100 to 6

Tonight's televised college football game on ESPN is a matchup between the The University of Houston and the University of Tulsa, the game is at 8:00pm Eastern Time.

Fifty years ago, this year the two teams also played, in Houston at the Astrodome, which was three years old at this time.

                                                         
                                                             

It was Saturday evening, November 23, 1968, and the site was the Astrodome. The 11th ranked UH Cougars were scheduled to play an average game against the Golden Hurricane of Tulsa University, but nobody really gave the Oklahomans much of a chance that season against the highly regarded Cougars from Houston.

Tulsa had a good excuse for what was about to unfold that night in Houston. The Tulsa team had been hit with a flu epidemic during the week leading up to the UH game. Some players were too ill to make the trip to Houston and others who did travel may have been either still too ill to play or just coming down with the bug on game day.

With the score Houston 88, Tulsa 6. Houston inserted a reserve Cornerback to the Offense to help play out the clock. The Receiver was named Larry Gatlin, who along with his brothers later gained fame as the Gatlin Brothers Band. Gatlin was inserted into the game as a wide receiver with the ball on the Tulsa 25 yard line. They were supposed to just grind it out to "kill the clock", but the rare chance for Gatlin was apparently too fat to miss. He and back up QB Rusty Clark teamed up for an easy 25 yard TD pass, which I think may have been the only TD of Gatlin’s college career. The score was then Houston 93 and the Tulsa Golden Hurricane 6.

                                                                 

Larry Gatlin

With about a minute left to go in the game Tulsa has to punt again and a reserve player for Houston named Simpson receives the punt and ignores the "palms down" signals from the Houston sideline to "take a knee" and down the ball, instead returns it through theTulsa defense to score one more touchdown creating a score of 99-6, with this score and the ongoing rivalry between Tulsa and Houston Oilmen. Houston successfully kicked for the extra point and an unbelievable 100-6 win.

By the way, Houston's Larry Gatlin was not the only player in the Astrodome that day to later gain some fame and notoriety, Phillip McGraw, now famous as TV Psychologist "Dr. Phil" was on the roster  as a Lineman for Tulsa, 

                                                          

Dr. Phil

Hopefully tonight's game will be a little more competitive.

Bourbon Street Blues

The University of Tulsa in January of 1970 offered a one month option to earn 3 three credit hours or to not take classes that month. I was a Student - Athlete at the time there, though with good reason both sides of the hyphened title could have been justifiably questioned in my case. Therefore it was literally a no brainer to take the month off.


                                                                   

The University is the smallest school in the Nation to participate in Division One Athletics, a private school affiliated with the Presbyterian Church and most of the students are commuters. These factors contribute to why the level of on campus social activity is as dismal as their usual athletic team's won loss records.

Upon my returning to campus in early February and resettling in LaFortune Hall, the on campus exclusive asylum for all student athletes, my roommate and I realized we had 5 full days before classes and our brutal off season training began.

Mark Fuhrer had drawn the short straw and was assigned to be my roommate in a suite that had 3 separate rooms with two jocks in each room. Mark had been a star running back at Lincoln Park High School in Lincoln Park, Michigan; a southern suburb of Detroit. The first night Mark called home to talk to his father, his Dad asked who his roommate was; Mark told him a guy from West Virginia. His Dad said "Oh Mark that is Appalachia, be really good to him"

Mark had returned to campus before me after the "Interim Semester" and had brought two of his high school buddies with him who planned to enroll and get a place off campus.

We were able to have our own cars on campus after the first semester, so I had driven my yellow 1965 Ford Falcon cross country and was one of few underclassmen to have wheels available. The 1057 mile trip from Chestnut Avenue in Oak Hill, West Virginia had taken its toll on the car.  


                                                                   

The car which was known as the "Maize Blaze" reached a certain level of celebrity when former Dallas Cowboy All Pro Drew Pearson, who was one of my suite mates, mentioned it in his autobiography in the chapter were he was describing going on his first date with Marcia Haynes. the daughter of former Harlem Globetrotter Marques Haynes. In the book Pearson says "he borrowed a car from one of the white guys in the dorm" I didn't get a shout out, footnote. nothing. This is why I don't fret much that he has never been enshrined in Canto's Football Hall of Fame.

