1948-1970 Mom and Me

Posted on August 16, 2024 by Mike

This was the most difficult to write of the hundreds of entries in this project. I decided to set an ending date of 1970 because after I left for the army face-to-face contacts with my mom were quite limited. My dad came to see me when I was working at the Hartford, but it was only for a day at the end of a business trip. Mom stayed home. I don’t remember them visiting us at all for the three years we lived in Plymouth. They both came to Detroit once, and they did not like it at all. After my wife Sue and I moved back to Connecticut they visited a handful of times, but, except for the first trip, they spent most of their time with my sister Jamie and her family.

Sue and I visited them in 1973. After that we were too poor and too busy to travel much until I started flying much more in the nineties. I arranged a stop in the Kansas City area whenever it was feasible, which was pretty often. However, the ones when she was still alive were mostly for parties or other celebrations. I remember very little of the conversation. Also, through much of this period she was reluctant to contribute much.

In fact, I reluctantly admit that the sum total of my knowledge about my mother is pitiful. Dolores Ann Cernech was born on October 2, 1925, in Kansas City. Her parents were John and Clara Cernech. My understanding is that Clara was half German and half Polish. Cernech is a Croatian name. John’s mother was at least partly Irish.

Mom grew up in Kansas City, KS. In 1943 she graduated from Bishop Ward High School, which was less than a mile from the Cernech residence at 40 N. Thorpe. Students in her graduating class were asked to specify who their favorite band leader was (!) and what they hoped to become in life. Dolores Ann Cernech answered “Tommy Dorsey” and “Private Secretary”. The latter seemed like a peculiar response in the age of Rosie the Riveter.

I am not sure how she met my dad, who was a year older and went to high school in Atchison, KS, about fifty miles away. My understanding is that they were already acquainted before my dad enlisted in the army in 1942.

I wish that I had learned more about what my mom did in the period between her graduation and Jim Wavada’s discharge from the army in February of 1946. I have a vague recollection that she had worked in a clerical position somewhere, but she must have been communicating with my dad while he was in the army. They were married on September 1, 1947, which was eighteen and a half months after he was discharged from the army. It definitely was not a shotgun wedding. It was officiated in St. Peter’s by my dad’s brother, whom I knew as Fr. Joe. I did not show up until eleven and a half months later.

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 persuaded him that it was for the best; 2) He might have gotten into serious trouble if he did not get married.¹ He also mentioned something about pinball machines, which in those days were common in bars.

Dolores and Jim took up residence in the Cernech’s house in KC KS. I am not sure if John and Clara lived there at the time. It was not a large house, and I know that at some point John, an employee of the Boss Glove Company, was transferred to Grand Island, NE. I have dozens of questions that I should have asked while they were still alive. Did they have a honeymoon? If so, where? Presumably my dad worked at BMA. Did mom work, too, at first? How did they get around? They did not have a car until 1954.

I have no doubt that my mom ran the household’s finances from day one. My dad was nearly incapable of balancing a checkbook. For the most part she was very frugal at least during the time that I lived at home. My dad bought suits and other dress clothes for work. My mom sewed most of her own clothes.

I am equally certain that my mom took on any task that involve any kind of a machine or any tools. My dad had the least mechanical aptitude of anyone whom I have ever encountered. What about yardwork? The house on N. Thorpe had a very small yard. I doubt that the family owned a power mower. So, somebody must have mowed the grass with an old-fashioned push mower. Uncle Rich might have helped, but my money is on mom. I can’t imagine my dad doing it even once.

Life in KC KS 1948-54

The first big event after the marriage was my birth on August 17, 1948. It must have been a horrific shock for her to see my mangled face. I have been told that the physicians performed the first surgery shortly after birth. There were follow-up procedures before I started going to school and another one after I completed the eighth grade.

My parents almost never brought this up. They had obviously discussed the matter and decided that they wanted me not to fret about my appearance. That certainly succeeded. Very few people whom I have met paid as little attention to appearances as I did.

I remember one trip to the shoe store when I was quite young. The salesman talked mom into purchasing arch supports for my very flat feet. I think that that only happened once. After that off-the-rack was good enough. I did not start using arch supports regularly again until I was in my seventies. Those came from Walmart, cost $10, and could be worn with any shoe or none.

I cannot remember my grandparents ever living in the Cernech house with us. Richard Keuchel², Clara’s youngest brother, lived with us. He kept to himself most of the time, but I remember that he occasionally brought me a small present or gave me some coins for baseball cards.

I vaguely remember mom taking me with her on a few shopping trips. Most of the time she probably walked to Central Ave., a lively retail area just a couple of blocks from the house. We might have taken an occasional bus or “street car” (trolley) as well.

The one type of excursion that impressed me the most was trips to the library. I was allowed to pick out my own books in the children’s section. My tastes primarily ran to westerns. I don’t remember her reading these books to me, but she must have, at least at first. I remember also that I had a rather large book that had fables in it. The only one that I recall was about an ant and a fiddle-playing grasshopper.

My recollection, which is probably at least a little off, is that I had the run of the neighborhood by the time that I was four or five. I am pretty certain that I walked to both kindergarten and first grade, and I remember spending a lot of time with my friends in the neighborhood. I don’t think that I was allowed to cross the alley in back of the house by myself, but I remember playing with friends up and down N. Thorpe Street. I also remember our telephone number, FAirfax 9890.

I remember attending several weddings and funerals of mom’s relatives. However, we had no automobile. Maybe those took place after we moved.

Did my mom have any friends? I don’t recall any. She knew everyone on N. Thorpe. She grew up there. Someone told me that she selected one of her classmates from Ward High to be her maid of honor. I have a photo of the wedding, but the people are not identified. I think that the same lady might have been my godmother, but she did not have any role thereafter in my mother’s life.

