1948-1970 Dad and Me

Posted on August 29, 2024 by Mike

I have limited the period covered by this entry to the years before I left for the army in October of 1970. The few face-to-face contacts that I had with my parents from my arrival in Connecticut up to the last time that I saw my mom are listed in the “Mom and me” blog entry.

James E. Wavada was born on August 25, 1924, or at least that is what he has always claimed. For some reason he was never able to locate his birth certificate. I learned about this when he encountered difficulty in obtaining an official ID card in 2005 after he moved to Connecticut. He was the youngest of the three sons of Henry and Hazel Wavada. They lived in Holy Name parish in the Rosedale section of Kansas City, KS. His two brothers were named Victor and Henry Joseph (Uncle Vic and Fr. Joe to me).

The Wavadas: from the left Fr. Joe, dad, Uncle Vic, Grandmom Hazel, and Grandad Henry. My mom probably took this photo with her Brownie.

Hazel’s maiden name was Cox. My dad said that they were “Scotch Irish”, descended from the people whom the British government transplanted from Scotland to Northern Ireland. Hazel once confided to me that the Wade Hamptons¹, powerful figures in South Carolina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were among her ancestors.

Henry was fifteen years older than Hazel. I think that they were both employed in the meat packing industry in some capacity. Henry’s ancestry is foggy to me.² My dad considered himself Irish, but the first Wavadas (or whatever the name was originally) reportedly set sail from Marseilles and lived in Alsace. They apparently settled in Fort Wayne, IN.

Jim was decidedly left-handed. Swinging a golf club was the only thing that he did right-handed^.3 His writing method involved curling his hand around so that he pulled the pen instead of pushing it. My understanding is that that meant that his right hemisphere was dominant and his cerebrum was contralaterally organized. The script that this produced was illegible to nearly everyone except for mom and his secretary.

As a youth dad reportedly had a temporary episode of alopecia totalis. It must have been very embarrassing for him, but all of his hair eventually grew back. I judged that the somewhat weird fact that his scalp hair was still dark when his eyebrows had turned white⁴ was probably related to that illness in his youth. I might be wrong.

For a while he called himself “Pibby”. Evidently he had difficulty saying “Jimmy”.

My dad never had anything good to say about his father, who was an alcoholic. He told me that Hazel had to pull him out of bars. Other anecdotes about Henry and his family have been posted here.

My dad and his two brothers grew up during the depression. It must have been extremely tough on Hazel, but she was up to it. She lived longer than all of my other known antecedents. She died in 1989 at the age of 90.

This, believe it or not, is the dormitory in which the three Wavada boys lived while they

Jim and his brothers all matriculated at Maur Hill, a boarding school run by the Benedictine monks. It was located in Atchison, KS, approximately fifty miles from KC KS. Hazel reportedly negotiated a deal with the Benedictines that one of the boys would become a priest if all three were given scholarships. I know only a few things about my dad’s time at Maur Hill:

The photo of Jim Wavada in the *Maurite* for 1942

His yearbook lists the following activities:
- Course: Classical
- Tatler (the student newspaper): 3
- Honor Roll: 2,3
- Sacristan: 2
- Pres. Servers’ Society: 4
- Student Manager Athletics: 3.
The fact that no activities were listed with a “1” leads me to think that he probably attended Ward High as a freshman and then transferred.
He won the school-wide oratory contest in 1942. This was not in his yearbook, but I learned about it when the school invited him back to judge the contest decades later, perhaps in 1962. I accompanied him to Atchison.
He confided to me that he had been terrible at math (especially geometry) and French. The French teacher reportedly said that he had the worst French accent he had ever heard. I suspect that he got through the other subjects using his incredible memory and his writing and speaking talent.
He learned to play back-handed ping pong. I played him once. He could not handle spin, but his reflexes were much better than mine.
He learned from other students that smoking was cool. He became addicted to cigarettes for more than forty years.
He learned to play golf, but the only clubs available were right-handed.
A man named Henry Etchegaray, who lived in Mexico City but was in dad’s class at Maur Hill (and lettered in football!), visited us one time. I remember no details.

At some point while he was in high school he evidently met my mom. Maybe it was shortly after he graduated and she was on summer break . They never told me the details, and I never asked. I am pretty sure that they communicated by mail while he was in the army, but I have not seen any of the letters.

The guy on the right is dad. The other gentleman is, I think, the man named Louis that we visited in Colorado.

Shortly after high school he enlisted. He told me that he was rejected (in World War II!) by the navy for “insufficient chest and shoulder development”. Maybe it was just as well; he could not swim. I never saw him in a swimming pool or pond, but he did take a motorboat out on Cass Lake in Minnesota a few times.

He was six feet tall and weighed 123 pounds when he first donned the olive drab. His performance on the mechanical aptitude test that the army required new enlistees to take was so bad that the guy running the test accused him of cheating on the other tests.

He served in the Pacific in WW II. He almost never talked about it except to say that he did well in ping pong. He ended as a sergeant, but something that he mentioned once seemed to indicate that he had been busted a rank or two at least once. He had little respect for most of the other grunts that he served with, but he made one life-long friend in Jake Jacobson.

I would love to know where dad and mom were when this photo was taken and who took it. Note that dad has his cigarette in his right hand, probably as a courtesy to mom.

Fighting for more than two years against the Japanese definitely had a permanent effect on his world view. Our family never had rice for supper when Jim was in town. If he ever ate any oriental food, it was not until late in his life. He firmly believed that the two nuclear attacks ended the war. I wondered what he would have thought when historians began to assert that the Japanese government and military leaders were more concerned about the Russians’ invasion of northern islands than the immolation of civilians.

Nearly all of my dad’s friends went to college on the G.I. bill. He did not. I am not sure that he even considered it.

This is my favorite photo from the wedding.

He married Dolores Cernech on September 1, 1947. His brother Joe, who had been ordained only three months earlier, officiated at the wedding in St. Peter’s cathedral in KC KS. What transpired in the year and a half between my dad’s discharge and the wedding? Decades later he disclosed two nuggets of information about that period: 1) Mom’s father was against the marriage, but Clara, her mother, somehow persuaded her husband that it was for the best; 2) He might have gotten into serious trouble if he did not get married. There were no more details, but he also mentioned something about pinball machines, which in those days were common in bars.

Life in KC KS 1948-54

The couple lived for seven and a half years in the house owned by Dolores’s parents, John and Clara Cernech. As far as I know, dad never worked anywhere except Business Men’s Assurance (BMA). I assume that he was employed there when he got married, but I could find no proof of it. As an employee he would have almost certainly received free health insurance. Otherwise, I cannot imagine how he could have afforded all of the medical bills my first few years on earth certainly generated.

Dad and J.K. Higdon, president of BMA, in 1951. I know only one other person with a head shaped like dad’s.

I can only imagine what my dad thought when he heard about my hare lip. He never talked about it later. In fact, I cannot remember him talking to me much at all in the years before I started school. The only memorable conversation was when he lightly reprimanded me for trading my Mickey Mantle baseball card to someone for a Vic Power card.

Dad was apparently pretty active at BMA. He started at the bottom, but by 1951 he was president of the KEO (“Know Each Other”) social club and one of four staff members on the company’s internal newspaper. In a short time he was transferred tp the sales department, where he eventually rose to the rank of Vice President. I think that he may have played a little baseball or softball there, too. The only equipment that he had was a first baseman’s glove. Although he sardonically referred to himself as “a natural athlete”, I never saw that side of him.

My only vivid memory of my dad in the house in KC KS involves the train set that he and Joey Keuchel set up “for me”⁵ in the basement. I am not sure how much my dad actually participated in that effort. I cannot remember ever seeing him use a tool as complicated as a screwdriver.

How dad got to work in the five years after my birth is unclear. Perhaps he took a bus or “street car” (trolly). In 1954 he bought a blue and white Ford. My recollection is that he had quite a bit of trouble with it. The word “lemon” was frequently employed.

I am pretty sure that Jake Jacobson visited us at least once before we moved to the suburbs. I remember that he had a big car, perhaps a convertible. He claimed that he could steer with his belly. When I got rambunctious he would cheerfully shout, “Michael, decorum!” I am pretty sure that the three of us rode with him to Swope Park for a picnic. A fair amount of beer was consumed. I remember a contest of pitching empty beer cans into the trash receptacle. In the fifties this was considered highly responsible behavior. People in those days thought nothing of hurling litter out of car windows. Let the prisoners clean it up.

I have a vague recollection of Fr. Joe taking me fishing at least once at Wyandotte County Lake. I don’t remember if mom or dad (very unlikely) was present. I seem to remember that there was a “gas war” going on. The going price was $.199 per gallon.

To my knowledge the only vacation that the three of us took was a long drive to Colorado to visit a man named Louis, who was one of Hazel’s relatives. I don’t remember his last name. This trip has been recounted here.

Prairie Village

In early 1955 the three of us moved to 7717 Maple, Prairie Village, KS, about twenty miles south of the house on N. Thorpe. My dad may have been in a car pool for work. Several BMA employees lived nearby.

I could hardly believe it when I found this picture. From left on the couch are Grandad John, me, Jamie, Clara, Hazel, Henry. On the far right is my dad. I don’t know who the person leaning in on the left is. I assume that the photographer was mom.

This was a big deal for me. We were in a new parish, which meant that I finished first grade at Queen of the Holy Rosary School instead of St. Peter’s. The Ursulines at QHRS seemed much nicer. Dad actually knew a few of them who had taught at his grade school in Holy Name parish in Rosedale.

When my sister Jamie arrived on the scene in January of 1956 dad must have been at least somewhat involved in picking her name. I don’t know how they came up with Jamesina. No St. Jamesina can be found in Wikipedia. They certainly did not ask my opinion. No one ever called her anything but Jamie.

Sometimes dad brought work home. On those occasions he sat at the kitchen table and filled up pads of paper with writing that reminded me of rain. Otherwise, he stretched out on our green sofa and read the newspapers (the Kansas City Star still had two editions), Time, Newsweek, or something about life insurance or marketing. He took no notes. He was not researching; he was absorbing.

If he read a book, it was non-fiction. I remember him reading only one novel ever, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather.. The salty language put him off.

He never watched movies. He said that he could not suspend disbelief. He saw people walking around furniture saying words that other people had written and feigning emotions. He attended one movie that I know of. It was a biopic, either Lust for Life, about Van Gogh, or The Agony and the Ecstasy about Michelangelo. He said that the movie was good, but, as far as I know, he never saw another one while he was in Kansas.

The only things that he watched on television were sports, especially football, and news. Occasionally he would peak at something that Jamie and I were watching. Batman comes to mind.

Dad and I watched football games as soon as they started appearing on television. I remember that the pros used a white ball for night games, and runners who were knocked down could jump back up and continue running. His favorite team was the Chicago Bears; mine was the Cleveland Browns.

We did no projects together, mostly because the only project that I can remember him doing was working on the lawn. I did the mowing,_⁶ but he did some weeding, planting, fertilizing, and lots of watering. The results were mixed. I helped only when coerced. To me the weeds had the same esthetic value as his Kentucky bluegrass.

Dad took me to several games of the hapless Kansas City A’s, who played their games in Municipal Stadium, which was in a fairly rough neighborhood. My recollection is that we parked on the street for those games. These events have been described here. I don’t remember us talking about anything at the games except how pitiful the A’s were. We were definitely present for the legendary 29-6 loss to the Chicago White Sox on April 23, 1955.

We also took in one home game of Maur Hill football. I don’t remember who the opponent was, but they probably lost. I also have a vague recollection of attending a game at the University of Kansas. Since I remember no details of that event, I may have fantasized it.

Dad and I drove with our neighbor, Ed Leahy, to south-central Kansas one weekend. I don’t think that the Interstates were completed yet. We drove mostly at night. I remember sleeping in the back seat.

We spent one day hunting quail or pheasants and one day at the State Fair in Hutchinson. This adventure has been described here.

The family’s big vacation to the East Coast is detailed here. Dad did almost all of the driving.

I remember two other trips with my dad. I am not sure whether my mom was along. On the first one we visited dad’s Uncle Vic Wavada (Henry’s brother) in, I believe, Nevada, MO. I remember no details at all. Great-uncle Vic died in 1962. By the way, the town is pronounced locally as nuh VAY duh, miz URR uh.

On the other journey we visited an older man named Crispy Ward somewhere near Jefferson City, MO. He might have been a salesman for BMA. We went fishing together in a small boat. I doubt that my dad participated. I had trouble with my line getting caught up in the vegetation. Crispy nicknamed me “Snag.” Fortunately, it did not catch on.

Dad and I did not do very much together. He played catch with me occasionally. The only thing that I recall that he ever taught me was how to wash myself. My reaction was a silent “Well, duh.”

Did my dad have any friends in the area? He talked to a few of the neighbors. He and mom went to social occasions at the homes of some of the other BMA employees a few times. The only other friends that I can recall were Boots and Fay Hedrick. I seem to recall that dad, mom, or both knew them from KC KS. They had a son named John who was about my age.

You could probably do it with one hand in a pocket.

I started wearing glasses in 1958 or thereabouts. My dad also wore glasses when he drove the car. Otherwise, he shunned their use. He nagged me about the fact that I put mine on as soon as I woke up and wore them continually until I went to bed. I took them off when playing football and whenever large amounts of water were involved. He could not understand why I always wore them. I wanted to see, and my prescription was much stronger than his was. The year before I got them I batted .000 in 3&2 baseball. It was humiliating. Give a kid a break.

The other thing that he nagged me about was putting my hands in my pockets. Whenever I heard him say, “You can’t climb the ladder with your hands in your pockets” I would spin my head around to see which ladder he was referring to. I never saw it.

Leawood

At the end of the 1961-62 school year the Wavadas moved south and east a few miles to 8800 Fairway in Leawood, KS. This house was much nicer than either of our previous two residences. It had three bedrooms, a large living room, a dining room, a rec room, a two-car garage, a basement, and an attic. It also had central air conditioning and a large fan in the ceiling of the hallway by the bedrooms. Every summer evening my dad would order the air conditioning turned off and the fan turned on. All the windows were opened except for the ones in my bedroom. I left mine closed and shut my door when I went to bed in order to muffle the sound of the fan.