The combination of a car, free time and two new conspirators combined to create a perfect storm for a dubious plan throwing good judgement to the wind.

Someone in this brain trust realized that Lent was to begin in the next few days and with deductive reasoning realized that meant Mardi Gras would be happening. Further reasoning was that we were in the South as was New Orleans, ergo we cold not be that far from the Crescent City.

Assessing our abilities we needed a car, so we pooled our money to buy a new alternator for the Falcon. We had no idea how far New Orleans was from Tulsa. We theorized that most of the trip was through the East Texas oil fields and therefore gasoline would be even less than the 22 cents or so a gallon cost it was in Tulsa.

With a free road map we had picked up at a Phillips 66 gas station we headed southeast toward Texas then Louisiana; hours and hours of monotonous driving with nothing to see but flat barren land, longhorn cattle and oil wells.

About ten hours into the trip, I was behind the wheel on a two lane highway heading  due South into the bowels of Louisiana we came upon a tractor trailer that refused to allow me to pass. Each time I would make an attempt to pass, the driver would block the passing lane. Each time I would follow him closely he would run the truck over into the gravel shoulder and pepper our windshield with gravel.

This persistent highway harassment managed to awaken the other three in the car. The consensus was that this guy would eventually have to stop and we would have our opportunity to beat the hell out of him. Sure enough after backing off and patiently following him for about an hour and he pulled into a rest stop.  As he pulled his big rig to the curb we pulled up to his cab. Just as we were about to spring all four door open and send this Driver to his maker, the door to his cab opened and all we saw was the double barrel shot gun pointed directly at the car. We wisely made a snap decision that this was our perfect opportunity to get in front of him and I kicked the accelerator to the floor and we proceeded on to New Orleans,

Fourteen hours later and as sun was rising we pulled into New Orleans. The cumulative net worth of all  of the occupants in the car that morning was under one hundred dollars, therefore renting a motel room for two nights in New Orleans during Mardi Gras was not in the cards.

In that we had completed the entire goal of our plan by making it to New Orleans, so it was necessary to now figure out another plan of action. I was exhausted from driving 14 hours without sleep, crashing was my singular goal.

The quick answer was to find Tulane University, I would park there and sleep in the car while the others would go into a dorm and try to find free breakfast.

After three hours or so of sleep I was ready to take in the Big Easy, though we were clueless to what Mardi Gras celebrations were really about. We learned it was basically about parades with lavish floats and consuming alcohol. The drink of choice were Hurricanes, a sweet red fruity cocktail, but they were priced beyond what our meager budget would allow.

We learned that the real parties were not open to folks like us and the fun was the parades and darkness.

The crowds were like nothing I had ever seen before or since. It was truly a mass of body to body humanity. You were compressed so tightly had you collapsed you would not have fallen.


                                                               

This would have been a Claustrophobic's worst nightmare. The entire French Quarter was like this and fights and some violence,  Famous Trumpeter Al Hirt was hit with a brick while performing on a float during the parade that night.

Bottles of Ripple and locally brewed Jax Beer were within our budget  if the fancy red drinks weren't. We rationalized there would be a time in our future lives that we could afford a hotel room with a balcony overlooking all of this rather than in a car and drink all of the Hurricanes we desired. But that night we were satisfied to have a waterfront room on Lake Pontchartrain as the we pulled the car up to the shore as it slept four that night.

I have been fortunate to go back to New Orleans several times since that weekend, never for a Mardi Gras, but I have done a Sugar Bowl, eaten at most all of the great restaurants and the pleasure of staying in some of the finer hotels.

But the experience has never been comparable to the 1970 Mardi Gras as Laissez les bon temps roulez

Growing Up Rich

My mother, was born during America's Great Depression, into a family in Southern West Virginia with five other surviving children and a father that was a coal miner. When recalling her childhood she used to say, "we were dirt poor but we didn't know it." When asked to explain what that meant she said that everybody she knew had the same
lifestyle; so she had no frame of reference that their family was any different from anyone else.

Sometime during my fifth year of life my parents moved from Fayetteville, West Virginia to the East End of Oak Hill, West Virginia. where I would start school.

