

Jim Hitchcock is another of the Auburn greats. He was inducted into the National Football Foundation’s College Football Hall of Fame in 1954.

Jim Hitchcock became Auburn’s first All-America player following a brilliant senior season in 1932. A triple-threat halfback, Hitchcock led the Southern Conference in scoring that year, handled the Tiger punting and tacked baseball All-America laurels onto his credits. In three varsity seasons, Jim compiled an incredible record as a punter, kicking 232 times without having a single punt blocked. During a 1932 game against Tulane, Hitchcock flashed his ball-carrying brilliance with a 60-yard touchdown return of an intercepted pass, followed quickly by a 63-yard TD run out of his punting formation. Tulane was demoralized and Hitchcock was racing toward one of the finest seasons the South had ever witnessed. That same season, after Auburn had defeated coach Wallace Wade’s Duke eleven, Wade commented: “I have never seen a finer all-around back play against one of my teams.” The 5-11, 172-pound native of Inverness, Alabama, turned to a professional baseball career for seven seasons after his graduation, coaching the Tiger backfield during the off-season. Hitchcock spent 39 months as an athletic instructor in the Naval Aviation Physical Training Programs during World War II and was elected to the Alabama Public Service Commission for several terms after the war.

The Phantom of Union Springs was listed as 5-11 and 165 pounds in college. He was a letterman in three sports in college, and had a cup of coffee in Major League Baseball. (For more, see the Society for American Baseball Research.) He is in the Alabama Sports Hall of Fame, served on the Board of Trustees at the university. The baseball field on campus is named after him and his younger brother. For a brief time he was the head coach of the baseball team. He also served in the Navy during the war, and on the state Public Service Commission after that, until his death in 1959 at just 47 years old. He was survived by his wife and two sons.

Buddy McCollum played for Auburn earlier in the decade as a lineman. He coached the team he once played for until he was called to active duty. After the war, serving as a lieutenant colonel, he caught on as the head football coach at Livingston State (the modern University of West Alabama) and then Troy State leading them to their first bowl game in 1948. He died in Georgia in 1978, survived by his wife and a son, which they named Buddy Jr. That guy was a defensive line stud at Duke, and served as a career member of the Air Force.

Here’s the whole 1935 football team. They went 8-2 overall, 5-2 in conference, losing two close games against Tennessee and LSU. Millard Morris, who we met in the last installment was the team captain. This next year, though, the 1936 season, Meagher would get his Tigers into their first bowl game, the Bacardi Bowl, in Havana.

The action photos were beginning to improve just a bit, though a few, like this one, were printed backward. I flipped it to the proper orientation for your enjoyment. The good guys are in the dark uniforms. I think.

The baseball team was sporting some classic wool uniforms. They went 9-12 over all, and an even .500 in the conference. They also played World Series champion St. Louis in an exhibition.

This wiry looking fellow is team captain Gilbert McMillan, a chemical engineering student who looks like he means to send one right back to the pitcher.

After school he worked for DuPont for 33 years, helping to start nuclear reactors at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. He’d also worked on the Manhattan Project. He was a tree farmer, a city councilman, and then an ultra-conservative state senator in South Carolina for decade. He died in 1998, aged 83. His wife survived him by a decade. They’d had two daughters. And when his wife passed she could count four grand children and five great-grandchildren.

Here’s the basketball team, which was coached by Shug Jordan, standing on the back right. He was rebuilding the team. They’d gone 10-33 in the last three years. But this season, they were turning it around. They went 10-7 this year and had winning seasons for the next four years.

Bruce McGehee, was a junior studying business and jumping high on the track team. He would have graduated in 1937 or so. He also earned a master’s degree. He served in the Pacific during the war, came home and got married in 1947 and honeymooned in Savannah. He was teaching economics at Auburn at the time. He stayed on the faculty from 1946-1949.

At some point they moved to Tennessee, had at least one child, who they also sent to Auburn, a son, and four grandchildren. He retired from TVA. He passed away in 1988.

If you want really arcane sports trivia, it was Bruce’s brother, Coleman, scored the first touchdown in what was inaugurated as Auburn Stadium, and has of course since been expanded and named Jordan-Hare Stadium. This little factoid is so important to the McGehee family that it is also listed in his son’s 2013 obituary. Coleman flew a bomber during the war, came home and opened a printing business. Among other things, he was responsible for printing the famous interlocking AU for the football helmets. (That was a design compromise, but that’s a story for a different day.)