My dad joined a car pool to BMA. Its members included Malcolm Holzer, the company’s treasurer, and Mac Dolliver, an actuary whose family lived only a block away from us. There was at least one other person in the car pool. In inclement weather they would drive me to Rockhurst High School. On most other days I walked.

For one of my birthdays my parents got me a wooden basketball backboard and orange rim of iron. My dad and, I think, my grandfather, John Cernech, mounted it on the roof above the driveway. The backboard was not quite vertical, and the rim broke in one place, but I still played there extensively.

A later Christmas present was a six-foot pool table that dad and mom clandestinely set up in the basement. Its surface was wood covered by felt that quickly warped, but I did not care. I practiced on it many evenings, especially in cold weather. While I did so I listened to my records on a portable turntable that I acquired somewhere. Nobody could beat me on my table because I knew how to play the “break” in the southeast corner.

At the new house dad had a much larger front lawn to maintain. He cared not a lick about the bushes, the side lawns, or the much larger back yard. I think that he was secretly competitive about this hobby. Our neighbors to the north, the Westergrens, had a thick lawn, but the grass was fescue, not bluegrass. Dad considered fescue to be weeds. It completely took over the lawn on the north side of the driveway. My dad concentrated on the 90 percent of the lawn that was south of the driveway. He waged a war against any fescue that somehow crossed the driveway.

By this time we had a self-propelled lawnmower. I was an energetic teenager; mowing the lawn was actually somewhat pleasurable for me. However, once a year dad rented a heavy machine that sucked up loose vegetation from the lawn. It was not self-propelled, and it was a huge pain to push.

As before, dad spent nearly every summer evening listening to news, sports, or talk on his small transistor radio. Never music; he no appreciation of music. Once in a while a song would strike his fancy, but I could not name even one song that he liked that was released between “Oh, My Papa” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” Seriously.

Dad had two season tickets to the Chiefs’ home games, which took place at Municipal Stadium until Arrowhead Stadium opened in 1972. Sometimes he took mom. Once or twice a year he took me. In 1965 he let me bring two friends from Rockhurst, Ed Oakes⁷ and Dan Waters. Win or lose, I had a great time at these games. From 1966 to 1969 I could not attend because I was in Ann Arbor. After that I never lived in KC in the fall.

I cannot remember anything about our communication during the games. We talked mostly about the players and strategy.

Why so much responsibility for the pinkies, and only one fat key for one thumb?

Dad had little involvement with my schooling. I sometimes rode to Rockhurst with him and the other members of his car pool. The only other involvement with my high school years that I recall involved speech competitions. He let me have his old Time and Newsweek magazines. I used them in my competition in extemporaneous speaking. They were very helpful.

Dad worked on projects with a Benedictine named Roger Rumery. Fr. Roger somehow obtained a book that explained in detail the process of learning to type. I spent a lot of time with it and an old Royal machine that was, I think, my mom’s.⁸ I became quite proficient at the keyboard. I used my new skill to type evidentiary quotes on index cards, arguments, and entire speeches. Later this skill became even more useful. Only God knows how many millions of words I have typed over the last sixty years or so.

Health

My dad was almost never ill, but he had problems with his back. At some point I am pretty sure that he had an operation that only helped a little, if at all. I have a vague recollection that he occasionally suspended himself in a closet in order to stretch something in his back. I never saw this, and I may have just concocted it from stories. At some point it must have gotten better. I don’t remember him wincing or complaining about it after the early sixties.

The only exercise that dad got was on the golf course. BMA purchased a family membership for the Wavadas at Blue Hills Country Club. Dad played there on weekends. He seldom used an electric cart. He walked with his bag in a two-wheeled cart that he towed behind him.

I must mention that although dad loved the game of golf, he was not very good at it.⁹ He had a good excuse. He was left-handed, and he was using right-handed clubs. He never mentioned this, and he never tried to swing left-handed, at least not to my knowledge. He did experiment with left-handed putting.

Dad and I played together several times per year. Did I enjoy it? Not really. He made me very nervous. He was always watching the group in front of us and the group behind us to make sure that we were not holding anyone up. I was (and am) not a good loser. When I hit a bad shot, I beat myself up over it. I had made a pretty detailed study of the golf swing (described here). I knew how to correct a slice (often) or hook (almost never). It frustrated me enormously that the balls sometimes did not go where I planned.

Nevertheless, playing with him raised my game up to respectability. I did enjoy the competition when I was playing as part of a pair or a team. I played on my company’s team in the army (related in some detail here) and in the golf league at the Hartford. My partner John Sigler and I were in first place in the entire league when I broke my kneecap. Those adventures have been chronicled here.

Occasionally he asked me for evaluations of his swing. I never volunteered an opinion. If I had, it would have sounded something like, “Well, your grip is wrong, and your stance is wrong. It is hard for me to say anything until you change them.”

His reply to my silence would be something like, “I think that I am pushing the ball”, “Am I swaying?”, or “I need to swing through it more.” I had no idea what any of these meant in terms of body parts involved in a golf swing.

My dad played golf until he became lame and blind in his eighties. For decades after I left the Hartford I could afford neither the time nor the expense of the game. In my seventies I had absolutely no regrets about giving it up.

Friends

My parents seemed to have a lot more friends in Leawood than they did in Prairie Village, but not in the neighborhood. Most of them were parishioners at our new parish, Curé of Ars. The two that I remember the most were Mike Goral, a golfing buddy, and Phil Closius. They were both transplants from the New York area.

What I inherited from my dad:

Physical build
Hair color
Head shape
Speaking and writing abilities
Political tendencies
Love of travel, although I did not witness this much as a youngster.

1. The three Hamptons named Wade were very influential in South Carolina in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If Hazel was a direct descendant (she might have said “related to”), I suspect that Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. would be able to tell me exactly how many slaves they had, but rest assured that there would be a comma in the answer.

2. A fairly large number of Wavadas lived in the Spokane, WA, area. One of them has done genealogical research. My dad had a copy of her findings, but, unfortunately, when he died Sue got her hands on it, and it entered the black hole of her existence. If I had to guess, I would place it in her garage, which has long been impenetrable.

3. Not quite true. I found one photo of him with a cigarette in his right hand.

4.Mine was just the opposite. My scalp was almost completely grey when the first white hairs appeared in my eyebrows.

5. I had no say in the design, and I only was allowed to handle the controls a few times under strict supervision.

6. I would have been too small to handle a lawnmower in the first few years in PV. Someone else must have done it. My money is on my mom.

7. My recollection is that Ed did not bring a jacket and was shivering by the second half.

8. It must have been. My dad certainly did not know how to type. He hunted and pecked.

9. For some reason he was pretty good at using a 3-wood from the fairway. Most people consider this one of the most difficult in the game. He was also a much better putter than I was.

1948-1979 Catholic Upbringing

Posted on August 1, 2024 by Mike

Catholicism and me. Continue reading →

This is a painting of the Ursulines arrive in New Orleans in 1627. I can testify that heir fashions did not change a whit in the next 335 years.

I have been a Catholic or an ex-Catholic for all but a few days of my life. My parents arranged for me to be baptized as a Catholic as soon as it was possible. My mother and father were Catholics. Every single relative whom I met was Catholic. I attended Mass every Sunday and holy day of obligation for approximately three decades. I went to Catholic schools for twelve years; most of my teachers were Ursuline nuns or Jesuits. I was an altar boy in grade school, and a member of the Sodality in high school. I went to a state university, but I never missed Mass, even when I was out of town on vacation or a debate trip. I never missed Mass when I was in the army, working in Hartford, or living in Plymouth, MI, in the seventies. Catholicism formed me in many ways.

Catechism

Biblical stories were rare in Catholic schools.

Catholicism is fundamentally different from other Christian religions in at least three ways. Catholics are not educated using biblical stories, and they are not encouraged to read the Bible on their own. I never heard about Bible studies until I started associating with Protestants. Young Catholics are taught what to believe using the catechism, a thin book of fundamental questions and correct (or at least authorized) answers about God and humans. Catholic students—at least in those days—spent hours memorizing them and many more hours being drilled about them. The first two pairs in the version that we used were:

“Q: Who made you?” “A: God made me.”
“Q: Why did God make you?” “A: God made me to show forth his goodness and to make me happy with him in heaven.”

There were many more. I remember that Sr. Lucy’s second-grade class had an oral exam that covered eight or ten pages¹ of these questions and answers. Before the test I was quite certain that I had all of the answers memorized, but I totally blanked on one of them. This failure totally crushed my spirit. I might have even cried. Sr.Lucy tried to comfort me, but at that point I was accustomed to academic success and just could not countenance my failure.

The catechism was comprehensive and coherent. It represented what Catholics believed. You could argue about other things, but contradicting anything in the catechism was, literally, heresy. For decades I assumed that other sects also had a fixed set of beliefs. When much later I participated in a group reading religious literature, I was shocked to find that the participants—al members of the same Protestant denomination—did not understand and agree upon the fundamental concepts of faith and hope. These people did not share the same religious beliefs. They just liked their minister and the other members of their flock.

To Catholics faith was agreement with the postulates of the catechism. Hope was confidence in God keeping up His/Her/Their side of the bargain. Love was respect for all of creation.

Seven Sacraments

The second identifying feature of the Catholic religion is its seven sacraments.

Other denominations baptize their members. A Catholic baptism has the primary purpose of providing absolution for “original sin”, a tarnish inherited from Adam and Eve that precludes salvation². That explains why the ceremony is arranged by Catholic families almost immediately after birth, and why the infant has no say in the matter.

We were taught that if someone who had not been baptized—whether a solid citizen or a mass murderer—was about to die, it was your duty to baptize them. A priest was NOT required. The nuns taught us that there were several forms of baptism, some of which did not even require holy water. I remember kids arguing about whether water from the radiator of a car could be used in an emergency. The answer may have involved the percentage of antifreeze.

The sacrament that involves confessionals is called penance³. Few, if any, other denominations have meticulously prescribed methods for forgiveness of the myriad sins committed after baptism has wiped one’s slate (that is how I thought of it) clean. Some protestants (commonly called heathens by Church members) claimed that faith alone was enough, but that has always seemed transparently flawed to me. What’s faith got to do, got to do with it? You sinned; you died without absolution; you go to hell.

Cleansing the slate requires confessing one’s sins to an ordained priest. Catholic priests can withhold absolution if they are skeptical of either the penitent’s “heartfelt contrition” or the expression of a “firm purpose of amendment”. To me it made sense that the well-trained clerics were called on to make these important decisions.

Heathens often want to know what it is like to go to confession. For me the anticipation was worse than the event. No priest ever asked me to provide any sordid details, and certainly none ever withheld absolution. The “penance” prescribed could be anything, but in my experience it usually was a small number of Our Fathers and/or Hail Marys as well as “a good act of contrition”, in a prescribed format. After a few years of Catholic schools I (and everyone else whom I knew) could recite these prayers very rapidly. We used to hold races.

I never confessed any “mortal sins”, offenses that would be serious enough to merit eternal damnation. Should I have confessed my involvement with Sue while her first husband was still alive? I don’t think so. The Catholic Church did not recognize their marriage; why should I? Whether the Church would have condoned the forty years that elapsed before we were wed in a short civil wedding is a moot point. By that time I had fallen by the wayside.

Youngsters were allowed to receive the Eucharist when they reached “the age of reason”, usually in the second or third grade. That does not mean that they understand the concept of transubstantiation on which the sacrament is based. However, they were required to make a good confession before their first communion, and the two requisites for absolution demand the ability to distinguish right from wrong. By second or third grade most Catholic youngsters had a pretty good idea of what was “class participation” and what could get your knuckles rapped.

The Eucharist has always been part of the Mass. In my youth the priest lay the consecrated host on your tongue; he did not hand it to you. The priest drank a little wine, but he did not share it with the communicants.

Before receiving the consecrated host for the first time our class had a dry run. It felt like a piece of paper that wants to adhere to the tongue. It has neither of the taste nor the texture of food. I had a lot of difficulty swallowing the (unconsecrated) host the first time that a nun put one on my tongue. I don’t know why; I never experienced any subsequent difficulty.

You can tell he’s a bishop by his crook and his miter.

I never really understood how confirmation fit into the sacraments⁴. It was supposed to make you stronger. You were allowed to pick a name; I chose Peter. The archbishop came to town. We all lined up, and he went down the line and gave each person a gentle slap on the cheek.

Almost no one has ever received all seven sacraments. One would need to be ordained as a priest (holy orders) and married (matrimony). Since women have never been allowed to be priests, half of the population was immediately excluded. A few widowers have been ordained late in life. I never asked whether priests who disclaimed their vows could be married. A vow is a vow, but there may be some wiggle room that I don’t know about.

Father Brown whipped out his stole and ointment and performed extreme unction on lots of murder victims.

Up to the end of the sixties the seventh sacrament was called extreme unction. “Unction” meant anointing with oil; “extreme” meant that it was reserved for terminal cases. I considered this a great name, but it has undergone several rebrandings in the last few decades. It was called last rites for a while and then the sacrament of the sick. At some point it was renamed anointing the sick.

As I understood it, the oil lubricated the pathway to heaven for someone who was deathly ill. On television it was sometimes used even when the symptoms included the termination of all bodily functions. You can never be too careful. Maybe the living soul was stuck between two non-functioning organs. Why take a chance?

Popes

The papacy is the other unique institution. One person, the Bishop of Rome, is given the lifetime occupation of administering the Church worldwide. It has worked pretty well for 2,000 years or so. In the twentieth century I was about as familiar with the popes as the average Catholic. The popes in the first fifty years of my lifetime—Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, and John Paul II—were well respected by most Catholics. In general they did a good job directing the Church in all areas except one. The elephant in the room will be discussed below.

Several decades after I dropped out of Catholicism I conducted an incredibly detailed study of the papacy—the institution and the individuals. I discovered that the popes were quite diverse. Some were geniuses, some were greedy or vindictive, one was hen-pecked!. A fairly large number of them spent little or no time in Rome. The Holy Ghost, operating through the College of Cardinals (and a number of other diverse electorates), has demonstrated eclectic taste in pontiffs.