Our new home was located on a dead end street, Rhodes Street.  At the time there were ten houses on each side of the Street. Actually five pair of identically designed houses. Our house was a small three bedroom Gunnison Home. Gunnison Homes were prefabricated post World War II homes developed to meet the demand of the thousands of soldiers needing housing after the War. A Gunnison Home could be assembled on a cinder block foundation in a matter of days. Our home was exactly like the one beside ours. Three small bedrooms, one extremely small bathroom, a living room and a small eat in kitchen.
                                                             

A Gunnison Home

Rhodes Street ran from North to South. Our house was on the West side of the Street, the Arbuckle Creek flowed behind our House. The Creek ran from the working coal mines in the small mining towns of Summerlee and Lochgelly. The bed and the water was coal black, in that it was simply the waste and sewage from the mines. This long before the days of the EPA the only protection we had was the threat of our mothers to stay away.
Which was taken in one ear and out the other, even when I was warned that playing near or in the creek would surely cause me to contract hydrophobia, which she described as something akin to the plague.

As dumb as we were to the hazardous waste exposure, we knew by the horrible smell to avoid getting into the water. On days when the smell was not too acrid the creek offered some entertainment when we would harvest small tree branches to use to spear and retrieve "stink balloons" It was a few years later that I learned why our parents were so apoplectic about this sport, when I realized we had been fishing for used condoms.


My interest was singularly focused on sports, my best buddy at the time was Tom Sarver. Tom was also a Rhodes Street kid and obsessed with sports. Practically every daylight hour Tommy and I would be playing whatever sport was in season as long as the day would last; and many nights sleeping over at one and others houses while studying sports trading cards or a sports board game until sent to bed, only to rise the next morning to begin the process over.

The boys of Rhodes Street, at that time, were blessed with a vacant lot, that acted as what is now called a multipurpose sports facility The lot was primarily used for football and straight base baseball, which means you only have a pitcher, a batter and if lucky you could round up one fielder, but that was rare. Though the lot was quite level on top the outfield was a small cliff.

 A ball hit over the cliff was a home run and required considerable time being found. The search was most always lengthy and difficult in that the baseball was most often a sphere of black tape that had been tightly wrapped around what had once been a real baseball that had literally had the stitches and cover worn off.

The property to the north of the field was a grown over field with cherry and apple tress. There was a charming white house with a large wrap around porch. The house was occupied at times by a man known only to us as Groucho.

 Should a foul ball be hit over onto his property and you were to attempt to retrieve it, you could suffer the wrath of being shot by the Maniac or at the very least receive a severe tongue lashing in some unknown foreign tongue. I had once myself had one of this close encounters in rescuing one of these strays. Therefore if a hunt for a ball would go on too long, a reasoned assessment would be declared lost depending on the balls condition as opposed to our lives.

All of our parents had accepted that he was crazy and we were forbidden to go onto his property and told should we be killed it would be justified. Much later in life I learned Groucho was in fact a Russian musician who was a member of the Pittsburgh Symphony and this was his summer home that we disturbed

For these reasons the field was much more suitable for football in that the trajectory of a pigskin is obviously much more predictable than a horse skin or more literally in our case a round cork wrapped in black tape.

It was usually easier to field a group for a football game, in that the older boys enjoyed the opportunity to knock hell out of the younger boys. The only form of protection that we would wear were ill fitting helmets. Once while I was still in grade school I was playing in one of these games and received a concussion which hospitalized me unconscious for over 20 hours. When I regained consciousness in a bed at the little hospital a nurse came in and said, "oh you're awake? Your mom wanted me to call her if you came to."

My mom came and took me home and I wasn't allowed to play football again for two weeks.

Rhodes Street's basketball venue was on the other end of the street in the back yard of Puck Painter's house. The basketball goal consisted of a backboard nailed to an oak tree made of weather worn and rotting plywood and a rim that had the remnant or a net sadly hanging from it. The court was about an eight foot by eight foot hardened and grass worn  part of the Painter's backyard. The dirt made it totally useless in rainy conditions, but dry or frozen it was well suited for imagining you were Jerry West or Rod Hundley making last second buzzer beating shots. The small dirt court was not conducive to much more than a 3 on 3 game, but that was fine in that it was usually just Tom and me or one of us alone shooting, rebounding and winning games in the arena in our minds.