Their father, Bruce McGehee Sr. was a prominent minister who died at just 55. Everywhere that man went in his life he filled an important local role. Their mother, Frances, died in 1974. She’d lived in Auburn for 35 years when she passed, at 89.

Bobby Blake has the best javelin form of the three, and so that’s who we are looking up.

He was a senior, a local boy, studying science and literature. He, too, served in the war, but he came back to Auburn, where he woud live most of his life. In addition to hurling a pointed stick he also played in that first bowl game, the Bacardi Bowl, in Cuba. He married Jane Slack, Miss Auburn, who we’ve already met. He coached football a bit, and then went into banking, retiring in 1981. Jane died in 1997, and so he moved back home from their retirement place in Florida. They had five children, seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren when he died in 2001.

James Karam was from Arkansas. He was a sprinter, and also a running back on the football team.

He got in a little bit of trouble trying to break up a union meeting. This was in 1937, when he’d just left school. That same year some people plotted to blow up his car. That had something to do with unions, too. The newspaper coverage of the courtroom testimony is not especially flattering. He’s accused of being part of a strong arm squad at Goodyear, who would intimidate and beat up union workers. (He was in a different union, it seems.)

Karam returned to Arkansas a few years later, became a labor leader and built what they called a vigilance committee. By ’46 he was saying his group was like the Klan, but without the masks. He’d become a successful junior college football coach, stepping away from the sport in 1949 to run a men’s clothing store. He was, soon, a prominent business man, incredibly active in the American Legion, and tied to a lot of civil rights incidents across several states. He hung out with the segregationist governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, and Paul Bryant. (I’ll let you decide which one of those he bragged on most.) He said he had a religious experience in April of 1959, after which he became a big speaker on the Southern Baptist circuit. It looks like he might have changed his ways, at least somewhat. There’s always a bit of doublespeak in the rhetoric of southern newspapers of the time. Let’s take it as a positive, though. He died before his wife. When she passed, in 2019, she left $2.7 million to the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.

Mostly, I think we should bring back the term “dash man.”

Here’s a team back for track and field. I wonder why the A looks different on the shirts.

Speaking of sports clothing, check out the swim team’s get up.

This team was self-coached. One of the co-coaches and captains was Gordon McKinney. He’s not easy to track down. The other was Mims Howard Conner. Some 30 years from now his family home would be a feature photo in a local newspaper because they cooled and heated it the modern, all-electric way. This was still a newsworthy thing in 1965.

We are, of course, a long way from that. Back here in 1936, one of the talks of campus was the polo team. The sport of kings galloped onto campus in 1932, via the ROTC. The War Department thought polo promoted :skill in horsemanship and daring.” It stayed on campus until 1939. Tanks and war were presumably the reasons it disap”eared, despite being a fan favorite.

Tank polo never took off, for reasons unknown.

They had one of the few polo teams on southern college campuses, so most of their competitions were with nearby military installations, or universities far away. You can read more about the era of horsies and mallets right here.

All of this will wind up in the Glomerata section (eventually). You can see others, here. Or maybe you’d like to click through to see all the covers. The university hosts their collection here.

adventures / Auburn / cycling / memories / photo / Rowan / sport / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
7
Oct 26

I crashed my bike again

I’m fine.

Just a perfect, beautiful, lovely, chamber of commerce day. The sort of day you want all the time. The sort of day that you know is really a marker. The sort of day that will stick around, for a while, if you’re lucky. The sort of day you know isn’t going to last.

But I got ahead of things, and so I found a way to sneak outside and enjoy it for a whole hour.

I invited my lovely bride out for a bike ride, so that I could chase her for 45 minutes and then slowly drift away from her, which has been the way it has worked this year.

After the turnaround, and before I got dropped, I managed a few photographs. We totally posed this.

And here’s me saying goodbye to her, because, for most of the rest of the way, she would be in the distance, and then gone, and I could just sit there and pedal into the wind with my thoughts and playing the rest of my week’s work out in my head. I wonder if I would go faster if I did that less. I wonder if I did that more I’d go slower, or if the work would be better. I didn’t have time to ask her, because soon after this, she was gone.