The illustrated book that I wrote about the popes is posted here. The story of how it came about is related in this blog entry.

The Calling

The nuns and, to a lesser extent, the Jesuits talked about “the calling”. They uniformly insisted that at some point in their lives an event of some kind occurred that demonstrated to them that their God-ordained destiny was a religious career. None of them described the nature of that event, but each one indicated that anyone who received such a calling understood that God had definitely designated his intention for them.

While I was in grade school and high school I was a devout Catholic and, at the same time, extremely arrogant. I expected to receive the calling from God, probably just after I was an all-America wide receiver at Notre Dame. I listened intently for the call. In my senior year of high school I went on a retreat for several days with the members of the Sodality at Rockhurst. The priest conducting the event emphasized that everyone should listen carefully for his calling. I did, but I heard nothing. I was quite disappointed.

Years later I gave some thoughts as to what the events that so many of my teachers interpreted as a calling could have been. If it was not the usual hormonal firestorm occurring in an unusual setting, I could not hazard a guess. Here’s a clue, however: two of the nuns who were my teachers at Queen of the Holy Rosary were Sr. Ralph and Sr. Kevin. Where did they come up with those names? They are supposed to choose the name of a saint. The following was published by the Houston Chronicle in 2005:

There are two Saint Ralphs in the Catholic hagiography: Ralph of Bourges, a ninth-century French abbot, and Ralph Crockett, a 16th-century English martyr. Compared to Saints Peter and Aquinas, the Ralphs were theological underachievers. Crockett tried to convert England to Catholicism but was hanged, drawn and quartered. Ralph of Bourges’ principal accomplishment seems to be taking part in the Synod of Meaux. Ralph, it appears, is the patron saint of mediocrity.

St. Kevin lived (allegedly for 120 years!) as a hermit in a very small cave in Ireland. This was on Wikipedia:

One of the most widely known poems of the Nobel prizewinner Seamus Heaney, ‘St Kevin and the Blackbird’, relates the story of Kevin holding out his hand with trance-like stillness while a blackbird builds a nest in it, lays eggs, the eggs hatch and the chicks fledge.

No wonder I didn’t hear anything on that retreat.

“Falling Away”

My transition from ardent Catholic to complete skeptic was a fairly sudden one. The events involved were described in this blog entry.

I must emphasize that in the twelve years that I attended Catholic schools I did not witness or even hear any rumors of any kind of questionable conduct from any teachers or administrators. Furthermore, I did not hear of any inappropriate behavior at any parish that I lived in.

One slightly peculiar event occurred in the few months that I was stationed at Seneca Army Depot in 1972. I have described it in this blog entry.

My dad once told me a story that he heard from his brother Joe, the Benedictine priest (introduced here). Evidently, when he was still in Burlington, IA, he approached the prior or the abbot or some other Catholic bigwig to complain about abusive conduct by one of the other priests. The only result was that the offender was moved to another part of the country. My uncle may have made a minor stink about this and/or threatened to make a major stink. In any case he too was transferred. His destination was as remote as is imaginable, Kelly, KS⁴. Imagine a small country town with a pastor who was a Benedictine monk with a masters degree in economics from the University of Chicago.

I cannot register any surprise at the Church’s response to the flood of allegations of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy. I can only think of three explanations for such behavior by a clergyman:: mental illness, possession by the devil, or simple unwillingness to resist the temptation. In any case the perp was probably called to account for his deeds. He was undoubtedly asked if he was contrite and whether he would be able to prevent recurrences. He almost certainly answered “yes” to both questions. If the bishop felt that he was sincere, he would have no choice but to provide absolution. The man’s immortal soul was at stake. The actions may have been (usually were) criminal, but they did not put anyone’s soul in jeopardy.

If the bishop was not convinced, then he would be faced with the prospect of choosing between mandating mental health assistance, initiating an exorcism, or calling the cops. All of these options would be considered disastrous by any bishop. Keep in mind that the offender had received a calling to work for the Church. He and the other clergy were the tools that the bishop was asked to deploy in order to provide eternal salvation, In my day the number of vocations was critically low and decreasing. So, why not see if the situation could be salvaged?

I don’t think that it was an official policy. Nevertheless, the bishops made the same decision almost without exception: They quietly tramsferred the perps to a different location. This would solve the problem if the subject was actually willing and able to stop his crimes, or if the new location did not provide the same temptations. This may have occasionally worked, or it may have worked long enough for either the perp to die or become unable to commit the crimes or for the bishop to die or be replaced. The other solutions mentioned above would have certainly removed one of the clergy on whom the bishop depended and generated publicity that would likely reduce vocations in the future.

Altar Boy

I served as an altar boy for two or three years. At Queen there were two Masses every weekday. One was at 6am. The other, which was attended by all of the students. was held at 8:30. The 6 o’clock mass was always a low mass, which meant that only two candles on either side of the tabernacle had to be lit by the senior server, mostly because there was no music. These Masses were also much shorter and required only two servers. Actually one would suffice in a pinch, but two looked more balanced.

Sometimes the 8:30 Masses were high Masses. That required lighting six candle that were much higher on the altar. A device⁶ with a long wick at the end of a brass pole is used both to light and snuff the candles. This was the one thing that required a bit of skill. If a lit wick broke off and landed on the altar cloth, there would be heck to pay.

The Mass always proceeded in the same order. The only variation was for the epistle and gospel readings and the sermon. The first two were determined by the Church’s official calendar. The sermon was determined by the priest. At the daily Mass, low or high, it was generally omitted. It was hard enough to keep hundreds of squirmy youngsters under control even when the nuns required that each leave room for his/her guardian angel on one side.

The rest of the Mass was called the “ordinary”. While I was a server it was all in Latin. To become a server you had to memorize all of the responses. Some of these, like “amen” and “et cum spiritu tuo” were easy, but the ones in the beginning were somewhat challenging. The very first response was “ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.”⁷ Probably the reason for multiple servers at nearly all Masses was to make sure that at least one was able to say the proper response out loud.

At a high Mass the following were sung by the entire congregation: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei. There were several sets of music for these. Some of them were quite elaborate. There were often hymns at other spots as well. All of these were in blue books that were available in the pews.

The servers were not asked to sing, but each had designated duties. The one on the right rang the bells to wake up parishioners that the important part was coming. The two in the middle handled the cruets that were used in the ablution section The one on the left was called “the dead end” because he (no girls!) had no special responsibilities. When they were not busy, the servers knelt⁸ at the foot of the altar. They got to sit during the epistle, gospel, and sermon. One of the nuns would always be on the lookout for squirming or poor posture.

The priest’s dressing room, called the sacristy was on the left (from the point of view of the congregants) of the altar. Priests wore (at a minimum) a white chasuble and cincture beneath the vestments, which varied in color depending on the type of Mass and the calendar. Green was the most common. The servers’ room was on the right. They wore white short-sleeve surplices over black cassocks. There were about ten of each to choose from, first come first serve. I like to get there early. In the eighth grade I was one of the tallest, and only two or three went down to my ankles. Both the priest and the servers were fully dressed before donning their religious attire.

It was considered an honor to be an altar boy. In retrospect I find it amazing that my mom was willing to drive me to the early service. She was supportive of almost anything that I wanted to undertake.

Mackerel Snappers

Those fish were not “wild caught” within 500 miles of Kansas City.

In the Wavada household meat was NEVER served on Friday. It was likewise absent from my grade and high schools. My recollection is that I had cereal for breakfast and cheese sandwiches for lunch. There was no fresh lobster in the Kansas City area. The only offerings for supper that I remember were spicy boiled shrimp, fried catfish, fish sticks, and tuna and noodle casserole. The last was by far my favorite of those four. However, I don’t think that I complained much. My mother was a very good cook.

Why did we (and nearly every other Catholic family) deliberately refrain from eating meat on Fridays? I don’t think that it was actually decreed by the Church in the way that attending Mass was. That was derived from one of the Ten Commandments. The fasting was just one example of the “offer it up” approach to life that was drummed into us. Whenever you were disappointed, upset, or frustrated, a nun or priest would tell you to offer the situation up to God. Friday was chosen in memory of Good Friday, on which Jesus suffered so much for the rest of us.

Catholics were also encouraged to give up something for Lent, the forty-day period before Easter. Most of the kids whom I knew gave up candy or nothing. Since I did not have a sweet tooth, that would not have been much of a sacrifice for me. I might have tried to do without Coke or potato chips, but I doubt that I had the willpower to endure forty days without them.

Prayers

Praying in the Catholic Church is largely a matter of rote. For example, saying the rosary consisted of saying 53 Hail Marys and a handful of Our Fathers and Glory Bes at a supersonic pace while cogitating about one of three sets of “mysteries”. My family recited the same prayer, which we called “Grace”, before every evening meal. At QHRS my vague recollection was that we all stood up at our desks and recited the same prayer right before lunch. My mother may have made me say it before breakfast. Here is what we said:

Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty through Christ, our Lord. Amen.

I never noticed before that there were two Lords in this prayer. One apparently owns the bounty; the other distributes it. If I had asked about this, I wonder what the nuns would have said.

Here is what I think about prayers with a specific purpose—asking for something, thanking for something, etc. If God is all-powerful, then He/She/They is also omniscient and therefore knows about the situation. Why would God care about whether someone debased himself to obtain something or express an emotion? Surely, if God is ever willing to tamper with nature, the decision would not be induced by nagging. Similarly, why would God care about whether someone was willing to forgo meat on Friday?

To me it is a lot easier to understand why the Church and its clergy would care about enforcing discipline than to think of a reason why an omniscient and omnipotent Being would be impressed by prayers or self-imposed suffering. I remember thinking how strange it was when both Argentina and Great Britain fought over the Falkland Islands. Both countries insisted that God was on their side in the conflict. I wonder if there were many conversions in Argentina from Catholicism to Anglicanism when the Brits prevailed.

Saints and Miracles

A few other religions have saints, dead people who are purportedly now in heaven. In the Roman and Greek Orthodox Churches they are a big deal. Cults that worship saints—especially Mary, Jesus’s mother—have developed over the years. “Queen of the Holy Rosary”, the name of our parish, was an example of the strange twists that the cults can take. Mary had nothing to do with the rosary. It was invented many years later. I don’t know if there is a singular “holy rosary” somewhere, but the only way that Mary is associated with the beads is the fact that the Hail Mary prayer is recited fifty-three times.

As far as I was concerned the popes decided—using a complicated legal process that involved the assessment of miracles and a “devil’s advocate”—who was a saint. Since the pope was infallible, that was it; they were in. Later I learned that during the first few hundred years of Christianity, lists of martyrs and other prominent Christians were created. At some point all of the people on the list were referred to as saints even though the process of getting on one of these lists was much less sophisticated than the rigorous process with which I was familiar.

The medals that I remember were pinned to the visor on the driver’s side.

In my day St. Christopher was one of the most popular of all saints. Many Catholics carried a medal of the saint. It supposedly provided protection against accidents. There were many contradictory stories about St. Christopher, but the evidence that he was a real person (as opposed to a fable or a composite of different people) was scant. In 1970, the year that I graduated from college, the Church removed him from the calendar, but he was still worshiped as a saint in some places. For that matter Charlemagne, who routinely executed thousands of people whom he captured, wass widely considered a saint and venerated as such. Although the emperor was never canonized, his statue was placed prominently in the narthex of St. Peter’s Basilica.

I think that my mom had a St. Christopher medal in her Oldsmobile 88. I could be wrong.

To be confirmed as a saint you had to have several miracles attributed to you. I firmly believed that there were thousands of documented miracles associated with these holy people. I took it as a “given”, not worth thinking about any more.

The nuns and priests that I encountered did not spend a lot of time discussing the saints. The one story that I remember vividly featured St. Dominic Savio and his biographer, Don Bosco. The saint died when he was only fifteen. Evidently he was extremely intelligent and absolutely devoted to becoming a saint. For a while I was inspired by his attitude, but eventually I reverted to my previous philosophy of doing whatever I could get away with.

The champion canonizer has himself been canonized by Pope Francis.

I am not sure which miracles Pope Pius XII (discussed in great detail here) attributed to little Dominic. By 1978, the beginning of the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, advancements in science had made obsolesced the standards of evidence previously used for verification of miracles. J2P2 canonized approximately 480 people, probably more than all of his predecessors combined. What process did he use? He just announced every so often that the list of saints was longer.

Much later I did a little research in the area of hagiography. I concluded that anyone who lived before the Renaissance and is considered a saint should be treated with suspicion. Some almost certainly were fabrications, others were probably composites of two or more stories, and some who were real people were rascals or worse..

Sacred Objects

The *duomo* in Milan is one of the most amazing plzdes that I have seen.

The Catholic Church has for a very long time made use of statues, paintings, and relics. The duomo in Milan has over 3,400 statues, including a very large number on its roof and a very famous one in the church of a flayed St. Bartholomew carrying his own skin. The altar in every church contains a blessed relic—usually a fragment of a bone alleged to be from a saint.

I remember that my class had a raffle of a few such tokens one year. Kids bought raffle tickets. First prize was a statue of Jesus that was perhaps fifteen inches in height. The secondary prizes were far inferior, probably “holy cards” with a picture of a saint or a miracle and some explanatory text on the back. For some reason I really wanted that statue. My only source of income was my allowance, which, if memory serves, was twenty-five cents per week. However, I spent almost nothing. I bought quite a few baseball cards over the years, but otherwise I was miserly.

On the day of the auction I brought all of my money to school and purchased more than half of the total tickets. Sure enough, I won the statue, but I did not win any of the other prizes. In retrospect I should have bought no tickets. After the auction I could have made the winner an offer he/she could not refuse.

I don’t remember what happened to that statue. I don’t think that it survived the move from Prairie Village to Leawood. For the most part my family did not take part in the iconography that was prevalent in Catholic homes in the fifties and sixties. However, I do remember wearing one religious item for quite a few years, a Brown Scapular.

The scapular was composed of two cloth rectangular pieces connect by two straps. One piece went on the front and one on the back. It was inspired by the habit of the Carmelites, which was, or course, much larger. The ones that I saw were woolen. Evidently, that requirement was dropped at some point.