And I, with their mother spent countless hours providing time and transportation for my sports playing sons in games, tournaments and sports camps. Expensive shoes and sports logo gear so they could have the maxim reward from sports participation I now realize trying so hard to make it better for them than I had experienced was impossible.

Tabouli, a Congressman and The Man

When I was a Senior in High School I had the opportunity to take a football recruiting trip to the University of Tulsa. While there, in order to  impress, I was taken to dinner at one of the best restaurants in Tulsa. A Lebanese steakhouse named Eddy's.

As a gawkey 17 year old kid from southern West Virginia, being in the flatland oil fields of Oklahoma there was a lot to take in; a newly expanded football stadium, Skelly Stadium, named for the Skelly Oil Company and a brand new athletic dorm that carried the name of another prominent Tulsa family, LaFortune Hall. Oklahoma, where the wind comes blowing off the Plains, seemed like a pretty cosmopolitan place as compared to Fayette County, West Virginia .

Of all the shiny new skyscrapers, oil baron supporters, and dreams of gridiron grandeur, what has stayed with me most was Eddy's Steak House and my introduction to the Lebanese salad called tabouli. Eddy's, as many old line steakhouses had dozens of black and white photographs of celebrities and athletes that have dined in the establishment.

The Tulsa Oilers minor league baseball team's field manager at this time was a former Major League favorite of mine, the great Warren Spahn.  The Oilers were the AAA farm team of the St. Louis Cardinals. Spahn was the best left handed pitcher in the history of major league baseball. This baseball Legend's photographs dominated the walls of greats and near greats that had dined there

                    

One of the few and special nights I was able to have dinner while a student I was able to meet and shake hands with Mr. Spahn and his dinner companion and friend Stan Musial. Stan the Man was retired but still involved with the Cardinals Organization. Musial was once  quoted as saying about his friend "Spahn will never get into the Hall of Fame because he will never stop pitching"

I have had a couple of occasions to be back in Tulsa since those days, each time I have found time to have dinner at the place that introduced me to what has become one of my favorite foods, tabouli.

 In the late 80's, about 20 years later than the football recruiting trip. As Chairman of the West Virginia  State Senate Banking and Insurance Committee, the National Conference of Insurance Legislators held a meeting in Tulsa which I was able to attend.


                                                                                    


While there I met the Chairman of the Ohio State Senate Insurance Committee. He and I were invited to dinner by a couple of Insurance Lobbyists, so I suggested Eddy's to get my tabouli fix. The Ohio State Senator, Bob Ney later became a U.S. Congressman who gained national notoriety as the fall guy in the Jack Abramoff bribery scandal. My dinner companion that evening was sentenced to 30 months in Federal Prison of which the last few months were at the Federal Facility in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Many years have past, two I met at Eddy's are in the Hall of Fame, one has brought great shame. My favorite food, the same.

Tabouli.

A Football Coach

As a boy growing up in the Southern West Virginia town of Oak Hill I dreamed of the day that I could  play football for the Collins High School Red Devils.

The first opportunity that a boy had to play interscholastic football back then was the ninth grade.
Even though it was the junior high team you got to wear the Red and Black colors, although rather than being called Red Devils as the high school team, the team was known by the much less truculent nickname, the Collins Junior High Imps.

I was fortunate enough to be the Co Captain, with the late Kenny Spann, of the 1965 version of this team. The team was coached Bill Baker who had been an outstanding quarterback at Concord College, with Coach Baker's able guidance and an unusual amount of size, speed and toughness for a ninth grade team we were able to defeat the team from Beckley, West Virginia which was tantamount to taking out Darth Vader. At that time most people around town could not recall the last time an Oak Hill team in any sport had beaten a team from Beckley, especially in football, in which the varsity team had suffered a long stretch of losing seasons.

                    

The Varsity was coached by Nelson Bragg. Bragg was a native, and former coach at Beckley, West Virginia. His hiring was with the understanding that he would bring the Oak Hill Program to the level of the Woodrow Wilson team in Beckley. Bragg had been Captain of the 1938 Marshall College team, that was coached by the Legendary Cam Henderson.