What happened next was, well, exactly what I said. The headwinds caught me, I sat up, started thinking about stuff and just casually pedaled my way home. I counted the vehicles that passed me dangerously. I’d just been thinking about how I’d gotten away from using that as a bit in class, and I should get back to that. Today, there was the commercial service van that almost hit The Yankee and gave me a little more room. Then there was the oversized black GMC pickup, which almost hit me, And then the white Chevy Silverado which almost clipped me while trying to save two seconds to immediately turn in front of me. I’m not sure why your two seconds are worth risking another person’s life, but that’s how it works.

Today, all of that happened within 36 minutes.

But the real fun was later! I completed much of the planned route, returned to the neighborhood, and then lost my back wheel. I felt it go to the right, felt me go to the left, and felt me hitting the ground. Heard myself saying “Ow! Ow!”

I landed on my surgically repaired shoulder, which is fine. I landed on my knee, which is scratched. I landed on my elbow and forearm, which has some nice road rash. For some reason I couldn’t get up in my bike shoes, so I kicked them off, and stood up, trying not to get a leg cramp at the same time. Looked around, surprised that no one saw this. Picked up my bike, where the left handlebar had gotten wedged beneath the top tube, the front wheel cranked all the way over. I couldn’t get undo that. Also, the handlebar was pushing the rear brake line, so the whole of my bike was shut down.

So I carried it, bleeding, the short distance home. I was very close.

Put my stuff away, inspected my helmet and was pleased to see I didn’t smack the ol’ noggin. I celebrated by hammering free the headset from the top tube, checked the wheels and the brakes, and then went inside.

Cleaned my wounds, took an angry, painful, shower. We did the first aid routine. Gauze, bandages, marveled that all of the bleeding parts are right on the bending parts of my limbs. So we made use of some ACE bandages. Then, I got ready to go to class.

Our department had an open house today, so the floor was filled with students. I tried to stay out of the way, hoping no one would bump into me. Already, I’m a bit sore, and that’ll become a problem tomorrow and Friday, but also, see above.

In class, I had to apologize for sitting sideways, because we mummified my leg. Also, I had to apologize for being delayed with grading a few papers. That was supposed to get done this afternoon, but the day got away from me, as you might imagine.

This class was about fan identity. I do this whole lecture through the lens of being an Auburn man. I make fun of Georgia. I discussed social identity theory, role identity, and identity fusion theory, which is my favorite of the bunch. I show this video, as an example of a shared experience. I show them where I was in the video.

They were a bit interested in that one, because it is surreal. And it was surreal. (Also, I think, it is why I don’t like being in crowds.)

I talk about Warren St. John’s Rammer Jammer, which has some incredible anecdotes about fan sacrifice. I show them videos of the viral Roll Tide Willie guy. Some of them know of him, but one of the local stations did a nice little profile package on him, and it is entirely different.

While it is playing I’m trying to count the number of people I know who are that guy. More than one. He looks like a caricature, but he’s a real guy. And since I’ve been asking them to think of fans as a client rather than as being a fan themselves, it seems important to give the guy a little understanding.

I show a terrific NFL hype video, which won’t embed here, but does allow me to point out roughly all of the positive things we’ve been talking about.

As a test, I showed this video. It doesn’t really get laughs. I don’t know why.

After I gave them my big Go Vote speech we got out a few minutes early.

I drove home, called my mom to tell her I got her grandfather’s pocket watch working. Missed a turn and wound up way off course before I figured it out. Every nondescript field looks the same in total darkness.

Got home and learned that I’d bled through the bandage on my elbow. Bled into a white shirt. I could feel it during class. Didn’t want to make a scene. All of that blood will come out of the shirt, though. And it’s an old shirt, so that’s not a problem. But, I need to figure out how to clean the elbow of my sport coat. And now I get to figure out how sore I’ll be tomorrow, how much more sore I’ll be on Friday, and what Saturday might feel like.

adventures / books / family / Friday / photo / Rowan / sport — Comments Off
11
Sep 26

This fine day

What a fine day this was! It was a fine day! And it followed on the heels of another fine day. Fine days all around, for everyone. You might have to seek out the parts that make a day so, but if you hunt long enough you’ll realize that you’re only making the parameters for your day, anyway, so may as well just get to it. Let the day come to you, which I do to much, and hope it’s fine, or fine the things that redeeming, wonderful, and rewarding in every day.