Maybe looking after me was all that mom could handle. Four instances came to mind that might have made her wonder what she had gotten herself into:

In addition to all of the trips to the hospital, she also arranged sessions for me with a speech therapist. This was apparently in anticipation of difficulties in speaking due to the amount of plastic in my upper lift. I don’t remember ever having trouble articulating, and I did well in the formal presentation required by the therapist.
I related the story here about the rock-thrower whom I beat up in kindergarten. I received no punishment that I remember. Mom and the teacher explained that what I did was wrong, but I don’t remember their reasoning. My reasoning was that “he had it coming.” In westerns this happened to people all the time.
One morning I made a scene at Mass because The Lone Ranger was on television³, and I did not want to miss it. I think that mom had to escort me out of the church on that occasion, but I am only guessing.
The problem that I had with the box of letters in first grade is also documented here. I would really love to know what mom thought when the nun informed her that I seemed incapable of reading and writing.

The only other vivid memory that I have of life on N. Thorpe was of mom painting a fruit tree freehand on one of the walls in the kitchen. Everyone praised it. In retrospect it made me wonder what else she could have accomplished if she were not so devoted to our small family. Unfortunately I inherited my artistic ability from Jim.

There might have been some trips. I think that the two of us took a train trip somewhere in the south. Clara (and maybe John) may have also been along. It seems to me that we spent some time in Hot Springs, AR. I am pretty sure that we also visited mom’s relatives in the Dallas area either on that trip or a separate junket. The mother’s name was Jule Palmer or something like that. Either or both of these might have been after the move, but I don’t think so.

Mom loved animals. I remember a dog named Trixie, which was, I am pretty sure, Mom’s pet before she got married. Trixie must have died before we moved. I have no recollection of her at our new house. I am pretty sure that we also had a pet parakeet named Mickey before we moved. Someone taught him to talk, probably mom.

Prairie Village

I found a set of four photos developed at Katz drugs, which was near our house in PV. They were dated Easter 1955. The other three are also at a train station, and they all include a couple whom I don’t recognize.

In early 1955 the three of us moved to 7717 Maple, Prairie Village, KS, about twenty miles south of the house on N. Thorpe. In addition to setting up a household in a suburban location, mom almost immediately had to deal with my childhood illnesses—chicken pox, measles, and whooping cough—that I contracted one after another. Fortunately, that was pretty much the last time that I was sick until I contracted the Russian Flu during exam week in college.

Evidently mom’s father did not think much of the blue house on Maple St. He called it “a cracker box.” My dad told me much later that my mom uncharacteristically retorted, “Yes, but it’s our cracker box.” Well, theirs and the bank’s.

I remember that mom took me to the doctor to receive the smallpox vaccine. I have always hated the idea of injections, and I dreaded this. I had to return for a second (and maybe a third) vaccine because the first one “didn’t take.” The second one did not either. I never got that little volcano-shaped scar on my arm. For the only time that I can remember mom took me aside and told me in a deadly serious tone that I must NEVER forget what she was about to tell me. If ever there was another outbreak of smallpox, it was critical for me to receive the vaccine again.

I spent no time in the hospital while we were living in Prairie Village, but I spent a lot of time at the doctor’s office. I ran into a shopping cart at the grocery store one day. It did not require stitches, but the mark is still visible just a quarter of an inch from my right eye. I ran into a parked car on the lot of Queen of the Holy Rosary during recess. I dodged the tag, and the nineteen stitches in my mouth were a badge of honor. I got four more stitches when I ran into the barbecue grill in our backyard while catching a popup that my dad threw to me. While returning a punt on the football field my nose got smashed and bent a little. On all of these occasions mom drove me to see Dr. Battey, our family physician. On one of the later occasions he told her that my head was held together by catgut.

I almost forgot one incident. Mom insisted that I take the free swimming lessons offered at the PV public pool. I rode my bike to the pool for the morning lessons. One day a German Shepherd came running out of a house on my left, growled, and chomped me on my leg. Someone called mom, and she came and got me. I don’t know how many stitches were required. The dog did not have rabies or anything else. He just got loose that day.

I hated the swimming lessons because I got so cold that my teeth chattered. Also, that was where I realized my footprints looked like they were made by a duck with toes. However, I later was glad that I learned how to swim.

When my myopia became evident in the third or fourth grade, mom took me to the optometrist. Since then I have seldom been seen without my specs unless I was in water or playing football.

My mom drove me to many activities. While writing this I began to wonder when and how she learned to drive, and how she got her license. Maybe she learned before she got married.

Aside from my tendency to run full-speed into inanimate objects, I did not cause many problems for her. She never helped me with homework, but I didn’t need it until I got to the chain rule in calculus class. She didn’t need to nag me to do it. I got tired every evening and voluntarily went to bed at about the same time. She never had to wake me for school. I was usually awake before she was. I took the bus to school, and I was always ready and waiting for the Bluebird.

What she did help me with were projects. I remember that we had to make a map of a state or country out of papier mache. I picked France. I was making a big mess of it until she stepped in. She also helped out with my years in scouting. She was an excellent den mother for a while; all the guys said so. When I had trouble growing bean plants for the Nature merit badge, she gave me a tip (I don’t remember its nature) that allowed me to succeed. She also made a costume of St. Peter for me for wear for an all-saints version of Halloween.

In retrospect I find it incredible that she was willing to get up to drive me to Queen for the 6am Masses for which I was a server and then pick me up when it was over. She also carted me around to sporting events. I often stayed after school (and therefore missed the bus) for band practice or great books or safety patrol or scouts or the school newspaper or football or basketball. Sometimes I walked home, but at least half of the time I engaged mom’s taxi service.

I do not remember Mom giving me much advice beyond basic Catholic principles. However, I very clearly remember her reaction when I got into a fight with Michael Bortnick. He was my age but considerably bigger. I came into the house crying and told mom that he beat me up, and he was bigger than I was. She merely replied, “Then you should have avoided fighting him.” I remembered that and applied it with great success throughout my remaining life..