You can’t just buy scapulars. I don’t remember this happening, but at some point the older kids at QHRS must have been “enrolled”. Part of the admonition is “Wear it as a sign of her [i.e., Mary’s] protection and of belonging to the Family of Carmel.” Furthermore, “whoever receives the scapular becomes a member of the order and pledges him/herself to live according to its spirituality in accordance with the characteristics of his/her state in life.”

Although it has never officially been part of the Church’s teaching, the Brown Scapular has for a very long time been linked with the “Sabbatine Privilege”, which promises that the wearer will be released by Our Lady of Mt. Carmel¹⁰ from Purgatory on the first Saturday after death. This was great! Purgatory was the place to which people were sent if they died with venial sins that were not absolved. Every “impure thought” was such a sin. Practically every adolescent who died would be forced to spend time—an hour, a year, a millennium?—roasting in purgatory. If, however, he had the Sabbatine Privilege, his time there would be less than a week. If he got in a car crash after partying hard on a Friday evening, he might go straight to heaven as long as he was still wearing his Brown Scapular. “So long, losers!”

My scapular had several pieces of cloth in each of the two sections. That is all that I remember of it. I don’t remember when I stopped wearing it. I certainly did not wear it in Ann Arbor.

There also was a version of the scapular that was a medal.

Big Events

The two big events on the Church’s calendar were, of course, Christmas and Easter. I remember being surprised that I was chosen for the boy’s choir as an eighth grader. We sang “Oh, Holy Night” at the midnight Mass.

For Easter I was chosen in the eighth grade to serve either at the high Mass on Maundy Thursday or Easter Sunday. I do not remember which.

1. This is almost certainly an exaggeration, but I remember quite clearly that this was a momentous event. Maybe it was preparation for First Communion or Confirmation. The most famous version is the Baltimore Catechism, which has been posted here.

2. In my day babies who died unbaptized supposedly went to a place called Limbo. In 2007 the Church waffled a bit on this and concluded that there is hope that God will do what humans were unable to do, namely baptize them himself. Don’t try to visualize this.

3. For some reason it seems to be called “Penance and Reconciliation” in 2024.

4. I wonder if it was added later to bring the list to seven. Most religious lists seem to have three or seven items. I might be on to something. The Encyclopedia Britannica The number of sacraments also varied in the early church, sometimes including as many as 10 or 12. In the sixteenth century the Council of Trent specified the list that we learned.

5. My experiences with Fr. Joe after he was sent to Kelly are posted here.

6. I expected to discover a Latin name for the pole, but it is merely called a candle lighter.

7. I discovered in my Latin class that some heathens might have been able to read this, but they would not have understood us when we said it. They had a markedly different way of pronouncing some letters. They rendered Caesar’s famous dictum “Veni; Vidi; Vici” as “WAY knee WEE dee WEE kee”.

8. What a wonderful thing it was to still have cartilage!

9.In my day the three sets were the Joyful Mysteries, the Sorrowful Mysteries, and the Glorious Mysteries. They told the story of Mary and Jesus in chronological order. Each had ten “decades”, one for each group of ten beads. I had never heard of the Luminous Mysteries, which are apparently prayed on Thursdays. All of these have been explained in detail on the Internet here.

10. I am 99 percent certain that “Our Lady of Mt. Carmel” is the same as Mary, the mother of Jesus. For some reason she has dozens of titles, each of which emphasizes something different about her. Incidentally, the Church has never officially preached that Mary shows up and checks for slightly charred scapulars every Saturday. However, it dies claim that Mary never died. She was “assumed” into heaven. If an archeologist ever makes a case that Mary’s tomb has been found, all Catholics must immediately denounce him/her/them as a heretic.

1966-2024 Bleeding Maize and Blue

Posted on January 28, 2024 by Mike

Michigan football and me. Continue reading →

I undertook this entry to explain what it was like to be a die-hard fan of a football team for fifty-eight years. I supposed that this might be of passing interest to some people (outside of New England, where no one gives a fig about college football), but, in fact I undertook it mostly to see if I could figure out to my own satisfaction why I have cared so much about an institution with no intrinsic value. Furthermore, over the years it has changed so dramatically. The only constants were the huge stadium, the winged helmets, and the school colors—maize and blue (mostly blue).

Before attending U-M: When I was still in grade school (not before—my family did not have a television set) my dad and I often watched professional football games on our black and white television set. This was remarkable for two reasons: 1) my dad seldom watched anything on television; 2) it was one of the few things that we did together. I distinctly remember that a white football was used for night games. Also, until the rule was changed, a runner was not considered “down” until his forward progress was completely stopped.

I knew Otto as #14, but in the days before face guards he must have been #60.

My dad was a fan of the Chicago Bears. My recollection was that his favorite player was Ralph Guglielmi, but he never played for the Bears. I must be wrong. My favorite team was the Cleveland Browns. In the early days my favorite player was #14,Otto Graham. Later, of course, I lionized the incomparable #32, Jim Brown.

Before I went to Rockhurst my dad also took me to one game in Atchison, KS. It involved my dad’s Alma Mater, Maur Hill. I don’t remember the opponent or result. However, Maur Hill was 2-6 in both 1960 and 1961, and so they probably lost.

The Dallas Texans moved to Kansas City in 1963, my sophomore year at Rockhurst, and were rechristened the Chiefs. Through his company, Business Men’s Assurance (BMA), my dad had two season tickets. He went to all the home games, and sometimes he brought me with him to the games at Municipal Stadium. I became a fan of Lenny Dawson¹, Curtis McClinton², Fred Arbanas³, the one-eyed tight end, and the rest of the players. I remained a big fan of the Chiefs while I was in the army and for a decade or so after that.

While I was in High School I attended every football home game. So did all of my friends and most of the other guys. My attitude was really more of a “be true to your school” thing than an appreciation of the game at the high school level. In fact, we all attended all of the basketball games as well. The guys at Rockhurst were proud that they were able to go to one of the very best schools in the area, and they supported all of the teams.

Before arriving in Ann Arbor I did not yet hate Woody or the color scarlet.

Undergrad at U-M:While I lived in Kansas City I did not follow college football very closely. Only three major colleges in Kansas and Missouri had football teams, and one of those—Kansas State—was perennially a doormat. I knew very little about Michigan football. I knew about the intense rivalry between Ohio State and Michigan. I had heard the song, “We don’t give a damn for the whole state of Michigan.” I had read about a few Michigan greats such as Tom Harmon and Germany Schulz. I knew that Michigan had the largest stadium in the country and usually won the Little Brown Jug. Woody Hayes (but not his counterpart Bump Elliott) was already famous.

The student section started on the 50-yard line and went around to the middle of the end zone.

However, it was not until I actually started living at U-M that I came to appreciate the importance of football at the university. Cazzie Russell had led the Wolverines to three consecutive Big Ten titles and to final four appearances in 1964 and 1965. Nevertheless, in the fall of 1966 when I arrived at my dorm absolutely no one talked about basketball even though the previous year’s football team had been a horrendous disappointment. The 1964 team had won the Big Ten and clobbered Oregon in the Rose Bowl. The 1965 team finished only 4-6 despite outscoring the opponents 185-161. Nevertheless, like nearly everyone else in Allen Rumsey House, I purchased season tickets in the student section of Michigan Stadium (no one ever called it The Big House) for a very low price and never gave a thought to going to basketball games.

I followed the marching band up

to the stadium for almost every home football game⁴ during the four football season in which I lived in the dorm. I have recounted in some detail those experiences in the 1966 season here. The last two games of my senior year were ones for the ages. On November 27, 1969, Ohio State was 8-0 and widely considered the best collegiate team of all time. They were riding a twenty-two game winning streak.. Michigan was 7-2, but one of its losses was out of the conference. Since this was the last game of the season, if U-M won, they would be tied with OSU for the the Big Ten championship. The league’s rules dictated that if there was a tie, U-M would go to the Rose Bowl because OSU had been there more recently. Michigan, a huge underdog, won the game 24-12. Wikipedia devoted a very long entry to this historic game. It is posted here.

I knew two of the stars of that game fairly well. They were both sophomores who had spent their freshman year living on the second floor of A-R. At the time I was the president of the house and had some interactions with both Thom Darden, a defensive back who was an All-Pro with the Cleveland Browns, and Bill⁵ Taylor, who scored the most famous touchdown in that game.

Michigan had hired a new coach, Bo Schembechler, for the 1969 season. He had a heart attack just before the Rose Bowl⁶, and so he was unable to coach. The team lost to the University of Southern California 10-3. In retrospect it is hard to believe that one of the most famous Michigan teams of all time did not score a touchdown in its last six quarter.

1970-1973: During the next four years it was somewhat difficult for me to follow the team too closely. In 1970 I was at my parent’s house in Leawood, KS, for the first three games, all of which were won by the Wolverines. For the remaining games I was at Fort Polk, LA (introduced here), for basic training. I learned the scores of the games, but there was no television available, and so I missed the second game of the “Ten Year War” between Schembechler’s troops and those of Woody Hayes. OSU won in Columbus 20-9. The two teams again tied for the Big 10 title, but OSU went to the Rose Bowl because of the “no repeat” rule. In those days Big 10 teams were not allowed to participate in other bowls.

In 1971 I was in the army at Sandia Base, NM (introduced here). The barracks had only one television, and none of the soldiers could afford to purchase one for their rooms. Michigan was 10-0 going into the OSU game in Ann Arbor, where they won a squeaker 10-7. I am pretty sure that I watched that one in the MP Company’s Rec Room. That team lost to Stanford in the Rose Bowl 13-12. Michigan was heavily favored and held the lead, but the team was done in by a fake punt by Stanford on a fourth and ten and a last second field goal. I must have watched that game in Leawood. A few days later I flew to upstate New York to finish my military career at Seneca Army Depot (described here).

In 1972 I was working as an actuarial student at the Hartford Life Insurance Company (introduced here). I watched the team on television whenever they appeared. I remember going to Jan Pollnow’s house for one of the regular-season games. I do not remember which one it was, but it was definitely not the season-ender (better known as The Game) at Ohio State. I am certain of that because Michigan won all of its first ten games, but they lost that one 14-11. This was a heart-breaker. Michigan had a first down at the OSU one-yard line and could not punch it in. The two teams tied for the conference championship, but OSU went to Pasadena, and U-M stayed home.

This man deserved to play inn the Rose Bowl.

In 1973 I was still at the Hartford. Once again the Wolverines won their first ten games. The Big Ten by then was known as the Big Two and the Little Eight. “The Game” was held in Ann Arbor. At the end of the third quarter the score was 10-0 in favor of OSU, but U-M tied it with a touchdown and a field goal. I am pretty sure that I watched that sister-kisser by myself in my apartment in East Hartford. I had a Zenith color portable with rabbit ears. The reception from the two ABC stations (New Haven and Springfield) was not great.

U-M’s quarterback, Dennis Franklin⁸, broke his collarbone in the fourth quarter. This was a decisive factor in the vote that sent the Buckeyes back to California. In two years U-M had lost only one game, but it did not get to go to a bowl game.

By this time Bo Schembechler had installed an option offense that emphasized running. For quite a few years U-M’s quarterbacks were better known for running and blocking than for throwing the pigskin.

Back in Ann Arbor for 1974-1976: In 1974 Sue and I moved to Plymouth, MI, and I enrolled at U-M as a graduate student in the speech department. I bought a season ticket in the student section. A few details about my personal involvement with the team during those years have been posted here.

A little more should be written about the 1974 season. The Wolverines breezed through the first ten games. They even had a 10-3 lead at halftime of The Game. However, OSU kicked three field goals and Mike Lantry⁹, who had earlier kicked a 37-yard field goal, pushed a shorter one very slightly to the left as time ran out. The miss cost U-M the conference championship and a berth in the the Rose Bowl.

Dennis Franklin, who lost only two games in his entire career as starting quarterback at U-M, never got to play in a Rose Bowl, or any other bowl for that matter. That was simply a travesty.

Detroit 1976-1979: For the next three football seasons Sue and I lived and worked in Detroit. I watched every game that was shown on television, but my memories are not too distinct.

The 1976 team lost a conference game at Purdue when the kicker, Bob Wood, missed an attempted 37-yard field goal at the end of the game. It was the first conference loss to one of the Little Eight since my senior year seven years earlier.

However, this team pummeled Ohio State in Columbus two weeks later to win the conference championship and qualify for the Rose Bowl. They lost that game to USC (whom else?).

The story the next year was eerily similar. The Wolverines were shut out in the Little Brown Jug game, but they defeated Ohio State in Ann Arbor. They then lost to Washington in the Rose Bowl 27-20.

It sounds like a broken record, but the 1978 team led by Rick Leach¹⁰, Harlan Huckleby¹¹, and a very stout defense, somehow lost to Michigan State before beating the Buckeyes again in the last game of the Ten Year War. USC then defeated the Wolverines in the Rose Bowl again thanks to a “Phantom Touchdown” awarded to Charles White¹² by a Big 10 ref.

I have two very vivid memory of this period of Michigan football. I remember that I was on a debate trip for Wayne State. For some reason one Saturday afternoon I was absolved of the responsibility of judging for one round. I found a television set and watched Michigan beat up on one of the Little Eight.

The other memory, of course, was the dramatic touchdown pass from John Wangler to freshman Anthony Carter on the last play of the Indiana game in 1979. The game, which was crucial for Michigan’s title hopes, was not televised. But the film was shown on all the highlight shows.

It was a period of frustration. It appeared that Bo’s coaching style could easily produce very good teams. They were always in the top ten and often the top five/. However, they were never good enough to win the last game of the year. Nevertheless the players were heroes to me and to all of the other die-hard fans.

I later read Bo Schembechler’s autobiography, Bo, co-written by Mitch Albom. In its pages he speculated that he might have driven the guys too hard on their trips to Pasadena. They did little besides practice. Most Michigan fans just thought that the team needed a passing game.

Michigan Replay: Most U-M football games were not telecast in the Detroit area while we lived there. However, every Sunday evening Bo Schembechler appeared on a half-hour interview show with Jim Brandstatter¹³, who had been an offensive tackle on some of his very early teams. Sue and I watched these programs every week. When we moved to Enfield, one of the few things that we missed about the Motor City was watching Michigan Replay on channel 4.