I’m going to try that one day. But not this day. This was a fine day all of its own accord.

But first, yesterday … I had to walk from the building where my office and some classes are to another building where I have a class. This was previously the sauna, but now it’s just the uncomfortably warm older person’s residence. The weather on the fourth floor of that building reflects what is going on outdoors, I was told. When it is hot, it is hot. Oh, the first three floors were nice and cool last week, but I am left to conclude they just ran out of duct work and insulation for the fourth and fifth floor. But, yesterday, because the temperatures have dipped every-so-slight, I only sweat through two layers of clothes.

In that class we discussed the diffusion of innovation theory. Started with agriculture! Bet you didn’t know that! See? A fine day for discovery. Some of the 19th century work that would go into Everett Rogers’ 1962 classic had to do with things like the spreading and adoption of information. Rogers then pulled on 508 studies across anthropology, sociologiy, education, medicine and agriculture and tried to explain how this theory can help us understand how and why new ideas and tech spread, and the conditions that help with that. Diffusion of innovation is such a beloved thing that a few years ago there was a 50th anniversary celebration for it. For a theory. I knew someone who traveled for that event.

We also talked about binary code and how that makes all of these digital things possible and how innovations can move beyond what designers or early adopters intend. I left them with something to think about. A question about a person becoming ones and zeroes themselves. I think I’m going to let them chew on that for another day or two before we get into it. It’ll make for an interesting mindbender when we get to Walter Benjamin.

On my way back to the office I got the third angle of the statue. From this perspective it looks like something sad has happened. Her face is just so. He’s gripping that hat a little too tight.

It still surprised me, to see that statue. I still think, when I catch it out of the corner of my eye, that it is two actual people in a particular moment.

One more wide perspective, next week, then we’ll start looking more closely at some of the figures’ details.

Last evening we got home and decided to sit outside and read. We know how to party! Also, our Sunday afternoon hot reading date is close to becoming a Thursday evening hot reading date, as well. When the sky is showing off, why not?

At some point, and I hope it is no time soon for selfish reasons, it’ll be cool enough to use the fire pit. Then we’ll be reading pages that smell of smoke and pulp. For other reasons, I am looking forward to using the fire pit, because we need to burn some twigs and branches.

I am reading Adin Dobkin’s Sprinting Through No Man’s Land, about the first Tour de France after the conclusion of World War I. Race designer, and editor of L’Auto, Henri Desgrange put on the most grueling tour possible. Dobkin makes the point a few times here that Desgrange’s ideal of a Tour winner was still coming into focus, even after a dozen races and four years without La Grande Boucle during the Great War. Some of these guys were still in the service. Some had just gotten out and had no time to train. They were going over some of the harshest terrain possible, less than a year after the war had ended, and even into new parts of France. This, for Desgrange, was an exploration, and a statement. While the point had, thus far, always been to sell more subscriptions and issues of L’Auto, it was also important to show France to Europe, and France to the French.

The thing about open road bike racing, even now, is that there is always a lot about the event we, the spectators, don’t know, even with cameras on motorocycles and drone shots and microwave technology. The empty spots in a given race are even more pronounced a century on. And, from here, maybe they don’t matter. But this does.

If there was enough credible source material, I’d read books on important and insightful anecdotes like this all day long.

Desgrange was a colorful and controversial character for many people, but at the same time the man knew what he was doing.

This evening we went to see my god-niece-in-law (just go with it) play her third varsity game at the college level. We saw her debut — she started! — recently and this game was also close enough to get to. Her mom was there. So were her grandparents. And also her godparents-in-law. That’s my in-laws, if you’re trying to keep this straight.

Before the game we met up for pizza with my in-laws and my uncle-in-law. (This gimmick gets confusing, but that’s what makes it fun.) We made it over to the game just as it was getting underway.