Coach Bragg idolized Henderson and one of his two sons was named for the Coach that is memorialized in Huntington with his name on their basketball arena. He often made reference to him and how tough and brilliant he had been. This was the era when the epitome of football coaching was Paul "Bear" Bryant in college ball and Vince Lombardi with the Green Bay Packers in the Pros. Both known for their sour temperaments, training practices that were grueling at best and sadistic at worst.

Coach Bragg played this role with perfection. Mean, unlikable and proud of it, the problem was Bryant and Lombardi won championships, Bragg could not muster even a winning record.

                                                                              
 He did look and dress the part though, His face was tanned crusty and his disposition was gnarled. He seemed to take great pleasure to make his players rankle. The rare times he would smile you noticed his diastema  and sizable gaps between most teeth. He looked like he could eat a cob of corn through a picket fence. He chain smoked Camel Regular cigarettes. He would squint meanly at you and get nose to nose with you to chew you out; close enough to smell his bad breath which he proudly called his "houseatosis"

When our class became sophomores and members of the Varsity team which the previous year had not won a game 0-10. We thought we were going to be the saviours of the long struggling losing streak and that Coach Bragg would welcome us as his bright stars of the future. We would repair the school's tarnished football reputation.
                                                                  
We were wrong, Coach Bragg was determined that we were some how a fluke that had been coddled by the younger Coach Baker and his modern more humane and cerebral ways of coaching.

Oak Hill was not a rich school, but yet a Triple A Class, the largest class in West Virginia. The uniforms that Coach Bragg had us wearing during the era of Joe Namath breaking in white shoes on the gridiron, while we  had to wear high top, boot like black shoes. The cleats on the shoes in that era were just that, hard plastic spikes with steel tips. The tips could be filed sharper, and though illegal, it was done on occasion allowing you to "cleat" someone.

The game and practice jerseys had long sleeves, which were far from the on field fashion at the time, by any other team but ours. Being a rather dapper high school sophomore in pressed khakis and button down madras shirts, I felt the the team that dressed well, played well. This was just one of the almost everything Coach Bragg and I disagreed on.

My soft attitude and sissy ways did not conform to the Coach's ideals of a football player. He liked the little tough guys. The hard scrabble guys from the surrounding old coal camps. He loved the saying" it isn't the size of the dog but the size of the fight in the dog." The proudest I ever saw him was when one of his tough little guys was able to fill his starting defensive back position the following Friday after being stabbed by a knife the previous weekend. That was the kind of grit Bragg wanted in his players and those of us coming from this soft, but winning background were not worthy of his team. Yet two or three of us had been listed on the second team. I was never quite sure because he wanted us there, or that he wanted us a scrimmage fodder for his much larger, stronger and experienced Seniors.

I remember lining up as a defensive player against the first team tackle a very big and strong black man, "Big Ben" Johnson. "Big Ben" was worthy of his name and took great joy in intimidating the newbies. As Ben came to the line and begin to bend down into his blocking position he pulled up the left long sleeve of his jersey to expose his extremely large black forearm, which he had written on with white chalk the word "BLACK" as he shifted down to his position he pulled up his other sleeve where he had chalk written the word "POWER" bringing both fists together to show me the completed phrase while glaring at me in the eyes and smiling big exposing his white mouthpiece. In the 90 degree August heat I begin to question my love of the sport and my mortality.

The summer preseason didn't become cooler or easier as realized as a sophomore and second team I was not going to be much more than a blocking dummy and a backup receiver.

Second only to Junkyard Dog toughness, Coach Bragg loved to see you bleed. During one practice that summer I was victim of a "cleating" on my left hand which was bleeding profusely. It didn't really hurt but the blood was coming pretty fast, so I asked a trainer for assistance which infuriated Bragg he came over to look at it and I could see the joy of a vampire in his eyes, he gave me a rare smile and said "hell son that little scratch is three feet from your heart you ain't gonna die, you can let your momma put a band aid on it when you get home tonight" I obviously didn't die and did get it taped after practice.

As the regular season began the team continued to lose, but that was actually kind of good for playing time for a second team sophomore in that when the game was out of hand you would get a quarter of playing time.