I recently discovered that the Michigan Replay shows have been archived by the university and posted on the Internet here. I recently watched the show about the 1980 version of The Game in which neither side scored a touchdown. The first thing that I noticed was that Brandstatter just dwarfed Schembechler, who was himself a lineman in college. The second thing that caught my eye was Bo’s outfit. He was decked out in plaid pants and a grey sports jacket with a Rose Bowl pin. It was 1980, but Bo;s wardrobe was still in the seventies. I wondered if his wife saw this outfit before he left the house.

On the show Bo was charming and gracious. He always credited the players. What was so attractive about his approach on the show was how clear it was that everyone on the team gave 100 percent, and Bo loved them for it even when they failed. When Brandstatter heaped praise on the team’s defense, Bo insisted that the offense, which did not score a touchdown, did its part by running twice as many plays as the Buckeyes. His slogan—”Those who stay will be champions”—never rang truer.

Bo v. the world as seen from Enfield 1980-1989: The Wolverines finally found a passing game, or rather a receiving game, in #1, Anthony Carter¹⁴, who was by almost any measure the most amazing player in the history of college football. He was named a consensus first-team All-American three years running. During those three years Michigan was definitely a running team. In the first two Butch Woolfolk¹⁵ rushed for more than 1,000 yards. In 1981 he set the single-season U-M record with a total of 1,459 yards.

Nevertheless, the “go to guy” was Carter. He was always the first read on a pass attempt and the last read on most. The two quarterbacks who passed to him, John Wangler¹⁶ and Steve Smith¹⁷, are remembered mostly as footnotes in tales of Carter’s heroics.

The 1980 season was the most memorable one for me. Bo’s coaching staff had been depleted in the off-season. He had to hire many new coaches, including Gary Moeller, Lloyd Carr, and Jack Harbaugh¹⁷. The team had a very shaky start. It barely beat Northwestern in the opener and the lost two non-conference games. The fans were dejected, but the team—especially the defense—seemed to get better with each game. The three games before The Game were all shutouts, and the Wolverines racked up 86 point. The 9-3 win in Columbus was ugly, but the victory over Washington in the Rose Bowl was absolutely beautiful.

I have several vivid memories of the period. Most of them are disappointments. I can picture in my mind Cris Carter¹⁸ making a fabulous catch for a touchdown. My recollection is that it won the game for the Buckeyes, but this was not the case. Jim Harbaugh, my favorite Wolverine of all time, rewrite the record book in that game and threw a 77-yard touchdown pass shortly after Carter’s reception had brought the Buckeyes back to within a field goal.

The 1986 team fumbled away the Little Brown Jug that had been on display in the Michigan Union since 1977 and also lost decisively in the Rose Bowl. I do not remember either of those. I do remember that Jim Harbaugh guaranteed that U-M would beat OSU. They did, but only because of a missed field goal. I remember many field goals missed at crucial times, but this was the only one by an opponent that I can recall.

Michigan won the jug back in 1987, but that team won only seven other games. They did beat Alabama in the Hall of Fame Bowl.

Bo’s penultimate team might have been his best job as a coach. Without any great stars it lost its first two games and tied Iowa at Kinnick Stadium. It then won four straight decisively, edged Ohio State in Columbus, and then won the Rose Bowl by upsetting Southern Cal 22-14.

The first game of Bo’s last year was the worst. Rocket Ismail zoomed for two touchdowns on kick returns, and #1 Notre Dame defeated #2 U-M in Ann Arbor but won the remainder of its regular-season games. In the Rose Bowl the Wolverines lost to USC by a touchdown. Bo was incensed by a holding call on a fake punt that had gained twenty-four yards. After the game he resigned as head coach and took a job as president of the Detroit Tigers. He was fired from that job in 1992.

Bo had had heart problems for a long time before he died in 2006. His legacy was smudged by his son Matt’s claim that Bo knew about sexual shenanigans by long-time university doctor Robert Anderson.

Gary Moeller years 1990-94: I think that it was during Moeller’s five-year tenure at U-M that I stopped watching U-M games. His first team lost a close game to Notre Dame and two regular-season games. However, they closed out the season with five wins (tied for first in the Big 10) and handily defeated Ole Miss in the Gator Bowl. The team had developed a passing attack with Elvis Grbac¹⁹ and Desmond Howard²⁰.

The next year the team lost to Florida State, but won its other ten regular-season games. The highlight was a completely horizontal 25-yard touchdown reception by Heisman-winner Howard on a 4th down against Notre Dame. However, the Wolverines were humiliated in the Rose Bowl by Washington.

The team had three ties but no losses in Grbac’s last year. It went to the Rose Bowl again and this time defeated Washington. Tyrone Wheatley was the star

Todd Collins took over at quarterback in 1993. The team lost four regular-season games, but they closed out the season with a 28-0 mauling of OSU and and equally decisive bowl victory over NC State.

Ty Law, one of the greatest defensive backs ever, could not prevent the miracle.

1994 was the last year in which I watched Michigan football live. The disastrous game at home against Colorado was followed by losses to Penn State, Wisconsin, and OSU.

I remember storming out of the house at the end of the OSU game. I went for a long walk, and I was still upset when I returned. The team’s victory over Colorado State in the bowl game did little to mollify me. The stress of these games was becoming too much for me.

Gary Moeller was allowed to resign after being arrested in May of 1995 for drunk and disorderly conduct at Excalibur, a restaurant in Detroit. He served as an assistant coach in the NFL until 2002. He died in 2022.

Lloyd Carr with four-year starter Chad Henne.

Lloyd Carr’s years 1995-2007: Lloyd Carr was named interim head coach after Moeller’s untimely exit. It was made official after the team won eight out of the first ten games. I expected U-M to lose the finale against #2 OSU, and I did not get to see the 31-23 upset in which Tim Biakabutuka rushed for an astounding 313 yards. That team ended the season at the Alamo Bowl, where lost to Texas A&M. The 1996 team also beat OSU and lost its bowl game.

During Carr’s thirteen years as U-M’s football coach I was extremely busy at work. If I was not traveling on a given Saturday, I was certainly in the office from dawn to dusk. I had a small TV on which I occasionally watched football, but I don’t think that I ever watched a Michigan game. I did not even check the scores until I was sure that the game was over. I told people that my favorite weekend was U-M’s bye week.

The 1997 team featured perhaps the greatest defensive back of all time, Charles Woodson, who had been a freshman phenom in 1995 and a consensus All-American in 1996. He was also used—to great effect—as a kick returner and wide receiver. The team won all of its games, but in The Game it needed a tremendous effort from the defense and special teams to overcome a moribund offense. It faced a very good Washington State team in the Rose Bowl.

I watched the game with my friend Tom Corcoran. Woodson was Superman without the cape, but the rest of the team struggled. With a 21-16 lead U-M had the ball with 7:25 to play. Michigan got two first downs passing (once to Woodson) before Wazoo took over on its own seven yard line with sixteen seconds to play. After a hook and lateral play and the most egregious example of offensive pass interference that I have ever seen WSU moved the ball to the Michigan twenty-six. The clock ran out as the WSU quarterback tried to spike the ball. They should have had a play ready to run. I remember telling Tom that I could not believe that this was what I was hoping for. I never wanted to go through anything so nerve-wracking again.

So, U-M was named national champion by the Associated Press, but the coaches voted for Nebraska, which was also undefeated.

The next three years were bizarre. Michigan turned into “quarterback U”. Tom Brady²⁴ and Drew Henson²⁵ battled for the starting job for two years. Brady eventually prevailed. Henson started for U-M in his junior year, which was typified by a 54-51 loss to Northwestern that must have made Bo rip his hair out (if he had any left). Nevertheless, those three teams won bowl games over Arkansas, Alabama, and Auburn.

The last seven years of Carr’s coaching career were drearily predictable. There were only two quarterbacks. U-M beat OSU in 2004, John Navarrre’s senior year. Henne lost four times in The Game. They were all good teams, but …

I watched onlyone game. I was visiting my dad in Overland Park, KS, the weekend in 2004 when U-M played San Diego State (coached by Brady Hoke) in Ann Arbor. U-M, which had lost to Notre Dame the previous week, were behind at the half. The on-the-field female correspondent stuck a microphone in Coach Carr’s face and asked him what he expected in the second half. He said, “I expect a comeback.” U-M did win, but it was really ugly.

The worst and best games were in the last year, 2007. The loss to Appalachian State in Ann Arbor was, at the time, the low point of Michigan Football in my lifetime. The victory over Florida (coached by Urban Meyer and led by Tim Tebow) in the Capital One Bowl was a pleasant surprise. U-M had four turnovers, but Henne passed for 373 yards and was named MVP.

Coach Carr was living in Ann Arbor in 2024.

Rich Rodriguez and Brady Hoke 2008-2014: I felt strongly that after Carr retired U-M should have hired Jim Harbaugh. After a long career as a quarterback in the NFL he had coached the Raiders’ quarterbacks for two years and then transformed a horrible University of San Diego team into conference champions in only two years. Stanford hired him in 2007, but I suspected that he would have accepted any reasonable offer from U-M. Instead someone decided to pay West Virginia University $2.5 million to allow its coach, Rich Rodriguez, to forsake the Mountaineers and come to Ann Arbor.

I saw two of the games of the Richrod/Hoke era in person. Sue and I were in Ann Arbor in 2008 for the team’s home debut against Miami University. It was a horrendous game. I suspected that Miami would have won if its quarterback had not been injured.

It took a couple of years, but Rodriguez was able to field a pretty good offense built around Denard Robinson. The big problem was on defense. Richrod hired Greg Robinson to coach the defense, and the results were absolutely pathetic. U-M fans were not accustomed to teams running up the score on them, but it became commonplace.

The other game that I viewed in person was in Hoke’s regime, but it was also horrendous. It was a night game played at Rentschler Field in East Hartford in 2013. More than half the fans were wearing Michigan’s colors. It was very close up to the end. Michigan ended up with a 21-14 victory.

That game increased my appreciation of the alcohol-free atmosphere of Michigan Stadium. Some UConn fans were really obnoxious. However, the team’s play did not impress me at all.

Michigan somehow beat OSU in Brady Hoke’s first appearance in 2011. That team also defeated Virginia Tech 23-20 in the Orange Bowl. However, it was downhill from there. The 2014 team’s record was 5-7, which caused Hoke to be fired. The Athletic Director who had hired him, Dave Brandon, resigned.

Jim Harbaugh pre-Pandemic 2015-19: My career as a cowboy coder had just ended when Jim Harbaugh’s stint as U-M’s head coach began. He brought “an enthusiasm unknown to mankind” and a basket of new ideas. He took all of the players to Rome as part of Spring practice. He conducted coaching clinics in the southeastern U.S. These radical approaches to the job and the fact that he almost always spoke his mind engendered a lot of enmity against him in the community of coaches.

The 2015 team was much improved. After losing to Utah on the road to open the season the Wolverines won nine of the next ten games. The only blemish was a loss to MSU in Ann Arbor that was reminiscent of Keystone Kops, On the last play of the game the snap to the punter went astray leading to a 27-23 victory for Sparty. In The Game at the end of the season the team was clobbered by OSU, but the Wolverines delivered an even worse thrashing to the Florida Gators in the Capital One Bowl.

Harbaugh with Wilton Speight, who lost an entire season to a back injury.

The next four years were more of the same—one or two stumbles early, lots of very promising victories, and a blowout loss in The Game. In these years, however, the bowl games were also losses. Fans were becoming upset with Harbaugh, but those OSU teams were extremely good. Their teams were loaded with five-star recruits, and U-M’s quarterback always seemed to get hurt near the end of the season.

MGoBlog and BPONE: MGoBlog was founded by Brian Cook in 2004. I must have discovered the website that covered all of Michigan’s sports shortly after that because I am pretty sure that my dad told me that he was impressed by how much I knew about the U-M football team even before he moved to Enfield in 2005. The emphasis of the blogs was on football, of course. The most amazing aspect was that someone (Brian at first, later Seth Fisher) charted and analyzed every play of every U-M football game.

Brian and Seth also appear on the Michigan Insider radio show that was hosted weekly by Sam Webb on WTKA and was streamed on MGoBlog.com. Craig Ross, a lawyer who was born a year or two before I was, also appeared on the show. Ross was a super-fan of all of the U-M sports.

Top row: Sam and Seth. Bottom row: Craig and Brian.

I have spent an inordinate number of happy hours reading and listening to these guys and the other members of the MGoBlog crew. I especially appreciated the analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of U-M’s opponents that was provided by Alex Drain.

Brian, who was a very talented writer, often bared his soul about sports and his personal life. He invented the acronym BPONE, which stood for Bottomless Pit of Negative Expectations. It described a state of mind when one can no longer appreciate the positive aspects of viewing sports because he/she (hardly ever she) is convinced that they will be overwhelmed by negative aspect in the end. BPONE is precisely the reason that I gave up watching the Wolverines on television. Once you have seen Colorado’s “Miracle at Michigan” or the bungled punt attempts against MSU and Appy State it was difficult to keep them out of your mind.

Harbaugh’s glory years 2021-23: I should pass over without mentioning the monumentally stupid college football season of 2020. U-M won two of the six games in which it was able to field a team of players who did not have Covid-19. I blame Trump, who insisted that all the teams should play during the second wave of the most infectious disease anyone had seen.

Aidan Hutchinson was the best defensive player since Woodson.

In preparation for the 2021 season Harbaugh had dramatically reshuffled his assistant coaches. The primary goals were to design offenses and defenses that would be effective against the ones used by Ohio State. The players recruited for these new schemes were big, tough, and smart. Harbaugh promised that he would beat Ohio State or die trying.

Expectations for the 2021 season were not high in Ann Arbor, but there were some scraps of good news. Aidan Hutchinson³⁰, the All-American defensive end, returned. Cade McNamara and five-star freshman J.J. McCarthy seemed promising as quarterbacks.