As soon as I was old enough I got to play on a team in the local 3&2 baseball program that served as a Little League for Johnson County, KS. The team was sponsored by Sunflower Drugs. I undoubtedly made the team through the intercession of Don Wood’s father. This was the last summer before I got glasses. I was a good fielder and base runner, but I batted .000. I only hit the ball once—on my very last at-bat.

The next summer I did not make the team. I was ready to quit baseball, even though I really wanted to play. I was even more depressed than I was when I missed a catechism question in second grade (described here). I was totally unprepared mentally for failure.

My mom told me that I should not quit; there were plenty of other teams. It was good advice. I somehow learned about the team sponsored by Bauman’s Red Goose Shoes. I had a good time on that team, and I even got quite a few hits.

Mom did not like the idea of me playing football in the seventh and eighth grade, but she allowed me to go out for the team. Even after she had to take me to the doctor after I got clobbered on a punt return, she let me continue. It meant a great deal to me.

I remember that for a short period we (I am not sure if Jamie was involved) spent a few minutes every evening reading the Bible from start to … well, I think that we finished Genesis before the project was abandoned. I would love to have heard that decision being made.

Like millions of other Americans our family owned a nicely bound Bible with those incredibly thin pages. Ours, of course, was the Douay-Rheims version, which is the only English version recognized by the Catholic Church. It had a dozen or so brightly colored illustrations. I don’t know what happened to it.

My mom was friendly with all of the neighbors, but the only ones that she socialized with were the Leahys. I remember that once when I was in second or third grade she was late getting home from somewhere. For perhaps the only time ever I was all alone after the school bus dropped me off. I started crying, and Jean Wallace, the lady with three kids of her own who lived directly across the street, calmed me down.

At some point we procured a phonograph player and a few records, probably 78s, which in those days were made of very brittle shellac. My dad’s favorite song was Eddie Fisher’s version of “Oh, My Papa”. I was playing it one day. When I took it off the turntable, I dropped it, and it broke. I was very upset, but mom consoled me.

The only television shows that I remember my parents watching were Your Hit Parade and Perry Como’s show. As the English say, my mom fancied Perry. We watched a lot of other shows, too, but none of them stand out in reference to my mom.

When she was working, which seemed to be doing all of the time, she often broke into a song. The one that she sang the most was the Andrews Sisters’ version of “Dance with a Dolly”⁴.

Jamie

One day shortly after we moved to PV my parents announced to me that they were “praying” to have another child⁵. I thought that this was a great idea. I would have a baby brother whom I could boss around and eventually teach “the ropes”. Imagine my shock when dad told me that mom had given birth to an girl on January 4, 1956. Did they actually pray for a girl? Why?

Jamie was nothing like me. Her face was decidedly not mangled. By the time that she was a few years old she had blonde hair⁶. Even I thought that she was good looking. Furthermore she avoided crashing into objects much better than I did. Her visits to Dr. Battey’s office were always routine.

I was approximately seven and a half years older than Jamie. I figured that she could figure out pat-a-cake on her own, and so I mostly ignored her. However, we often watched Captain Kangaroo and Romper Room together before I went to school.

The fact that mom had another little one to mind nearly all the time that I was in grade school made it even more remarkable that she was willing to drive me to all my activities. I think that it also explained why she let me roam the neighborhood with no evident supervision. She even let me shoot off firecrackers on the Fourth of July.

Decades later Jamie told me that as she was walking to kindergarten at Tomahawk School some older boys accosted her. I had heard nothing about this, but I was often oblivious. I wonder what I would have done if I knew about this. I would have been in the eighth grade, at least two years older than anyone at Tomahawk.

I remember that I asked mom one year whether I could help with playing Santa Claus on Christmas eve. She let me do it. I don’t remember any details.

Our pets have been discussed in some detail here. My mother’s role was central. My dad had no use for animals. He was obviously either fearful of or disgusted with them to an extent that I never saw in any other person. Mom made sure that they were

Mom handled the tricky situation that begin with the appearance of a dachshund (eventually named Sam by me) with no tags brilliantly. She allowed him to go back to his owners on his own, but for some reason he seemed want to stay at our house. She advertised somewhere that we had him, and eventually someone claimed him. Jamie was crushed, and I was also upset, but mom explained to us that we had no right to take him from the other family.

My grandmother Hazel came to the rescue by giving us her pet dachshund Tippy. However, he seemed to want to spend most of his time with me.

Leawood

At the end of the 1961-62 school year the Wavadas moved south and east a few miles to 8800 Fairway in Leawood. Once again we were in a new parish, Curė of Ars. Jamie started grade school in September at C of A, and I started my freshman year at Rockhurst High School. So, this was a new experience for everyone.

I don’t recall having many conversations with my mom. I cannot remember asking her any probing questions. My recollection is that on most days she worked pretty much from the time that she got up until the supper dishes were in the dishwasher, and all of the food and accoutrements had been put away. The one major incident in my youthful life that she had to deal with was the time in 1964 when she had to accompany me to traffic court. Nothing came of it, but I did grow up a little bit that evening.

My mother was a great cook. We enjoyed delicious meals almost every day except, of course, on Friday. My parents decided that instead of eating out occasionally, we would have steak on Saturday evening. My dad grilled them over charcoal on the patio in good weather. If the weather did not allow that, mom broiled them. My favorite meal, by far, was fried chicken⁷. We had it once a week, usually on Wednesdays.

I was not big on breakfasts. Cereal usually sufficed for me. A special treat was “pigs in the blanket”, which were link sausages baked inside of biscuits that had been folded over them.

My lunches were the envy of everyone in my classes. Usually I had a ham sandwich, an apple or other fruit, a small bag of chips, and a thermos of soup. Most kids had to put up with cheese sandwiches or PB&J with little or no variety. I went to a Catholic school; many of those moms were making at least a half dozen lunches. In high school I usually ate lunch in the cafeteria.