You know that old saying about missing the shots you don’t take? Our star player does not have that problem. Put the ball at her feet and she’s going to the cage. In this game her team got their first goal of the season. Then they put up a second goal. Guess who got the assist? And then, her teammates slipped her the ball twice more, and she got her first collegiate goal to tie the game 3-3.

The referee, let us say, enjoyed putting his stamp on the game, such that the other team were able to score with 29 seconds remaining in the game. When he wasn’t doing that, however, he was watching the emerging star do her thing.

We took a family photo after the game. They’d just lost a heartbreaker, they’re still looking for their first win. She was so happy. It’s still early yet, but it looks like maybe she’s found the right place for her — and isn’t that what all of this is about?

We went out for ice cream after. I told you, it was a fine day, just a fine day.

family / photo / site / sport / Tuesday — Comments Off
1
Sep 26

First day of classes

Oh it was hot today. The shade was a good four or five degrees cooler, and I was grateful for the shade. There’s a reason people move more slowly where I’m from, and this is that reason. In the old days, before forced air, a person would perish in the real heat. And sometimes they’d do that before they burst into flames. It’s true. You don’t read about it in books all that often, because the books would ignite too. Also, they ban some books there now, which is, we can all agree, just about the most offensive and dumbest performative thing you can do to a collection of ideas. Though the act of doing so does seem to create a lot of curiosity about the ideas contained therein. An inquisitive and rebellious human nature has that going for it.

There’s no reason at all I’m on that subject. It’s really hot here today. It was hot tonight. And humid. It was humid like home. And there were insects everywhere. But we’ll get to that.

Well, class. I have one class on Tuesday. This is Digital Media Processes, and its about the structure and concepts behind our social and digital media. And if that sounds fun, it is! But more is watching me stumble my way through trying to find an easy way to discuss what it means to discuss the conceptual nature of things without getting ahead of myself, which is precisely what I did today. Hey, it was my first day, too.

This was my 19th first day. One day, I’m going to be good at it. Maybe on the 20th first day.

This class was supposed to be in the same building where my office is, but it got moved for logistical reasons and so now I must walk some 450 feet feet and around a corner, to another building. There on the corner is a fiberglass statue. It is a statue of a man and woman in a deep hug and perhaps a passionate kiss, depending on where you are standing. And I’m wondering how many times I’ll walk by it before I think something like, “Awwww, that’s nice,” or “Get a room you guys!” Twice as I walked by it today, I had that sort of reaction to the statue. Let us chart, this semester, how long it takes for something to sink into both sides of my brain.

The class is on the fourth floor of this building, which is where they put all the great classes. All of the professors wind up in the hot box eventually, according to the campus tradition I just made up. They don’t, apparently, put air conditioning in that class. I was sitting at the desk in the front of the room sweating, and it wasn’t nerves. My jacket may have been too heavy for this early in the term. Every jacket is.

Anyway, we did Syllabus and Expectation Day. I talked about what the class was. You’re threading a needle there, I think. I need them to come back. I need them to think this is interesting or useful for them. I don’t want to overwhelm them on the first day. I also need to tell the story of the class and introduce myself and get them talking just a little bit, because they’re going to be doing that a lot this term. And I need to show them the course and a slide deck and I have 75 minutes to do all this.

Here’s my bet, I’ll get back in the groove of laying out and delivering a 75 minute class before I figure out that statue is a statue. Time my brain understands — despite how often I am late in arriving at places. I can still talk 60 seconds without a clock and wrap it up on the post, because of my time in broadcasting, and I haven’t been on the air since the Bush administration. Seventy-five minutes I’ll get adjusted to. My other class, which runs two hours and 45 minutes, I’ll get adjusted to. Can I manage both in one semester? Is that a statue, or are those real people, moving slowly? Very. Very. Slowly.

We traveled from our campus to another campus to see my god-niece-in-law (just go with it) play in her first university field hockey game. I’ve known this little girl her whole life and now we’re watching this young woman, on day two of being a college student, start for her field hockey team as a true freshman.

She’s playing as a forward. She’s been working hard and I’m sure she’ll continue to work hard. The game didn’t go their way this evening. There were two lightning delays. And then the bugs descended. Have you ever been to an event at night where that really fine mist plays on you? The sort where you can’t really see it, but you can feel it and it is so obviously there? And then you look up into the lights and you can see all of that rain dancing and reflecting the light? This was like that, only with insects. More insects than you need to see at one place. The team we were there to see were the visitors and the home team needs to invest in some bats. If they did, those bats would live well.