In fact, this was a very good team. It lost a heart-breaker to MSU in the middle of the season when Kenneth Walker III ran for 197 yards and five touchdowns, but the Wolverines still entered the Ohio State game with a surprising 10-1 record. The team played an inspired game and defeated the Buckeyes by a score of 42-27. They then annihilated Iowa in the conference championship 42-3. They were ceded #3 in U-M’s first appearance in the College Football Playoff. The team was outclassed by eventual champion, Georgia, 34-11. Nevertheless, this was was the most accomplished Michigan team since the 1997-98 team that was named national champion by the AP.

When Corum got hurt, Edwards stepped up.

Even Brian Cook was optimistic about the 2022 team. Hutchinson was gone, but this team had two legitimate quarterbacks, two outstanding running backs, Blake Corum and Donovan Edwards, outstanding receivers, and the best offensive line in the country. The questions were on defense were quickly answered. The team breezed through its first ten games. A stubborn Illinois defense nearly engineered an upset in Ann Arbor, but the team was still undefeated and ranked #3 for The The Wolverines prevailed in Columbus for the first time since 2000 by a score of 45-23. They then sleepwalked past Purdue in the Big Ten championship and entered the CFP ceded #2.

Sherrone Moore (left) and Jesse Minter were probably the best offensive and defensive coordinators in college football.

Their opponent in the semifinal was Texas Christian. Michigan was favored by almost everyone, but J.J. McCarthy had a terrible game, and Blake Corum had been severely injured late in the season. The defense also had trouble stopping TCU’s attack; it did not help that two or McCarthy’s early passes were intercepted and returned for touchdowns. In the end the Horned Frogs won 51-45. Perhaps it was just as well that U-M lost that game. Georgia overwhelmed TCU in the final.

The 2023 team had one goal: to win the national championship. Almost all of the important players and coaching staff returned. The team was ranked #2 behind Georgia for nearly the entire season in both polls.

Two silly “scandals” were distractions. Because of allegations of recruiting violations in the Covid-19 year³¹ Harbaugh did not attend the first three games, which were blowouts of non-conference teams. Because of bizarre behavior of a low-level analyst with the unlikely name of Connor Stalions. He apparently bought tickets for people for games of prospective U-M opponents. Some of them allegedly took videos of the signs used to signal plays³² to the field. The Big Ten’s investigation resulted in the firing of one coach and the requirement that Harbaugh not be on the field for the team’s last three regular season games.

Corum was the star in overtime, but everyone contributed.

Those three very important games—were overseen by the Offensive Coordinator, Sherrone Moore. The results were decisive victories over Penn State, Maryland, and Ohio State. Michigan then shut out Iowa in the last conference championship game ever. After Seth Fisher analyzed each play of U-M’s semifinal overtime triumph over Alabama in the Rose Bowl he called it the greatest of Michigan’s 1,004 victories. The victory over Washington in the final game was less dramatic but equally satisfying.

In the end Michigan was the unanimous choice as #1, and the NCAA said that they had won the title fairly.

Denouement: Nick Saban, the long-time extremely successful coach at Alabama retired. Harbaugh resigned after agreeing to become the head coach for the Chargers, one of his old teams. Sherrone Moore was named U-M’s head coach. McCarthy, Corum, and quite a few others went pro. Some of the coaches accompanied Harbaugh to wherever the Chargers play these days.

In February of 2024 I watched the entire Rose Bowl game v. Alabama. I could not have watched it live. There were too many times in which Michigan committed unbelievable blunders that threatened to blow the game open. The FIRST PLAY was an interception that was overruled! BPONE would have overcome me. At least one vital organ would have failed.

How will Michigan do in the future? I sincerely doubt that the heroics of team #144 will ever be matched by any Michigan team in the future. College football has changed so drastically in the early twenties, and most of those changes do not bode well for the Wolverines.

I am quite happy that I got to experience this event even though I refused to make the kind of emotional investment in the team that others did. Their reward was no doubt greater.

1. Len Dawson, a Purdue graduate, led the Chiefs to victory in Super Bowl IV. He died in 2022.

2. Curtis McClinton, who went to the University of Kansas, was the AFL’s Rookie of the Year in 1962. He played nine years for the Chiefs. He was still alive and living in KC in 2024.

3. Fred Arbanas was a graduate of Michigan State. In January of 1965 he was assaulted in KC and lost vision in one eye. He nevertheless was an All-Star for the Chiefs for several years after that. He died in 2021.

4. The only one that I missed was one of the greatest U-M games of all time, the 1969 Ohio State game. I opted to attend a debate tournament in Chicago instead. This was one of the poorest choices that I ever made. I even gave away my ticket, which was on the 50-yard line halfway up.

5. I never heard anyone call him “Billy” in the year that he lived in A-R. He was generally known as BT, just as Darden was commonly called TD.

6. This game was attended by my parents while I watched on TV in Leawood! I was on my holiday break from classes.

7. Michigan easily won all ten games before the OSU game. The combined scores of it first three home games was 140-0.

8. Dennis Franklin had a cup of coffee with the New York Lions. He lived in Santa Monica, CA, in 2024.

9. Mike Lantry was my age. If he had gone to U-M after high school, he would have played when I was an undergrad. Instead he went to Vietnam. Although he held many records for kicking when he graduated, and he was a first team All-American, he is best remembered for three crucial kicks that he missed in the 1973 and 1974 OSU games. In 2024 he was living in Florida.

10. Rick Leach was still alive in 2024. His professional career was as a baseball player, mostly riding the pine with the Detroit Tigers.

11. Harlan Huckleby played six years for the Green Bay Packers. He was still alive in 2024.

12. Charles White played for the Cleveland Browns and the Los Angeles Rams. He led the NFL in rushing in 1987. He died in 2023.

13. Jim Brandstatter was in the same class as TD and BT. He tried out for the NFL but never played. He had a very long career in broadcasting. He was still alive in 2024.

14. Anthony Carter’s official height was 5’11”, and his weight was 168 lbs. I was two inches taller and 23 lbs. lighter when I entered the army. So, I was much skinnier than Carter. However, compared to nearly all football players, Carter was a midget. He set an incredible number of records. You can find them on his Wikipedia page, which is posted here. Carter was still alive in 2024.

15. Butch Woolfolk was a track star as well as one of the all-time great running backs at U-M. He also had an outstanding professional career. He was still alive in 2024.

16. John Wangler had to fight for the quarterback job his entire career at U-M, and he did not make the grade in the NFL. Nevertheless he will always be remembered for that pass in the Indiana game and his victories in The Game and the Rose Bowl. He was still alive in 2024.

16. Steve Smith started at quarterback for U-M for three years. He played for a couple of years in Canada. He was still alive in 2024.

17. Jack Harbaugh was the head coach at Western Michigan and then Western Kentucky, where his team won the Division I-AA national championship in 2002. The most important aspect of his career at U-M was probably the introduction of his son Jim to the nicest football town and best program in the country. Jim hired him as an assistant coach in 2023 (at the age of 84), and he was on the sideline coaching away when the Wolverines finally won it all in 2024.

18. Cris Carter was a phenomenal receiver, perhaps the best ever, but he had difficulty staying out of trouble. He was suspended for his senior year (1988) at OSU and then had a long and checkered NFL career. The high spots were lofty enough to get him into the Hall of Fame. Since his retirement after the 2002 season he has had had a few jobs in sports broadcasting.

19. Elvis Grbac had a reasonably successful, at least in financial terms, eight-year career in the NFL. He retired to become athletic director of his old high school in Cleveland. Believe it or not, he had a brother named Englebert.

20. Desmond Howard, who went to the same high school as Grbac, had a very successful NFL career and an even more successful career as an analyst at ESPN. I sat next to him on an airplane once during the early days of his career there.

21. I was astounded to learn that in 2023 Tyrone Wheatley had been hired as the head football coach at Wayne State in Detroit. He had a long and successful NFL career with the Giants and Raiders.

22. Todd Collins was never a big star at U-M, but his NFL career, which started in 1995 lasted until 2010, although on two different occasions he took a few years off. He was never a starter, but he evidently was widely considered a reliable backup.

23. Charles Woodson was just as good in the NFL as he had been in college. He played from 1998 to 2015, an astonishingly long career for a defensive back. The greatest interception of all time can be viewed here. In 2024 Woodson worked as an analyst for Fox.

24. Tom Brady became the greatest quarterback of all time in the NFL.

25. Drew Henson dropped out of school after his junior season and signed a contract with the New York Yankees. He bounced around in the minors before and played only eight games with the Yankees before retiring in 2004. He then tried the NFL, where he saw very limited action over a five year career. He was still alive in 2024, apparently working for a company that advised players on economic matters.

26. John Navarre was drafted by the NFL, but he played in only two games. In 2024 he lived in Elmhurst, IL.

27. Chad Henne played fifteen years in the NFL, mostly as a backup quarterback. His last few years were with the Chiefs. He retired in 2023.

28. This is my favorite figure of speech. It is called preterition.

29. Thankfully Walker played only one season for MSU. He was drafted by the Seahawks.

30. In 2024 Aidan Hutchinson was the cornerstone of the rebuilt Detroit Lions.

31. Brian Cook and the other MGoBloggers call this incident “hamburgergate”.

32. I was shocked to learn that it was illegal to go to other teams’ games to scout. I also assumed that everyone tried to “steal” signals and that teams took measures to make this nearly impossible. The NFL has installed technology that allows the coaches to talk to the players on the field. College coaches refuse to consider this arrangement.

2008 Road Trip to Michigan

Posted on November 18, 2021 by Mike

Driving through Canada to the Wolverine state. Continue reading →

In 1975-76, my last year of coaching at U-M, the debate team was in shambles. I described the situation here. During the three years that I spent at Wayne State in downtown Detroit I heard virtually nothing about the U-M team. I do not recall hearing that they attended any tournaments. I figured that the team had been abolished or reduced to obscurity.

I discovered at some point in the 2007-2008 school year that, unbeknownst to me, they program had at some point risen from the ashes and was competing strongly at the national level. I don’t remember how I learned about this, but as soon as I did, I composed and sent an email to Josh Hoe¹, the director of the debate program. In it I described my lackluster career as a debater and my much more successful efforts at coaching. I also described the hardships that the U-M debaters and coaches had to overcome when it was funded by the speech department.

Josh really appreciated my email a lot. He forwarded it to all of the alumni of the debate program. This precipitated an outburst of “reply all” responses from old-timers. Josh needed to ask them to take their communications off-line. It was great for me. I was able to find out what had become of most of my charges.

At some point over the summer Josh and his assistant Aaron Kall² decided to host a mostly informal gathering for debate alums on the weekend of U-M’s first home game against Miami U. (OH) on September 7, 2008. As it happened it was also the debut in Michigan Stadium of newly hired coach Rich Rodriguez. The team had lost its opener, 25-23 to Utah.

By 2008 I was no long working as constantly as I had in the nineties. My wife Sue and I also had amassed enough money at this point to pay for trips. As soon as I heard of the debate/football event, I made arrangements with Josh for us to attend. We decided to make a mini-vacation of it and to drive across Michigan to visit Sue’s aunt and uncle, Boband Carol Locke³, and their daughters, Deb, Wendy, and Sandy. They all lived in the Grand Rapids area. Our destination was Bob and Carol’s home in Hudsonville.

Sue was really looking forward to that part of the trip. Sue liked everyone in that part of her family a lot. I suspected that part of the attraction was that Bob was the only member of his family to move away from Enfield. His three brothers and his sister (Sue’s mother Effy) all lived within a couple of miles of one another.

Documentation: I don’t think that I took any notes on this trips. I had a small Canon point-and-shoot camera in those days. If I brought it, I either did not take any photos, or I lost them. I think that for some reason I left it home.

I found a folder on my computer about this trip, but its contents were of no help. Inside it are two identical html files that contain MapQuest directions from 1275 Huron St. in Ypsilanti to our house in Enfield. That address in Ypsi in 2023 was associated with the Marriott Eagle Crest resort and hotel. I have absolutely no memory of staying there. Aside from that it only contains an image of the Hampton Inn logo and a small map of the area around the Hampton Inn in Ann Arbor.

When I first asked Sue about the trip, she had no recollection at all. She could not even remember being in Michigan Stadium. Later, after a little prompting, she recalled a few details that I have included.

In short, I am relying almost exclusively on my memory for the account below.

Enfield to Ann Arbor: The town of Ann Arbor had a population of only about 112,000 in 2023. However, on football Saturdays almost that many people would be crammed into Michigan Stadium. Lodging would be in high demand. My first order of business was to find a place for us to stay for Friday and Saturday night. I booked us rooms at the Hampton Inn that was just south of the U-M golf course. I probably used the points from my credit card to pay for at least part of the bill.

I think that we must have left on Thursday morning. We took the Canadian route through Ontario, and I remember that I was very upset that there was a long delay when we entered near Buffalo. When we got to the front, the border guy asked me what my license plate was. I knew that it was three digits followed by FAU, but I was not sure of the number. I guessed, and he said that that was close enough.

The 10+ hour drive time that Google Maps sited, and I am pretty sure that we did not leave at the crack of dawn, and we stopped for food twice. We might have stopped in Plymouth to check out the house on Sheldon Rd., too. Also, I have a vague recollection that we crossed over north of Lake St. Clair to avoid rush hour traffic in Detroit. The Ambassador Bridge was closed for construction. The lines at the tunnel must have been outrageous.

In any case, I think that we arrived at the Hampton Inn after dark on Thursday, September 5. We probably ate the free breakfast at the hotel the next morning.

I remember that we spent most of a day walking around the U-M campus and assessing how much had changed in the twenty-eight years since we had last been there. That must have been on Friday. I remember that Allen Rumsey House did not appear to have changed much at all. I am pretty sure that I ducked into the Intramural Building to assure myself that the overall championship won by A-R in 1969-70 was still recognized on the banner.

I also remember showing to Sue the spot behind the administration building where the water balloons launched from the fourth floor of A-R landed. I am pretty sure that we ate lunch at a restaurant on S. University near the engineering buildings.

We also had an appointment with Linda (Calo) Martini, who was working, I think, at the Michigan Debate Institute or maybe the Michigan Intercollegiate Speech League. We were hoping to see Kent (introduced here) as well, but he was not present. Linda said that he had taken it very hard when his mother died. It all seemed a little mysterious.