Trips

My dad worked in the sales department at BMA. Every few years my dad and mom would take a business trip together for big meetings. They were generally at a resort or in the vicinity of special events. They were usually gone for the better part of the week. Sometimes they hired someone to take care of Jamie and me. I had very little interaction with these women. I remembered that the suppers that they prepared with uniformly disappointing.

I found four photos that were labeled “Easter 1957” by the company that developed them. At the time I was finishing second grade, and Jamie was a little over one year old. They show my mom and dad stepping onto a train. Based on her outfit, this must have been a business trip on which she joined him. Someone must have taken the photo. I am guessing that it was Clara Cernech. She probably took care of us while they were gone.

My mom did not regale us with tales of these adventures. I remember that she was most impressed by the one in Banff, Canada. I have no recollection of her talking about any of the other places, and I doubt that I pestered her for details.

Details about our family vacation trips have been provided here.The four of us took one big vacation to the east coast while we were living in PV. Mom took over the driving for a part of the trip. That was the only time that I ever saw my dad riding shotgun. Most of her time was spent with Jamie, who was only three or four years old. Our other trips were usually to Minnesota. Mom must have enjoyed the breaks from cooking and cleaning, but she mostly seemed to busy herself with other things.

Health

My mom was in good shape. She did not smoke. She drank very little, and ate mostly fresh foods in moderate amounts. She also exercised. I remember her watching Jack LaLanne and his dogs, Happy and Walter. I never partook of these activities, but I remember being awestruck when Jack nonchalantly did vertical pushups on a step on a ladder.

She also played golf a little. She played with my dad and me a few times, and while I was waiting to get drafted we played as a twosome. I think that she played with other ladies off and on. She was a good athlete, but her golf swing got worse the more that she played. In the end she bounced her torso up and down on every swing. This peculiar motion made it very difficult to hit the ball cleanly. I always suspected that advice from my dad was responsible for the degradation of her game. I don’t know how much (or even if) she played after I entered the army.

She wast 5’7″, which was considered quite tall in the forties. She was skinny enough to be nicknamed bird-legs in high school. She never got fat or even a little pudgy.

I only remember mom being sick a few times, mostly during the Christmas season. Overworking and the pressure probably got to her. She did have a few issues. Her “sinuses” bothered her a lot. She took Dristan tablets for the “sinus headaches”, but they did not help much. I also remember some kind of saltwater purge that she did. When my dad quit smoking many years later this issue disappeared almost immediately.

She also suffered from varicose veins. I don’t know any details. She might have also had diabetes. I know that her mother did. Mom never complained about anything, and she never let any symptoms slow her down.

When she was in middle age she started to have problems with memory and confusion. It was not Alzheimer’s, but the doctors never were able to pinpoint what caused her so much difficulty. My dad said that she asked him one time, “Jim, what did I do wrong to deserve this?” Of course, he had no answer.

When she died in 1998 (described here) my dad did not request an autopsy to determine what the source of her problems was. I rather hoped that he would, because I wanted to do something about it if I inherited it. I am older when I write this than she was when she died. So, I guess that I did not get it.

The biggest regret in my life is that I squandered the opportunity to know this wonderful woman better.

What I inherited from my mom:

Skin color
Hair
Build
Social reticence
Love of music (but different taste)
Work ethic
General demeanor
Aversion to arguments
Early bird.

1. The fact that I asked no more questions is, to me, convincing evidence that I must be somewhere on the autism spectrum. I have never asked people about their lives. Although I have always been good at remembering names, I almost never remember the names of relatives of acquaintances, even if I have seen them many times. For example, I have a great deal of difficulty remembering names of members of Sue’s family. I know my own cousins, but I could not name any of their children. It never really occurred to me that I was excessively solipsistic. I just considered myself less nosy than most. In my defense I always try to think of the potential effect on others before I do something, and I never deliberately do anything that might inflict pain on someone else.

2. Uncle Rich apparently died in 1972. My recollection is that he worked for a company called Gustin Bacon Mfg. that manufactured pipe joints and, for a time, air horns for trains. I have no idea what he did there. I also don’t know if he remained in the house on North Thorpe after the Wavadas moved south in 1955.

3. I don’t know when we purchased the TV, but I was a big fan of the Howdy Doody Show, and I am almost certain that I watched Hopalong Cassidy, which only ran until 1952. I cannot picture our television in the house on N. Thorpe, but we must have had it there.

4. This was a bizarre song: three women fantasizing about dancing with another woman. “All the fellows wishing they were me.”

5. This naturally raises the question of whether my parents employed birth control. The Church has never sanctioned anything besides the “rhythm method” for birth control. If that was what they did, they were certainly good at it. I was conceived a little over two months after their marriage. Jamie was conceived shortly after they moved to a new house with a spare room.

6. It turned quite a bit darker by the time that she went to school.

7. When I started cooking for myself I almost immediately tried to fry chicken. I never got it quite right. It is difficult and time-consuming. The spattering of grease makes a mess. I eventually just gave up. It did not seem to me to be worth the effort.

8. In my dad’s estate I found a used ticket for Super Bowl III and one for the Rose Bowl in 1970 that featured Michigan and Southern Cal.

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.

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.

1966-1970 Miscellaneous Events

Posted on February 19, 2021 by Mike

Things unrelated to life at U-M. Continue reading →

The Leishmans lived at 8801 Fairway, which was directly across the street from our house.

During each of the four years that I was an undergraduate at Michigan I came home for the Christmas holiday. A very unusual event occurred in one of those holidays. I think that it was the first one, 1966, but it might have been 1967. During the fall I had been alerted by my parents that my cousin and my classmate at Rockhurst High School, Terry Cernech, was getting married. The bride, Debbie Leishman, lived directly across the street from my family’s house in Leawood. They wanted me to be an usher at their wedding.