At one point, the insects were just falling on us. Not flying into us. Falling on us. We joked that despite the two lightning delays, and the continued lightning that the officials ignored in the second half, that they would only call the game if two more almost-plague-like events occurred.

The home team, who no one likes very much won the game. The Knights, who we were cheering on, will fight on again another day. Lane played 52 minutes in probably the most humid conditions any of those young women have ever experienced. It felt like home, honestly. We — her parents were there, as where her grandparents and her aunt and some of her cousins — were sweating just sitting, dodging insects, and cheering on the Knights. Field hockey players do a lot of running.

I have seen enough to see how she is progressing at the craft. When she’s had a few more games in hand I’ll be interested to hear her opinion on how this game is different than the high school version. I noticed a bit of that here, in this one example, and this sport is inscrutable to me. (I stood behind the goal of one of her last high school games and, to me, a soccer goalie, I could see the game a lot better and understand it a bit more, but there’s always a lot to learn.)

Started her first game! She is that rare young person that can peer into the long term. I suspect she’s going to soon come to realize that if she keeps working hard, even better things are going to come her way. Sometimes the ball lands at your feet. She’ll be ready to put it in the cage.

Finally, since it is the first day of the month, I did all of the regular first-day-of-the-month things. I cleaned my desktop. I cleaned the downloads. I emptied the computer’s trash bin. I updated my boilerplates. I updated the spreadsheet where I keep site stats. (Doesn’t everyone do that?) Last month had the most visits in the 22-year history of the site. More than a quarter of a million! I don’t know why you’re all here, I’m grateful for every one of you that isn’t a bot. I’m glad you came back. I hope you’ll do it again.

Also, I updated the art on the front page of the site. This is another 10-photo collage from South Africa, at the Cape of Good Hope. Here’s the theme, but then go look. This will be here when you come back.

Those images will stay up for a month. I’ll update them again for October. Let’s all have a great time until then, shall we?

More tomorrow, including the second first day of classes.

memories / Philadelphia / photo / site / sport / Wednesday — Comments Off
12
Aug 26

I can see mulch and top soil again

What a fine day. Productive and rewarding in several senses, but not in all of them. One can’t be productive in every sense. We weren’t designed for that. How else would we have developed imagination, hope, and ambition? How else would we have ever learned to fly, go to space, develop life saving vaccines, study the planet and what we’re doing to it? If we could do everything all at once, how would we have internalized concepts like dreams, lists, and ways to judge our neighbors against our efforts? Someone had to have the idea of emulating the birds, and s/he and their ilk were scorned for generations, until one day it wasn’t a flight of fancy, it was a flight. And you couldn’t do that or go to space or any of our other marvels, really, without the ability to create and pursue lists. We’re talking about human pursuit here! You can’t pursue everything at once. The neighbors would stare and talk.

I hope not too many people are doing that around here, because we’ve given them something to judge of late. There’s a lot of weeding to be done, but it’s been so deliriously hot. The temperatures settled into the low 90s today, however, and I went outside in the morning and pulled things out of the ground for a while.

My first job was a summertime thing working for one of my teachers. She was a horticulturist, and she had a summer side hustle landscaping one of the big houses on the mountain. The husband was a surgeon. A plastic surgeon, I think. Or a heart surgeon. Something that set him up well enough to marry a woman who descended from old money. (People knew the family name.) It was a gorgeous house, made to look ancient by the stone work that didn’t come from our red clay hills. It had a commanding view of the city in the valley below, the city her family had left a few generations before. The city where her family name was on one of the skyscrapers downtown, which you could see standing at their sink, or at their pool, or in any part of the house that looked to the northwest. They had a Rolls Royce Phantom 2 in the garage, giant oil paintings of themselves in the foyer that was, itself, bigger than any house I’d ever seen. And they had landscaping needs that meant after we’d worked our way across the whole of the yard it was time to go back to the other side and start again. I was in the 8th grade and it was incredibly hot and that job taught me a lot, namely that I didn’t want to do that kind of work. My teacher also taught me about Tracy Chapman that summer. Everyone knew Fast Car, but she talked about that debut album and the followup, Crossroads and how somehow that had inspired her to go into the Peace Corps. That didn’t make sense at the time, but I guess I can see it now.