We were supposed to meet Josh and some other debate alums at a bar in Ann Arbor on Friday evening. Several of those in attendance wore Michigan Debate tee shirts that closely resembled the one that I once had. However, none of theirs had the letter C (for captain) on the front and “Prof. Wavada” on the back. My tee shirt had not survived the decades since the debaters gave it to me in 1970.

I am pretty sure that Bill Colburn, who had been Director of Forensics back in the sixties and seventies was there, too. I could hardly recognize him.

I learned that the debate team had been divorced from the speech department, which had at some point been combined with the journalism department. Somehow the debate team had taken control over the summer institute and turned a locally successful gathering run mostly by Wayne State people into the #1 such event in the entire nation. The benefits to the U-M debate program were enormous. It generated a lot of cash for the team. It provided summer employment and recognition for the coaching staff. Most importantly, top-flight high school debaters flocked to the institute every summer, and some inevitably fell in love with Ann Arbor and the U-M campus, enrolled, and joined the team.

The program also received funding from the University and had begun to receive significant contributions from its growing alumni base, most of whom were lawyers. I was astounded to learn that one of the recently graduated debaters, Dylan Keenan, had attended one of the Shawnee Mission schools and had majored in math⁴.

On Saturday we ate breakfast at the Hampton Inn and then drove to the game. Parking was always scarce, but we found a spot that was not too far from the stadium. We somehow eventually found the area where the debaters tail-gated. I think that we met up with Wayne Miller there. He was with some of his friends from the seventies.

Another short walk brought us to the stadium. Almost everyone wore blue and/or maize, but someone in the large group of fans crossing the street was wearing a red hat with a white M on it. The guy directing traffic called to him and said, “Well, you got the letter right, but whoever sold you that hat must have been color-blind.” Sue told me that someone also gave her a hard time because she was carrying a red handbag.

We sat in the upper reaches to the left of the scoreboard. The student section begins in the middle of the block M and stretches to the far end zone.

There are no bad seats in Michigan Stadium, but almost everyone had a better view of the action than we did. We were near the top in one of the corners of the end zone. It was more comfortable than being crammed together in the student section. It was also much more pleasant than UConn games because no liquor was allowed in the stadium.

I think that this was the big play near the end of the game.

The game, however, was painful to watch. U-M started well. The score was 10-0 at the end of the first quarter, and people in the stands were happy for a time with the team’s new approach to offense. However, after that the winningest team in college football stalled. By the fourth quarter it was 10-6. Brandon Minor scored a late touchdown to make the score a little more acceptable. Michigan had never lost to any team from the Mid-American Conference. For a while it appeared that we might be watching something historic.

Afterwards we drove with Wayne to Krazy Jim’s Blimpy Burgers. Wayne was surprised that I knew about it. I informed him that I had gone there more than once a month for the four years that I lived at A-R.

Inside a blowhard who was a little ahead of us in line started telling stories about how he had worked with the legendary Krazy Ray. Everyone was impressed when I said that I came here all the time when Krazy Ray ran the grill, and I sure didn’t remember this guy. I then explained how upset Ray would get if someone tried to order the whole meal from him. He strictly grilled and assembled the burgers. You were expected to give the rest of your order to the next person behind the counter.

The burgers were still very tasty, and the atmosphere was magical. I had a great time.

Ann Arbor to Hudsonville: One other very important event occurred in Ann Arbor, but the details are shrouded. Sue somehow arranged for a new custom-designed tee shirt for me that was nearly identical to the one that the guys had gotten me in 1976. I remember that she ordered me to stop at a location on the outskirts of town (I think) on the way to Hudsonville. She went inside for a while and returned with a bag that she presented to me. I can’t say that I was surprised—Sue is notoriously bad at keeping secrets—but it was a very nice gesture.⁵

I don’t remember anything about the drive to Hudsonville. We probably arrived there at about lunch time. I think that we only stayed one night and that Bob and Carol put us up for the night in a cottage that was on their property.

An overhead view of the Locke property. Those trees had leaves on them when we were there.

Their home was in a secluded area surrounded by woods and wildlife. I remember that there was a pond nearby and that Carol was interested in birds, especially cardinals.

We saw at least some of the daughters, their husbands, and their children. Sue reportedly brought a game with her that she had used in her work with the Enfield after-school program. It was involved with traveling from state to state. I vaguely remember it. She said that she left it with them.

Hudsonville to Enfield: Our route home was quite different fromour route to Hudsonville. We took I-96 and I-69 across Michigan and crossed to Canada at Sarnia. We then took 402 and 403 across Ontario. I remember nothing about this journey.

1. In 2010 Josh was convicted of soliciting a minor for sex and went to prison for a few years. The article in the Ann Arbor News about the incident is posted here. In 2023 his LinkedIn page (posted here) listed his jobs as Criminal Justice Policy Manager at Dream.Org and host of the Decarceration Nation podcast.

2. Aaron took over the program after Josh was fired. In 2023 he was still the coach of perhaps the most successful program in the country. However first place at the National Debate Tournament has still evaded the Wolverines.

3. Carol died in 2018. Her obituary has been posted here. Bob outlived all of his siblings. He died in 2022. His obituary is posted here.

4. That last part may not be right. Dylan, whose LinkedIn page is posted here, evidently majored in economics. Dylan and his partner, Adam Farra, had made it to the semifinals of the NDT in 2008.

5. I still have the tee shirt in 2023.

1974-1977 Living in Plymouth, MI

Posted on March 10, 2021 by Mike

Life outside of U-M, in Plymouth and beyond. Continue reading →

I can remember a lot about the three years that Sue and I lived in our apartment on Sheldon Rd. in Plymouth, but in some cases the chronology is a little fuzzy. I have consulted with Sue on many of these items, but grey areas persist.

The area north of 845 Sheldon Rd. has greatly changed since we left. The train tracks were, I think, near what is now called Beech St. The houses on that road and the large cul-de-sac on the left did not exist when we lived there.

One strange and memorable aspect of life in that apartment concerned light bulbs. The train tracks just to the north of the house were, in those years, quite active. Long freight trains rumbled through at a rapid pace day and night. Whenever a train passed, the entire building shook as if in a mild earthquake. Nothing was ever damaged except our incandescent light bulbs. We did not have a great number of lamps, but we routinely needed to replace bulbs at least monthly.

Fortunately, our electric company, Detroit Edison, had a policy of providing free light bulbs¹ to its customers. So, we would just pick up a couple at their local store every time that we were in the vicinity.

Pets: We brought Puca, Sue’s boa constrictor, to Plymouth from Connecticut. He lived in his cage in the bookshelves in the living room throughout our time in Plymouth.

Having a snake means that one must also have a supply of animals to feed it. We fed Puca mice. We found a very nice pet store in Northville, the town immediately north of Plymouth. It was only a ten-minute drive unless, of course, a train was coming through.

On our first visit we bought a few mice to feed to Puca. We needed a place to keep them; he never ate more than one. We bought a fish tank with a lid of wire mesh. We also needed some wood shavings for the floor, a water bottle, and some Purina Mouse Chow².

The athleticism of the mice amazed me. They looked fat and slow, but their appearance was deceptive. Any mouse could easily jump from the floor of the cage to the lid—a leap of about a foot. It could at the same time whip around and grab the lid with all four paws in one smooth motion. They appeared to just will themselves up.

When Puca was like this it was safe to feed him. Only the S-shaped coiled part strikes. In this position he could only strike something an inch or so away from his head.

Keeping a few mice around was acceptable as long as Puca was eating. However, he was unpredictable in that regard. We knew that boa constrictors generally hibernated in the winter. They drank a little water, but they were very lethargic. Puca’s cage had a heat lamp, but it seemed that he somehow knew when it was time to hibernate.

Snakes can unhinge their jaws. They can swallow animals that are much larger than one might expect.

We expected Puca to be hungry pretty much all of the time in the other three seasons, but that was not always the case. Fairly often he refused to eat.

The thing about mice is that if you have a male and a female, you almost always have quite a few more before you know it. Although they are born blind and hairless, mice nurse for only twenty days. They can be fertile at an age of four to six weeks. The gestation period is only twenty days. The litter size can be up to thirteen! Pregnant mice can barely walk on the last few days. One of our mice, named Mellow, had a litter of twelve, and all of the pups survived.

So, we soon needed more cages. We bought a twenty-gallon tank with a lid of wire mesh and a Deluxe Habitrail. We acquired a small wire cage that we used to isolate pregnant females. Fortunately it is easy to determine the sex of mice, and so I was generally able to keep the breeding down. However, over one winter our mouse population still rose to fifty-three.

I kept careful records of the mice. I was not doing research. I just likes to keep records. I assigned a name to each mouse and gave him/her a file card that documented date of birth or purchase, appearance (I tried to buy mice with interesting colors and patterns), parentage, and date fed to Puca (or other demise).

Occasionally a mouse escaped. I chased the each fugitive until I had it cornered. Then I picked it up by the tail. Their only weakness was their inability to hide their tails, and I never gave up.

Once a mouse on the lam ran—I swear that I saw this happen—through the wire cage that we used as a maternity ward. Less than a half inch separated the vertical bars on this cage, but the mouse did not even seem to slow down when he passed between them.

To feed Puca I would grab a mouse by the tail. I would wait for an occasion in which he seemed active but not on the prowl. He would almost always flick his tongue, his best sense, whenever I opened the door to the cage. If he was interested in eating he would slowly stalk the mouse. When he struck he seldom missed. He then squeezed the life out of the mouse and swallowed it head-first. If he was skinny (which he usually was), you could see the mouse move through his body.

Was I afraid of Puca? No, not at all. We sometimes took him out, but we never let him roam. He was too good at hiding, and once he got himself wrapped around something, it was very difficult to pry him loose. My biggest fear was that he would somehow get into our heater.

Actually, I was more afraid of the mice than Puca. Puca struck at my arm once. It felt like getting punched. His teeth also made small puncture wounds, but there was not a lot of pain. The wounds did not last long.

This is the recipe box that contained cards with the details for each mouse.

I was also bit by a mouse once, and it was MUCH worse. I was holding the little critter by the tail, as I had done dozens of times. This one must have had great abs because he whipped his head up to my hand and glommed onto the loose skin between my thumb and forefinger with all four of his oversized front teeth. The bite really hurt, and he would not let go no matter how much I shook my hand. I whacked my hand up against a wall three times before he let go. When he hit the floor he sped off, but eventually I caught him.

The area of the bite was sore for a few days, but there was no permanent damage.

Our Charlie was much better looking than Charlie Haggers.

Sue and I often drove to the pet store in Northville even when we had no need of mice. We looked at all the potential pets for sale there. In 1976 we decided to buy a guinea pig. We picked out a Peruvian (long hair) with a very interesting color that involved a mix of silver and light brown hair. We named him after the Charlie Haggers³ character on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, which we watched every night in 1976-1977. The guinea pig’s full name was Carlos Cavia y Vega, but we called him Charlie.

In those days I loved to bake in the sun in the backyard of the apartment house. During the summer of 1976 I brought Charlie with me outside, where I would liked to read a book or work on something. I had removed the bottom and lid to a large cardboard box to provide Charlie with an open-air fenced in place to enjoy the outdoors. It may sound boring, but this array of fresh edible greens was like paradise to a guinea pig.

This photo of Charlie doesn’t do him justice. His coat was very nice when he was not all wet like this.

In the apartment we kept Charlie in a twenty-gallon fish tank for a while. I decided to build a cage for him and a potential family to fit on the barnboard shelves. It was a split-level, and it featured a ramp that, when lowered, let them roam in the living room and return home when they wanted. They were very well-behaved. They were not fast; their only defense mechanism in the wild was to hide in a hole or cave, and, to tell the truth, these long-haired guinea pigs had not been in the wild in many generations.

I thought that it would be nice to take Charlie for “walkies”, as Barbara Woodhouse called them. Charlie had very short legs, of course. I did not anticipate that we would cover a lot of ground. I bought a very cheap leash for Charlie, and he did not seem to mind it. I put the leash on him and carried him outside. He made a beeline for the nearest dandelion. He spent a few minutes there until he had devoured all of the greens. He then moved to the next dandelion about six inches away, and he spent the next few minutes chomping on the delights that it had to offer. I terminated our walkie without ever doing more than shuffling my feet.

When the guinea pig mansion was completed, Sue and I decided to get Charlie a companion. Her name, of course, was Loretta. We decided on the name before we ever departed for the pet store.

As soon as we reached the store we walked to the section in which they kept the guinea pigs. They usually had between five and fifteen of them, a very good selection. Most people do not realize that guinea pigs whistle when they get excited. I was quite adept at emulating a guinea pig whistle, and I always exhibited this talent at the store. Pretty soon the whole clan would get in the act. All of the customer would come over to the guinea pig area to witness the excitement.

Loretta, with her three-toned face and white torso, was at least as cute as her namesake (when she dried off). Also, my arms were never as hairy as they look here.

We picked out a suitable Loretta and brought her home with us. She got along fine with Charlie, and before too long she had a litter of three.

Guinea pigs and mice are both rodents, but the similarity ends there. Loretta carried her babies for about two months. The last few days we could see them moving around inside her. They came out with their eyes ope, a full set of teeth, and beautiful coats. By the time that we saw them they were on their feet and moving about.

Another important difference between mice and guinea pigs: The best way to pick up mice is by the tail. However, NEVER pick up a guinea pig by the tail; its eyes will fall out.

Guinea pig babies certainly must rank with the cutest animals ever. When we let down the ramp Loretta would go for a walk in the living room, and the babies followed her in a line nose-to-tail. To top it off they all made what I called “monk-monk” noises. I don’t know how else to describe them. Adults never made these noises. I am positive that Sue took some photos of this furry little train, but I cannot find them.

The big trip: Sue and I took no vacations during the years that we lived in Plymouth. In the fall of 1976 we learned that Patti Lewonczyk and Tom Corcoran were getting married in Newington, CT, on January 7, 1977. They invited us to the wedding, and we decided to go. We planned to fly to Kansas City⁵ to spend Christmas with my family in Leawood, and then fly back to Hartford. We then would drive to Enfield to celebrate a late Christmas and New Year’s with Sue’s family. Then we would return to Michigan after the wedding.