As the losing continued it was evident that the Seniors on the team had basically given up. The next to the last game of the season was against the reigning AAA State Champion Bluefield Beavers in Mitchell Stadium on the Bluefield West Virginia Bluefield ,Virginia  stateline. Mitchell Stadium is an impressive and large, for West Virginia high school standards stadium built during the CCC Great Depression era. West Virginia University had once played Virginia Tech there. The Beavers were undefeated, nobody had even come close to them. Rumor was they had not even broken a sweat, therefore and for luck had not washed there highly fashionable and short sleeved maroon uniforms.

The game, though their last regular season game was their Homecoming and it was to be played at 1:00 pm in the afternoon on Saturday November 5, 1966.  We traveled to the game early Saturday morning in our usual school bus manner though  during the day across the West Virginia Turnpike and south to Mercer County. Lambs on the way to slaughter.
                                        
In one of the more bizarre moves, even for Coach Bragg; as we topped the hill on the Turnpike at Flat Top which is one of the highest points in the State, he asked the bus driver to pull over on the shoulder. He then ordered us all off of the bus and pointed out the panoramic view of the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains that you can see at that elevation. He made some analogy that this is why we needed to win this game and that we would need to be strong like the mountains. This meant little to a bus full of teenage boys, but confirmed to us that the man was not sane.
    
The home stands of Mitchell Stadium were packed with loyal Homecoming Bluefield fans there to Wayne Davis, my friend who was also a sophomore and second team is excellent at math and after their second score turned to me on the bench and said " I just calculated the time and at this rate they may score over two hundred." Fortunately they were just leading at the halftime 36-0.

The locker room at halftime was bizarre. Even this team that was used to and accepted losing were shell shocked. It was freezing cold in early November and we were physically being beat up too. Bragg came into the dressing room late and was outraged and berserk. He screamed and cussed like never before and said none of the Seniors or starters would play in the second half. That the second team and sophomores would finish the game, that we couldn't do worse. At least he was correct about that, the final score was 56-7.

On the bus on the way home Bragg's tantrum continued. He threw several the Seniors off the team, There was only one game left in the season.

That night after we returned to our gym I had stayed late to have some attention paid to my aches and pains and I was the last one in the locker room. Not knowing anyone was there Coach Bragg came in through another door and laid down on a bench face down and began crying. Up to that point in my life I had wanted to be a Coach, after that experience I changed my mind completely.

Coach Bragg was fired as the Coach after one more losing season and finished his teaching career at another school in the County doing nothing but seven periods of study halls.

Shortly after his retirement he and his wife Jewel, who was also a retired school teacher, together died in a fiery car crash.

The first year under a new coach the team went 5-5, the first time in many years there wasn't a losing record at Oak Hill.

I liked Coach Bragg, though most could not figure out why; maybe it is a football thing or maybe something else. But there is not a time that I am driving south on I-77 on the West Virginia Turnpike that I don't admire that view. I think of him, and it seems the older I get the more I appreciate it. I still have the scar on my left hand as a remembrance too, it didn't kill me.

Lubbock in the Lone Star State

In 1985 fueled by my own careless ambition and the ease of raising money from Savings and Loans that were soon to fail. I considered buying a small chain of radio stations in the Mid and Southwest United States.

                                                                        
                                                                        


The stations were owned by a family newspaper company. The Seaton family of Kansas owned newspapers and radio stations in Kansas, Nebraska, and Texas. The Patriarch of the family Fred Andrew Seaton had been the United States Secretary of Interior under fellow Kansan Dwight Eisenhower Presidency. Alaska became a State under Secretary Seaton. He had also been a US Senator representing Nebraska

                                                            
Communications Equity, primarily a cable television investment banking firm, was expanding over into radio and represented the Family in the selling.  Due diligence which is a term used in mergers and acquisitions which mean going and looking at what you may be buying. Communications Equity which was flush with money from the heydays of cable television deals had their own private jet which they allowed one of their guys and me to use with their two pilots to check out the stations.