Terry, who lived nearly twenty miles away in Sugar Creek, had met Debbie during the production of a musical that featured performers and crew from Rockhurst High School, which both Terry and I attended, and Debbie’s high school, Notre Dame de Sion, a Catholic preparatory school for girls. Strange as it might seem, I had absolutely nothing to do with them getting together.

Terry and I were seniors when the play was staged. Debbie was a year or two younger. I am therefore pretty sure that she was still in high school at the time of the wedding. Terry was in college. His Facebook page says that he “studied at University of Notre Dame.”

The ceremony might have been held here at St. Ann’s church in Independence.

If there was a bachelor’s party, I was not invited, or maybe my parents neglected to tell me about it. I am pretty sure that the wedding ceremony was at a Catholic Church. Since the Leishmans were not Catholics, I am quite sure that the ceremony was not at our parish, Curé of Ars. So, I figure that it must have been held at the Cerneches’ church, St. Ann’s in Independence, MO, Harry Truman’s home town. I am almost certain that Terry went to grade school at St. Ann’s school.

So, why did the happy couple choose December for this occasion? Well, it probably wasn’t for tax reasons—both the bride and groom were full-time students. Everyone knew the answer, of course. In the language of the day, they had to get married.

Terry’s brother John was the best man. Before the ceremony he talked for a while with my parents. He said that he had been up all night talking with Terry. According to John, his brother had ingested a large amount of “Dutch courage” to prepare himself for the big event. John was dubious about the whole situation.

My job as usher was trivial. People sat where they wanted. I don’t recall that I had to wear a tuxedo or any other kind of costume. My real responsibilities began at the reception where I discovered that no one in the Leishman household was talking to anyone on the Cernech side. My dad did not get along particularly well with either Terry’s father, my Uncle Dean, or Mr. Leishman. So, I was drafted to pass messages between the two patriarchs. I do not precisely recall any particular message, but the flavor of most of them was something like the following:

“Tell that son of a bitch that if he thinks that he is going to …”
“He said what? Tell that worthless sack of shit that that will never happen until hell freezes over.”
“That’s NOT what we agreed on! You tell that two-faced bastard …”
“That’s it. I’ve had enough of that asshole. Just tell him to shove it.”

Needless to say, I sanitized the messages a bit before I delivered them. For a while I found this farce slightly amusing, but eventually it wore me down.

The marriage did not last very long. I don’t know what became of any of the Leishmans. Terry remarried; in 2021 he lives in Springfield, MO.

During the exam period right before Christmas, in December of 1967 (I think) I came down with influenza. When I have recounted this story, I called what I had the Russian flu. However, apparently the disease, which started in November in Michigan and Florida, was actually popularly known as the Hong Kong Flu. I somehow got through my exams, but I was completely wiped out. I slept through the entire plane ride to KC, and then I spent another day or so in bed at my parents’ house. This was my last real illness until my tuxedo-wearing cat Jake gave me cat-scratch disease in the mid-eighties.

A different member of my high school class, John Williams, also got married and had a son while he was going to college. He invited me to attend a play that his younger brother was in. This must have happened either over the Christmas break in my senior year or during one of the summers. John was driving, and for some reason his wife was not there.

At some point John was talking about the toddler. When I asked him a question, I mistakenly called the kid “your brother”. At least three of my acquaintances fathered children while I was in college, but I never actually saw any of them. I was so immature and aloof that I could not internalize the fact that people my age were reproducing.

One baby that I did see was Dr. Colburn’s youngest daughter. When the child, whose name escapes me, was baptized, I stood in for the real godfather, who could not make the trip to Ann Arbor. The event occurred in September of either 1968 or 1969. This was the last baptism that I ever attended.

In 2020 I discovered evidence of two events that I am quite certain that I never attended. I found these two football tickets among my dad’s possessions after he died in 2011.

They did not even call it the Super Bowl.

I have no recollection at all that he had attended one of the most famous football games of all time, the 1969 Super Bowl. This was the game between the New York Jets, quarterbacked by Joe Namath, and the Baltimore Colts, led by Johnny Unitas. The Colts, who had defeated the Cleveland Browns 34-0 in the NFL¹ championship game, were heavily favored, but the brash Namath guaranteed that the Jets would win, and they did.

In fact, it was not a close game. The defense of the Jets completely stymied Unitas and the Colts, who were held to a field goal in the fourth quarter. The final score was 16-3.

The game was played in the Orange Bowl in Miami, FL, on Sunday, January 12, 1969. I would have been back in Ann Arbor by then. I have no recollection that my dad went to this game. Of course, it had no effect on me; I was probably either at a debate tournament, returning from one, or busily preparing for one.

I wonder if my mom also attended this game. My dad often traveled on business, and some of those events included entertainment for the local salesmen. If this was part of the company’s annual convention, then my mom also probably came. In that case, they would have probably needed to get someone to stay at the house with Jamie, who had been a teenager for eight days when the game was played. Surely this would have been a topic of discussion over the holidays, but I have no memory of it whatsoever.

I definitely do remember the other game.

Michigan played against Southern Cal in the Rose Bowl in my senior year. I watched this frustrating nail-biter at home in Leawood. I am pretty sure that both of my parents attended, but I don’t remember if they left Jamie with me (I was twenty-one, and she was almost fourteen), or if someone stayed with us.

Southern Cal was undefeated. Michigan was coming off of its best game ever, the upset of undefeated Ohio State in Ann Arbor. I had missed that game because of a debate tournament in Chicago.

Both teams in the Rose Bowl had very stout defenses and unimaginative offenses. The game was tied 3-3 at the half. The only touchdown was a thirty-three yard pass from Jimmy Jones to Bob Chandler. Southern Cal won 10-3..

The backs of both of these tickets have diagrams of the seating in the stadiums. In both cases the tickets are on about the twenty-five-yard line, a little less than halfway up. Those are very good seats! Note that the price of the Rose Bowl ticket was only $8.