Anyway, I was thinking about that today, pulling weeds in my own flowerbeds, stuffing lawn bags and sweating and listening to Tracy Chapman. I was also hoping none of the neighbors would walk by, notice me doing all that and giving me the nod of disapproval.

“About time he got around to that.”

“The last owners would have never.”

“No they would not.”

Yeah, well, they had kids and I’m guessing the children got sent out to do their share of the work. Or they hired someone. We’ve done that. It’s been … spotty. Sometimes great. Sometimes aggressive. Sometimes questionable.

Anyway, one man did walk by and, even across the yard, you could hear that he was on the phone. I paused to listen, wondering if he’d say “He’s actually doing it. I know. I know! No really, he is!”

I didn’t get it all today. I don’t know that I can, or want to get it all. Pretty much the entire Tracy Chapman catalog is great, much of it peerless, but it would need to be much larger for me to get of this weeding finished. Plus, there’s other work to be done. But there are things on the southern side of the house that I didn’t want to get choked out by undesirables, so I did that for a while, until it was time to come in and cool off. Because while it was only 88 degrees, I still managed to do a credible sweat test this morning. But two hours, noon, 88 degrees, and three comically large bags of now dead green things are ready to be disposed of. The bulk of the work on the south side of the house is done. I could still probably pull weeds for another hour there, plus a good 20 minute weed-eating session. But enough is enough.

Also, we had afternoon plans.

A while back we met a man at a conference who runs this development program for kids where soccer is the entryway, but they’re ultimately working to create scenarios where preschool through high school kids and beyond can build healthy bodies and minds. They have an indoor park, outdoor fields and people show up for the soccer, but find a full slate of programming and services for their community. It sounds amazing and so today we went to see the operation.

There was some high school pick-up soccer underway on their indoor pitch. No one invited me to play, thank goodness. We saw the rest of their facilities, which are lovely and growing. It’s not a community center, it’s more than that. We talked with the people that run the place for about 90 minutes. They’re six years in and still growing and doing some great work. It’s not just sport. Sport gets kids in the door, but then there is programming that helps the children learn about things like nutrition, interpersonal skills, money management, confidence building, and so on. They aren’t trying to build soccer players, the goal is to help kids in ways that matter on a real and human level. It’s quite charming, they’re very passionate about it, and it’s easy to see why.

Sport, as we talk about in classes a lot, means a lot more than just what happens on the field. In one class I teach a section on the real values of youth sport — fair play, collaboration, health, socialization, discipline, rules, respect, etc… — and that’s what this organization is after, too. What’s really interesting, to me, when I talk about those life lessons with other people that played youth sports, even college students who aren’t that far removed from it themselves, they quickly see how it helped them. We don’t always realize it at the time, but it is apparent in retrospective. It is obvious the value we can offer people. It is a mystery there aren’t more deliberate programs just like that.

And when you compare that to the infamous travel ball experience … no contest.

Stuff on the site I’d like to do, since I mentioned it … There are two or three of the old running projects I’d like to return to, and I will. I have to wrap up the local markers project. Easy enough, and that’s the one I combine with bike rides anyway. When the weather turns. I want to return to the happy habit of scanning photos from old books. It’s time intensive, and that’s the problem, but ultimately it entertains me and makes this place look, determined to follow ancient thing.

Another thing I’d like to do more is diving into old newspaper clippings. It’s a great way to learn about a place, or remember about a place. But it seems odd to do that about places where I no longer live. And the place where I do live doesn’t have a wealth of digitized newsprint online. This could devolve into a “where do you belong?” paragraph, but this is Wednesday and while all of my projects on the site ideally would have a day of the week, roughly, the old existential issue is not a Wednesday item. (Wednesdays are for markers, if you’ll recall, and they will be so once again.

These projects one need only invest the time and I say the thing I always say to myself, “After so and so … then you can do that.” And that never changes, but it at least has the added advantage of being frustrating.

Tomorrow, back to the classwork. If I can bend my fingers to the keyboard.