The plane picked me up in Pittsburgh, PA from there we flew to Coffeyville, Kansas, a town about 90 minutes from Tulsa, to visit the two stations there and spend the evening visiting at the home of R.M. Seaton who published the Coffeyville Journal and oversaw the operation of the AM and FM radio stations. The next morning we made the short flight to Manhattan, KS to meet with Edward Seaton who was R.M.'s son and the Publisher of the Manhattan Mercury. Edward like his father was a great and personable gentleman and businessman. He was a Harvard graduate and was friends with West Virginia's the Governor Jay Rockefeller who had been his classmate while in Cambridge.

After lunch we took off for Hastings, Nebraska where the family owned the Hastings Tribune and KHAS am radio station. This was my first, and to this date, my only visit to Nebraska. The Hastings airport was very small and had minimal commercial service. The arrival of the Citation jet was a pretty big event for them. The few people that were at the small terminal looked rather disappointed when we walked off and were not recognizable as celebrities.

It was very cold in Nebraska and we were told when we checked into the Holiday Inn, which at the time was the only recognizable lodging brand in town, that the best steak in town was available just across the street. After refreshing in our separate rooms we walked across the street to the recommended place, where we ordered a couple of steaks and a bottle of wine. Our waitress was somewhat embarrassed in that she did not know how to use a corkscrew. I was able to talk her through the process in a manner that she felt comfortable.

Early the next morning after visiting with the General Manager of the radio station we headed to the airport where the pilots had fresh fruit, bagels, juice, coffee and the Wall Street Journal in the plane waiting for us, we were wheels up and headed to our last stations that were in Lubbock, Texas.

Realizing this was the last day we were going to have use of the jet and no more stations to visit we decided that we should celebrate when we got to Lubbock by having barbecue and Lone Star Beer.

Though I had been to Texas before, I had never been to Lubbock, which is best know for being the Hometown of Buddy Holly and Texas Tech University, a school where WVU Old Grads will recall that football coach Jim Carlen left Morgantown to coach. Then allowing his top assistant Bobby Bowden to take over the head coaching duties in 1970.

                                                                  

We rented a car at the airport and went to explore the town seeing the Buddy Holly statue and the impressive Texas Tech Stadium, then to check into the hotel, before our pursuit of barbecue and Lone Star Beer.

After checking into our rooms we agreed to meet in the bar in 30 minutes for our first Lone Star.

While waiting in the lobby for my traveling companion I was reading an article in the Lubbock Avalanche newspaper about a bizarre murder that had happened at a ranch outside of town. The mother of the family, which sounded a lot like the Ewings of South Fork , had been murdered by her son. In interviewing one of the neighbors on their thoughts, the neighbor was in disbelief because the accused "seemed like a nice young man and always had a good crease in his jeans" which I made a mental note of should I decide to get into business in West Texas.

Also while waiting in the lobby the University of Houston basketball team checked in for a game they had that evening with the Texas Tech Red Raiders. After their coach, Pat Foster distributed the players their keys he went to the desk and told the clerk to completely turn off all of the phones in their rooms. This in the days before cell phones was a prudent thing to do with his student athletes.

Finally we went to the bar and ordered two Lone Stars to be told by the bartender that they did not carry Lone Star Beer, which we found inconceivable, so we immediately left to find a real Texas bar that would have the beer of the Lone Star State. After striking out at two more watering holes to find out brand we were directed to a barbecue restaurant that we felt would surely have the brand.

After being seated, our waitress came and took our drink order and of course we ordered two long neck Lone Stars. She can back in short time to announce that they also did not stock Lone Star. So now I know there is something terribly wrong. perhaps a labor stoppage or product shortage. So doing my best J.R. Ewing impression I order a bourbon and branch and asked the waitress to please go to her manager and find out why nobody had Lone Star.

Upon coming back to deliver the cocktails and take our dinner order she made no mention of the answer to the ongoing lack of Lone Star. I said to her,"well did you find out the answer to my question?" and she said, "yes, but I can't tell you" Looking both surprised and displeased I said "why not?" she said "I just can't" I went on to tell her our quandary and suggested that her tip would be more liberal if I could find the answer. So she begrudgingly whispered that the manager said they didn't carry Lone Star, "because Lone Star tasted like piss." This was not the news we had been waiting to hear. As we were finishing up our dinner, the manager came to our table to apologize and also to give us directions to a bar near the Texas Tech campus that sold Lone Star, which was cheap and therefore a favorite of the students. After our first bottle we were pretty well convinced that the manager's assessment of the beer had been correct.