My two fondest memories of Jamie occurred, I think, during one of the breaks from college. The first one was in 1966, the year that Barry Sadler’s song, “Ballad of the Green Berets”² topped the charts. We invented a dance to accompany this song. It involved standing at attention next to one another. Then one of us would stand on tip-toes for a beat while the other squatted. Then we returned to attention. On the following beats we reversed roles, and so on until we could not keep straight faces any longer.

At some point when I was not paying attention Jamie learned to play the guitar. She had a Bob Dylan songbook that contained the words and music for a dozen or two of his early songs. A few times we made music together; she would play the chords and I would sing. I can carry a tune, the songs were in a key that stayed in my range, and I could do a passable imitation of Dylan’s voice. We should have recorded one of these songs—I had a tape recorder. It would be fun to hear what we sounded like.

1. The NFL and the AFL had not yet merged. The first four Super Bowl featured the champions of each league.

2. This horribly unimaginative song tied “California Dreamin'” as Billboard’s top song of 1966. Surely this was the worst song ever to become so popular. Sadler was a medic in Vietnam. His one hit made him a lot of money, but his life subsequently went quickly downhill. In 1979 he was charged with second-degree murder and pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in Nashville. He went to prison for thirty days. In September of 1988 he was shot in the head in a taxicab in Guatemala City. He died early the following year.

1970 Part 2: January-March: Debate

Posted on July 10, 2020 by Mike

1970’s debate tournaments. Continue reading →

In my last undergraduate semester at U-M I planned to spend a LOT of time on debate. This was my last chance to qualify for the National Debate Tournament, and I intended to make the most of it. This post has details about a few debates. If you need a primer on intercollegiate debate in 1966-1970, you can find it here.

I must describe our coaching staff in 1969-70. Bill Colburn was the Director of Forensics, but he no longer worked with the debaters or took trips. The Debate Director was Juddi (pronounced like Judy) Tappan, who was finishing her PhD. We had two excellent graduate assistants, Roger Conner, Mark Arnold’s partner in 1968-69 at Oberlin, and Cheryn Heinen, who had been a very good debater at Butler. Roger and Cheryn could probably have been a big help, but they were seldom allowed to go to big tournaments, and neither planned a career as a debate coach. Because the program had very few debaters, we hardly ever had practice rounds, and when we did, Juddi ran them. Cheryn did not work with us much.

Juddi’s major contribution was to insist that I reserve the last thirty seconds of my 2AR to summarize the case. She was big on style and polish. No one else did this in 1970; time was too precious. So, on the affirmative we always had less time to present and answer arguments than our opponents did.

We received valuable help from an extremely unexpected source. In my senior year Jimmie Trent was a professor in the speech department at Wayne State University. He had been a legendary debate coach at (of all places) Emporia, KS, and was universally credited with introducing the Plan-Advantages form of affirmative case, which by my time had almost completely replaced the traditional Need-Plan format.

Jimmie Trent died in 2013. I found no other photos.

Jimmie had a big impact on my thinking about the negative. I was almost always 1N, which meant that I attacked “the case,” the reasons for adopting the plan. One of my principal weapons was “inherency,” which challenged the affirmative team to prove that the “present system” was incapable of producing an equally desirable result. Jimmie argued that this was an unreasonable standard. In his (and eventually my) way of thinking, both teams must defend an approach. The negative’s approach could, of course, merely allow things to continue unchanged, but it could not keep changing its mind about what that entailed, i.e., “we could just …” I did not immediately change my tactics on the negative, but on the affirmative I always tried to pin down the other team.

On the negative Jimmie recommended that we try the Emory switch when we thought that we could get away with it. Previously I was 1N, and I attacked the case. The 2N attacked the plan, arguing that it would not achieve what the affirmative claimed and that it would cause severe problems. With the Emory switch the roles stayed the same, but my partner became 1N, and I became 2N. We attacked the plan first and then the case.

This had many advantages. More of the plan attacks were “canned,” which is to say that they were the same for many different plans and therefore written out in some detail. Having the extra time to prepare for attacking the case was more valuable than for attacking the plan. 2N got more time when he needed it most‐to rebuild his plan attacks after the affirmative had answered them.

Also, of course, it messed up the opponents’ strategy. Each of them was doing an unfamiliar task, and our approach also gave the 1AR only five minutes to rebuild their case and to deal with the defenses of the plan attacks. Finally, it let me give our last speech, and I was a little better at selling.

There is an obvious counter to the switch. The affirmative team can delay presenting its plan until the 2AC. One of Dartmouth’s teams tried this against us. However, the 1AC made no sense without the plan, and two or three minutes were still available when he finished. I had no trouble adapting. I just reverted to my old role as 1N, and the 2A, who had to present the plan in his constructive for the first time ever, had too little time to defend the case well.

A better approach, which we would have used if anyone had tried the switch against us, would be for the 2AC to present additional advantages of the plan after (or before) dealing with the plan attacks. Then, the 2AR can then drop some advantages and defend others.

We only lost one round all year when we switched. We met a pretty good team from Loyola of Baltimore at a tournament in Miami. They did not even try to defend their case in rebuttals. They only argued that our approach was unethical because it emphasized the “spread,” i.e., taking advantage of time limitations to present more arguments than the opponents could possibly answer. We had a very good set of answers to these arguments, but the judge voted against us on the ethics issue. The lesson we learned was to avoid the switch if the judge seemed too conservative. Loyola evidently knew the judge better than we did.

Our first trip in January of 1970 was the “East Coast Swing,” where we used the switch in every round except the one in which Dartmouth delayed presenting the plan. My partner, Bill Davey, and I were allowed to fly to Boston to participate in the tournaments at Boston College and Harvard. At BC we went 5-3 and narrowly missed qualifying for the elimination rounds. Because we did not have a long drive ahead of us, we decided to watch the octafinals. I watched Brown on the affirmative v. Southern Cal. Bill watched a different debate. One of the Brown debaters was visibly startled when he saw me enter the classroom and sit down. He nudged his partner and whispered something to him.