I don’t honestly remember too much about the trip to KC, but Sue took a number of photos. My sister Jamie was apparently not there. She was nineteen or twenty at the time. I think that she had left college and moved somewhere. She also got married around this time if my math is correct. Father Joe drove down from Kelly, KS.So, there were six of us (counting Molly the dog) for Christmas.

From the photos it appears that Sue and I spent most of our time at my parents’ house playing with Molly, whom I have always considered to be Jamie’s dog. My dad, who had no use for live animals of any description, was forced into several pictures that included Molly.

My parents and I certainly attended mass on Christmas day. I am almost positive that I was still going to church regularly in late 1976. If not, I definitely was not ready to tell my parents. Sue might have attended out of courtesy to my parents. I can’t think of any other reason for her to be wearing such a nice dress.

The whole experience was more than a little awkward; things were always awkward in that house. My parents were both devout Catholics from birth. They had raised me to be one, too, but, after a very promising start, I failed to meet their expectations. They never said anything, but it was in the air.

Two young guinea pigs and Sue’s present for Betty.

From the top: Loretta in her split-level pad, Charlie on his hind legs sniffing around in the 20-gallon tank, and their two offspring in a wire cage that I don’t recognize.

From KC we flew back to Metro Airport in Detroit.

Shortly thereafter we drove to Enfield in Sue’s Dodge Colt. We must have gone through Ohio and Pennsylvania because we brought with us several guinea pigs—Charlie, Loretta, and some of their offspring. They occupied the back seat in at least two cages, including the split-level house that I built for them.

I have almost no recollection at all of this part of the visit. Sue’s photographs indicate that gifts were exchanged, and the guinea pigs always seemed to be right in the middle of the festivities.

Snow at the church. That may be the legendary Hergmobile.

Although Tom and Patti were not very religious, their nuptials were performed at the Catholic church in Newfield. That was what people whose parents were Catholic did in the seventies. We attended the ceremony, but I don’t remember anything about it. In the Catholic church the wedding ceremonies are generally part of a mass. So, a large portion of the time was devoted to the usual rites.

Many of our friends at the Hartford were there, and, as far as I know, they all attended the reception. I only remember one detail. At the meal Sue and I were seated near Jim and Ann Cochran. Someone asked me about what I had been doing. I told them how thrilled that Wayne, Mitch, and I were the previous year to make it to the National Debate Tournament in Boston. I also probably told them about Don and Stewart. I may have told a few debate stories, too.

An hour or so after the meal Ann came up to me and said, “You don’t even know what you’ve got, do you?”

I didn’t think I had anything, but my last physical was when I left the Army almost five years earlier. Before I could relay this information, she put her arms around my neck and planted a huge smacker on my face. You could have knocked me over with a feather. Later, I saw her sweet talking a guy that I had never met.

I think that there must have been a second round of festivities at the 345 Club. Quite a few photos show people without suits and ties in rooms with old wallpaper and antebellum furniture.

Scott Otermat in the foreground and Tom Corcoran with the drink.

Damon Panels, Someone, Scott Otermat,
and the Cochrans.

The following photos are at the 345 Club.

Fashion note: Yes, there was probably still a suit in my closet, and I certainly had some ties. However, as an impoverished graduate student, I was well within my rights to wear to any “formal occasion” my trusty corduroy jacket over a bulky wool sweater. Besides, it was cold.

The last forty or so miles were through the Pocono Mountains.

The first half of the drive back to Plymouth was something of an adventure. As we reached the northern section of the Pocono Mountains it started to snow. Thereafter we saw very few cars. Sue was driving, and I was nervous. At the time this was the scariest drive I had ever been on, but that record lasted less than a month.

We finally arrived at a motel near Scranton, and we obtained a room. The motel had a no-pets policy, but we snuck the guinea pigs and their cages into the room. All four had long coats, but they were not used to cold weather.

It was sunny and bright the next morning, and the drive to Plymouth was easy.

Sue’s jobs: Sue’s first job after we arrived in Plymouth in 1974 was a very convenient one. It was in the center of Plymouth, only a few blocks from our apartment. The company was a business association for insurance companies in Michigan. I am not sure what her responsibilities entailed. She was called a “correspondent”.

Sue liked this job, but her employers considered her a potential rabble-rouser. Unions were still very big in Michigan, and management did not want anyone who might undertake to bring one to the organization. They asked her to leave.

She found a job pretty quickly with a company named Michigan Basic. This company developed software for IBM mini-computers, such as the System/3. Sue’s boss’s name was Chuck Glore. Sue learned from him how to program in RPG (Report Program Generator).

I don’t remember where the office was, but I recall accompanying Sue there on a few evenings or weekends. I was very interested in the concept of computers that a small company could program themselves.

After a while, Sue and Chuck had a falling out over something. It might have been because of a recession in the auto industry. Since nearly every company in southeast Michigan was heavily dependent on the auto companies, at least indirectly, all businesses suffered. At any rate, Sue was back in the job market, but she now had a marketable skill.

She took a job as a placement for an employment agency. In many ways it was a perfect job for Sue. She has always loved to talk on the phone, she enjoys introducing people to one another, and she really believed that there was a seat for every butt.

Unfortunately, the local economy being what it was at the time, there were far more butts than seats. Sue often came back to the apartment crying in frustration.

One of the few thriving companies in Detroit was Brothers Specifications. As “white flight” took hold in Detroit a lot of fairly nice houses were abandoned. The federal department of Housing and Urban Development hired the company to inspect the abandoned houses and to assess the cost, if any, of making the houses habitable. The employment agency that Sue worked for had been contacted by Frank Yee, the computer guy at Brothers. Sue tried to convince him to hire one of her job-seekers. He told her that he would rather hire her than the applicant whom she was representing.

Sue took Frank up on his offer. She liked this job a lot. She got along well with the people there, and there was a very active social life, which was right up Sue’s alley. The details and many photos will be posted in the Detroit section of the blog.

Visitors: Sue has told me that her peripatetic grandmother, Molly Locke, visited our apartment and slept on the waterbed. She was on a trip to western Michigan to visit the family of her son Bob Locke or on the way back to Enfield. I must have been away on a debate trip. She slept on our waterbed but did not enjoy it much. This visit probably occurred in the spring or fall. I would have known about it in the summer, and tourism in Michigan in winter is seldom advisable.

Sue also told me that her female cousins (her Uncle Bob’s daughters) also visited her while I was on a debate trip.

Mark (?) is on the waterbed. Jamie is sitting on the floor looking at the Mean Reserves album. I am probably sitting on a kitchen chair. We are all facing the television set.

I reckon that our other visitors arrived in late winter or early spring of 1977. My sister Jamie drove up with, I think, her new husband Mark. I remember absolutely nothing about this visit, but Sue took a photo of them, and I am in the picture. I suspect that we talked mostly about our pets. We were very serious pet owners at the time.

They stayed overnight on the waterbed. I think that they left the next day.

Entertainment: Sue has always loved live music. She found a bar named The Crows Nest inside the Mayflower Hotel, which was right in the center of Plymouth. It often featured live musicians. She had two favorite singers, a blonde whose name was Jane or Janet, and Elaine Philpot, who had darker hair and claimed to be 5’12” tall.

Elaine had an interesting song that she used for sing-alongs. The title is “Piccolomini”⁶. Here are the lyrics:

Piccolomini Piccolomini Piccolomini Picco-
Lomini Piccolomini Piccolomini Piccolomini Pi-
Ccolomini Piccolomini Piccolomini Piccolomini 
(repeat faster and faster until totally out of breath).

I remember Elaine best for her pet waterfowl named Kensington. I thought of him as a large duck; Sue remembers a goose. She is probably right.

Whatever he was, he enjoyed biting people’s bare legs. He brazenly walked up to strangers, turned his head ninety degree, opened his beak and thrust at the exposed flesh. When he hit the target, he twisted his head back to the upright position before releasing. This really hurt.

Sue photographed the RMSB playing hard and fast at Floyd’s in Ann Arbor.

Our other favorite hangout was a bar in the center of Ann Arbor called, if memory serves, Floyd’s. We went there several times to listen to the Red Mountain String Band, a bunch of people who occasionally came up to God’s country to perform before returning to “that school down south” in Columbus. At least once Don Huprich joined us at Floyd’s.

This was from an article in the OSU newspaper about the group wanting to play in prisons.

They were very good musicians. The leader, Larry Nager⁶, was also very funny. We always sat quite close to the band. I asked Larry once to specify the location of the Red Mountains. His answer disappointed me a little. He admitted that they were a figment of the imagination. In his position I would have made something up.

Cards: I think that I got interested in card magic and card throwing while watching Ricky Jay⁷ on the Tonight Show. He performed a hilarious trick called The Lethal Four-Card Fist. He made Johnny Carson put on a studded mitt designed by a goaltender in hockey. Then he gave Johnny a banana to hold in his gloved hand. He began a long tale about the origin of the technique of the four-card fist (one-card between each finger and one between the thumb and forefinger), which he attributed to Somebody “the heathen”. In the middle of his patter who once slew five separate assailants when he was apparently unarmed. In the midst of this patter he whirled and threw all four cards at the banana HARD. At least one or two definitely struck the banana or the glove.

Afterwards Johnny examined the banana and remarked that the attack did not appear to be very lethal. There was not even a scratch on it. Ricky sternly reproved him for the plebeian mistake of judging a book by its cover. He then explained the art of ubiwasi that he had learned from the inside back cover of Superman DC comics. With one finger an ordinary man can bring an assailant with a single finger without leaving a mark.

Ricky advised Johnny to peel the banana carefully. The fruit of the banana fell onto the carpet in five neat pieces. Even with no training I could figure out how he did the trick, but his presentation was flawless.

I purchased Jay’s outstanding book, Cards as Weapons. I did not use Ricky’s throwing technique; I invented my own, in which I compensated for my rag arm with a method that allowed me to snap my shoulder, elbow wrist, and finger joints in rapid succession. I threw one thousand cards a day for the better part of one summer. It was a minor miracle that I did not do permanent damage.

I once threw a playing card forty yards outdoors against the wind. That’s ten yards less than Ricky’s best (long since eclipsed by others), but it was farther than my bunkmate in Basic Training, Rosey, could throw any object.

I bought quite a few other books about card tricks and some trick decks at a magic store. I practiced my sleights for at least an hour a day. I could do a few tricks, but none of them very well. I only perfected one, Scarne’s Color Change, which required very little skill. I watched the Amazing Kreskin use it to baffle Charlton Heston, who held the deck in his own hands through nearly all of the experience. on national television.

Once, when Elaine Philpot was sitting at our table at the Crow’s Nest, I pulled a deck of cards from my pocket and said that I had learned a magic trick. I then told her that scientists in Switzerland had determined that a few sensitive people were able to determine whether a playing card was red or black solely through their fingertips. The cards with red suits and numbers allegedly transmitted slightly more heat. I asked her to try it. When the trick was over she was absolutely convinced that her fingers could discern red cards from black even though I started by telling her that it was a trick.

Wedding: Mitch Chyette married his longtime girlfriend, Andee, in the summer of 1976. It was the only Jewish wedding that I have ever attended. The debaters were all there, but I don’t remember many details. If I find any photos, I will post them.

Sports: I played a few rounds of golf with Don Goldman. I don’t remember any details.

I bought a pair of Adidas running shoes and started jogging when I noticed that I was getting fat. I jogged at least a couple of times a week for forty or more years.

The only recognized sport in the Ann Arbor area is college football. If the team and I were both in town, I went to the game. If I was out of town, I gave my ticket to Don Goldman or someone else. He did the same for me. In that way Sue was able to see a few games, too. The team’s records during the three years were 10-1, 8-2-2 (tying two out-of-conference games and losing to Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl, and 10-2 (losing to USC in the Rose Bowl).

Rick Leach was the star of the 1976 team.

One game—or actually half of a game—stands out in my memory. Sue and I attended the game with Mitch Chyette and wife Andee. For her the best part of the game was the show that the band put on at halftime.

We watched the first half of one of the home games—I think that it must have been the 1976 game against Minnesota—in the rain. I was miserable. Andee opined that we should leave after the half. I said that if we stayed for the halftime show, we were definitely staying for the second half. We decided to leave at the end of the first half and watch the rest of the game at their nearby apartment.

For years I thought that the game we saw with Mitch and Andee was the one in 1968 in which Ron Johnson set the NCAA rushing record (broken many times in subsequent years) with an unbelievable second half in the mud. I must have conflated two events that were actually years apart. It happens when you become a geezer.

I am pretty sure that we also went bowling once with Mitch, Andee, and her sister, who was dating a Chaldean guy who apparently smoke a smattering of Arabic. He told us how he had been hired by some Black guys to read some Muslim texts to them. They liked the way that the Arabic sounded, but none of them understood it. He said that he always threw in some jokes, malapropisms, and obscenities.

1. This policy began in the nineteenth century. In 1974 Detroit Edison was sued for antitrust violations by a drug store. In 1978, after we had moved away from the tracks, Detroit Edison terminated the policy.

2. I don’t think that Purina still markets specifically to mice owners. I looked for a picture on the Internet, but I could not find one.

3. Charlie Haggers was played by Graham Jarvis. He died in 2003 at the age of 72.

4. Loretta Haggers was portrayed by Mary Kay Place. She won an Emmy for her performance.

5. It is quite possible that the Kansas City trip took place a year earlier (1975).

6. I later learned that Piccolomini is the family name of two popes, Pius II and his nephew Pius III. Pius II as a young man wrote some erotic literature. His nephew’s pontificate lasted less than a month.

7. The band is long gone, but Larry Nager has had a very productive career in performing music and writing about it.

8. Ricky Jay died in 2018. He was one of my very few idols.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: Ann Arbor MI

1948-1970 Dad and Me

1948-1979 Catholic Upbringing

1966-2024 Bleeding Maize and Blue

2008 Road Trip to Michigan

1974-1977 Living in Plymouth, MI