                                                                      
Shortly after this is when the huge savings and loan crisis developed and the S&Ls in Texas that had agreed to the financing of the deal reneged.

It was a deal that obviously was not intended to happen, but Lubbock taught me a lesson about beer and blue jeans. Perhaps now I know why Buddy Holly felt so blue about Peggy Sue.

A Festival of Memories

I have taken a hiatus from writing this blog, realizing that very few of the subjects which I have written has happened in this Century.

So this gives me the opportunity to write about something current that in fact is more about the Twentieth Century.

This weekend my first born son, Derek and I took a trip back to New Martinsville, West Virginia a town that we moved from in 1990. I had been back once briefly, Derek had not been back to this town of about 7,000 people on the banks of the Ohio River.

Coincidentally the Community was presenting, what has now become annual, Festival of Memories.
I made the drive west from Fairmont , West Virginia over US 250 and West Virginia Route 7 from Hundred, West Virginia on into New Martinsville. It is about a 55 mile drive that takes 90 minutes to make and longer on the return after dark.

When you finally reach New Martinsville it is such a relief to get on WV Route 2 after a drive that truly takes all the romanticism out of John Denver's Country Roads.

The Festival is all held on Main Street, so parking was at a premium after finding a place on the River.
I walked over to Witschey's Supermarket, which is a New Martinsville landmark, to check out the place that I was in at least once everyday that I had lived in the Town. With three growing boys, I was told after we had moved from the town that Bill Witschy the Proprietor and friend, had said not only was he sorry to see us move, but the family had been one of his best customers. Which was confirmed when Derek later said that he may go back there to see if they still had Garbage Pail Kids. 

After leaving the much changed and larger Store I walked south on Main Street to a side street where classic cars were being displayed there I ran into Derek and his friend Kate. We continued our walk down Main Street running into Santina Vigliotti, who while in high school had been a part time employee at my radio station,

Santina and me on Main Street New Martinsville

 After being a teacher she is now a Main Street merchant with her Presto Lunch and very active in several community improvements in town, she was joy as a teenager and is now a great asset to the Community as an adult. As I had written before I have been very fortunate in having good young people working with me.

Kate, Derek and I continued our trek down Main Street with Derek surveying the building that we had owned that his mother's fabric shop had been located and then on to the Court Restaurant which is the landmark eatery across from the Wetzel County Court House. The Rotary, the Chamber of Commerce, all of the latest gossip and really good home cooked food can always be found at the Court. Derek had memories of the place, which had expanded and changed. Breakfast with he and his brother Wes was a tradition for the three of us on Saturday mornings.

We proceeded back north on Main Street recalling times while there, where Derek as a little boy was just  in a class by himself in all the big wheel races on Main Street and recollections of his fifth and sixth grade basketball skills where he almost always won all the games in which he played, but also usually individually scored more points than the entire team of his opponents.

Not only had I operated both radio stations in town, but had been involved in almost every civic activity there was. Chairing the Hospital Board, President of the Chamber of Commerce, was President of their Regatta, on the Rotary Board, and for a period the State Senator. We were dug into the community.

The three of us took a pleasant respite from the walk at the lovely riverfront home of Sherron Winer, whose husband Sam was downtown promoting his speedboat races which is his and her passion.
Kate, who is skilled at fixing things, wanted to visit the Ace Hardware, this is a very good thing in that no Thomas men are handy, it also allowed us to walk east on North Street passing several other memorable landmarks including the old radio station building and the site of the old train station, which was unmercifully torn down while we had lived there.

Kate and Derek left to do some independent exploration and I went back to Main Street in that the activities were not scheduled to begin until later.

I was able to chat with the regionally famous and recent inductee into the West Virginia Broadcasters Hall of Fame "Uncle Dougger" who had done afternoon shifts at the radio stations there in the Eighties

                                    

Uncle Dougger and I catching up

He and I always had great fun working together and he truly is a legend in the Northern part of West Virginia where thousands grew up listening to him and going to his dances.

A day well spent getting to spend time with good people I had not seen in well over twenty years
No apologies for reliving fond memories, in fact it was rather festive,
Thank you for the memories, New Martinsville.