A few minutes later I found out why. Brown’s first affirmative constructive speech was word-for-word the same as ours! Evidently they had tape-recorded one of our rounds at some previous tournament and transcribed it. I have never heard of anyone—in the previous seven and a half years of debating or the subsequent six and a half years that I coached—doing anything like this. In disgust I stopped taking notes a few minutes into the speech.

Brown’s was a bad strategy. USC, which ran a similar case when they were on the affirmative, annihilated them. I was totally embarrassed that a team incompetently running our exact case qualified for the elims at this tournament, and we did not. I told Bill about it, but no one else.

In contrast, Harvard, which was the biggest tournament of the year, with over 100 teams in attendance, was our best tournament ever. In the prelims we were 7-1, losing only to Canisius on our affirmative. By the way we had an astoundingly good record on our negative all year. If we got to face Canisius in the elimination rounds, we would be “locked in” on our negative.

In the octafinals we faced an overmatched team from Boston College. We lost the coin flip (as usual; we only won one coin flip all year), and so we had to debate affirmative. It didn’t matter. All three judges voted for us.

The quarterfinal match against Oberlin was somewhat controversial. The Oberlin pair was Mark Arnold, whom I knew from our days in Kansas City, and freshman Paul Zarefsky, whose brother had been a champion debater at Northwestern, and he now coached there. We were affirmative again. The timekeeper was a debater on Canisius’s second team. We barely knew him, but he was friendly with our opponents.

The first two speeches delivered by Davey and Zarefsky were fairly routine. I was somewhere in the middle of my constructive when someone, I think it was Arnold, yelled out “Time.” The timekeeper was busy taking notes and had neglected to time my speech. He put up the 5 card, followed quickly by the 4. Arnold was sure that he gave me extra time. I thought that he cost me at least a little, and he certainly flustered me a little when 5 turned into 4 so fast.

Anyway, we won three of the five ballots. Oberlin had had a very good first semester, they had done well at BC, and Arnold was considered one of the best debaters in the country. He later coached at Harvard.

Dallas Perkins had a lot more hair and a few less pounds in 1970.

Our opponent in the semifinals was Georgetown, a perennial national powerhouse, represented by Dallas Perkins (who also later coached at Harvard) and Howard Beales. Once again we lost the coin flip. I thought that we debated pretty well, but all five judges, including Laurence Tribe, voted for Georgetown. I will always think that if we had won that coin flip, we would have won the tournament, but who knows?

Still, it was our best tournament ever, and I was the #5 speaker out of the 200+ who attended. Dartmouth also had a tournament, but we did not attend.

When I called Bill Colburn to pick us up at Metro Airport, I told him that we had dropped eight ballots at Harvard. He just said “Really?”, and I replied, “Yes, but the good news is that seven of them were in the quarters and semifinals.”

Hank Stram & the Chiefs matriculated up and down the field.

I remember riding home from a bitterly cold tournament on January 11. I was sitting shotgun and therefore had control of the radio. I found a CBS station, and we listened to the surprisingly calm voices of Bob Reynolds and Tom Hedrick. It was near the end of Super Bowl IV, and the Chiefs seemed to be running out the clock. The Vikings were thirteen-point favoritess, and so we all assumed that the Chiefs had just given up. Au contraire, mon frère! KC had pounded Minnesota 23-7. I knew that my dad and all my friends in KC would be ecstatic.

Juddi made all of the decisions about pairing and scheduling. Two of her decisions puzzled me. The first was to have me debate with sophomore Mike Hartmann at the most important tournament in the district at Northwestern. Mike was a really good debater, and Juddi must have wanted to give him some incentive for the next year. That’s fine, but we had never debated together, and he did not know our case. I would not have minded too much if it was another tournament, but Northwestern was perhaps the most important tournament of the year.

Mike and I won all of our negative rounds and two of the four affirmatives. One of the losses was to a good team. The other was to the worst team in the tournament from Northeastern Illinois University, which I had never heard of. Their record in the tournament was 1-7. The judge, whom I had never before seen, gave both Mike and me higher speaker points than either of the NEIU debaters (although considerably less than we received in any other round). However, he gave NEIU their only victory of the tournament. The text on the ballot was short and bitter: “I just can’t vote for this case.”

Sixteen teams qualified for the elims. We were seventeenth. You know what they say about horseshoes and hand grenades.

I think that 1970 was also the year that Bill and I flew to the tournament at the University of Miami. I remember that it was 70° warmer when we exited the plane than when we boarde. I also remember that right in the center of the campus was a huge swimming pool. The diving team was practicing when we were there. The centerpiece of the Michigan campus is the graduate library.

It was not a great tournament. My recollection is that the elimination rounds started at the quarterfinals, and we missed on speaker points. This was very annoying for a number of reasons. The first was that we lost a negative round on ethics, the only time that we lost when we switched and one of only a handful of negative losses all year.

The other annoying thing occurred against a weak team. The judge was a Miami debater who had graduated the year before. He came up to me before the round and told me that he knew the debate was a mismatch. He demonstrated a little sideways wave with his hand as he said something like “If I do this, cut it short. There’s no reason to prolong the agony.” I ended up cutting at least a minute or two off of my constructive, and I jettisoned the thirty-second summary in my rebuttal. We did win, but he gave us speaker points that were well below our average.

The third annoyance was that we had wasted time and money on this second-rate tournament. I don’t remember any more details about where we went and how we did.

Districts:I need to mention that Juddi and Jimmie tried for a while to keep their torrid relationship secret, but nearly everyone surely knew about it. At some point during the year they got married, and Jimmie tendered his resignation at Wayne State to become chairman of the speech department at Miami of Ohio. Juddi decided that she might be a political liability for us. She decided not to go to districts.

We had to supply two judges. Roger and Cheryn were chosen. This was fine with us, but it did not erase the last few months.

1970 was the first year that I seriously prepared for the district tournament. Roger worked with us quite a bit. We prepared by sprucing up our affirmative case to appeal to a more conservative audience and by working on how our arguments would work without the switch. We were too afraid of political consequences to pull the switch at districts. The only round that we had lost with the switch we had lost on ethics. We could certainly expect arguments like those in every round. Some judges might vote against us on general principles even if the negative did not make the arguments.

Some words of explanation about the District 5 qualifying tournament for the NDT are in order. The district was composed of four states‐Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The national committee also invited seven additional pairs that did not qualify.

Northwestern was always a national power. Its coach, David Zarefsky, left his top team, Gunderson and Strange, at home because he was confident that they would receive an invitation to the NDT, and he was right. Northwestern sent its second team, Sitzma and Welch, to the district tournament. This was a break for us. We had beaten Sitzma and Welch all three times that we had met them during the year.

The district committee evaluated all the twenty-four teams in attendance. Six were rated A, six B, six C, and six D. Everyone debated two from each group.

Maybe we were not mentally in gear. Roger had tried to teach us to yodel, which he claimed was the best way to warm up. At any rate we lost the first round on our affirmative to a C team from Indiana State. Both Bill and I were just off. I thought that we had won, but I can understand why a judge could vote against us.

Then we met two pretty good teams—Hample and Sproule from Ohio State on our affirmative and Sitzma and Welch on our negative. We mopped the floor with both of them, and they knew it. It turned out that they were our two A teams. This kind of surprised me.

The next three rounds seemed uneventful. The seventh round was on Saturday evening. We faced an obnoxious guy named Greg Rigo from Ohio University on our negative. I don’t remember his partner’s name. They were a mediocre team with a very standard case. We debated fairly well and pretty much pounded them.

Two of the judges had familiar faces. The third one, who voted against us, was someone whom I had never seen. He came from one of the very weak schools. This sometimes happens, as it did to Mike and me at Northwestern.

One of the familiar judges voted for us and wrote that it was not close. The other judge, George Ziegelmueller, was the long-time Director of Forensics at Wayne State in Detroit. In my four years at U-M he had NEVER voted for any of our teams. His ballot in this debate was incomprehensible.

When I started debating in 1966, Wayne State was a highly ranked national power. The team of Kathy McDonald and Don Ritzenheim had narrowly lost in the final round of the NDT two years in a row. By 1970 they were just another mid-level team. I am not sure what happened to them, but it must have frustrated George.

Needless to say the Jimmie-Juddi business probably did not sit well with George. A faculty member at his school, who had probably never helped coach any of his debaters, was giving valuable tactical advice to a rival school! This just was not done.

I worked for George for three and a half years in the late seventies. I never brought this up, and neither did he. In those years I confirmed my impression that George was not considered a good judge. His note-taking was weak, and he tended to get fixated on one aspect of the debate, even if the debaters did not emphasize it.

The eighth and final round was on Sunday morning. Unbeknownst to us Juddi had shown up for the coaches’ cocktail party on Saturday night. I am sure that she pumped everyone with whom she was on speaking terms for information. Outside the room of our last debate she showed up with a huge grin on her face. She told us that we were doing very well, but we shouldn’t be too overconfident We had also heard a lot of buzz in the hallways that we had blasted everyone on our schedule.

At any rate in the last round we were on the affirmative against a so-so team from Illinois State. Both Bill and I were superb. We obliterated them. I had absolutely no doubt that we picked up all three ballots. In fact, one of the judges, David Angell from Albion College awarded me a perfect score of 30 and wrote on the ballot that it was the best performance that he had ever seen.

All the debaters, coaches, and hangers-on assembled for the announcement of the five qualifying pairs. Juddi was all excited when we told her that the last debate was by far our best.

Next came the assembly. Five teams would qualify for NDT. It took them at least half an hour to process the ballots. The district chairman finally came out and began, “There was one team that was 6-2 but …”

I swear the following is true: I screamed out “Oh no!” and buried my head in my arms on the desk in front of me. Everyone looked at me as he continued, “unfortunately had too few ballots to qualify. So, let’s have a hand for the University of Michigan, 6-2 with fourteen ballots.”

We lost ten ballots, five of them on the negative. We had only lost one negative ballot in the second semester, and that was on ethics. We lost that first affirmative debate 3-0. OK, I can live with that. We beat both of our A teams and our B teams. We kept both Ohio State and Northwestern from qualifying. The critical round, though, was clearly the seventh. There was no way that we lost that debate. However, we also somehow lost three other ballots on our negative. This just never happened that year.

In retrospect I think that we should have somehow made it clear to the other schools that we would definitely not be using the Emory switch at districts. The other 23 teams that were going to districts probably wasted many hours trying to figure out how to adapt to our tactic. This could have irritated a lot of people.

We submitted an application for a post-bid, but I knew we wouldn’t get it. The district recommended the two Northwestern teams and Ohio State in a tie for first. They recommended us, but as their fourth choice. They thought we were only the ninth best team in the district! NDT only gave seven post-district bids altogether. The other three from our district all got bids. Once again we got the shaft.

Our performance at Harvard earned us an invitation to the Tournament of Champions. Juddi encouraged us to go, but I could see no point to it.

Thus ended my debate career. Was I bitter? Yes. I only had one goal, and I would never get another chance to achieve it.

Bill Davey made it to the quarterfinals of NDT in 1971. He is a professor at the University of Illinois. His very impressive biography page is here.

In 1972 Mike Hartmann also made it to the quarterfinals of NDT. He is a lawyer. His webpage at the firm of Miller Canfield is here.

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1970 Part 2: January-March: Debate