On Sunday mornings when I was little Dad would toss me the car keys and say, “It’s almost time for church. Go warm up the car.” The first time he did this I hesitated and he noticed. “What’s the problem? You know how, don’t you? You’ve seen me do it often enough.” I nodded my head realizing for the first time that I really did know how to start the car all by myself and Dad wasn’t making a mistake entrusting this sacred and noble task to me. Off I went.
Some months later he’d hand me the keys and say “Back the car out of the garage for me. You know which pedal is the brake, right? That’s the only pedal you need to know!” I’d nod my head and off I’d go.
We were living in Des Plaines, Illinois when my dad started these drills. I was in the third or fourth grade at the time. My dad had his own ideas when kids should do such things, and his ideas didn’t always conform to what the state legislature desired and the police enforced.
When we moved to Cedar Rapids Dad would have me driving on the gravel county roads after outings to state parks, which we took fairly often. To be generous, I might have been 13 years old at the time and two years away from my learner’s permit. He’d pull off on one of these county roads on the way home and say, “Tom, I’m tired. Why don’t you drive for a while?” It wasn’t rocket science, and I’d been watching him drive the car for years, so it really wasn’t a big deal. We’d switch places and off I’d go with Dad riding shotgun. He didn’t need to tell me; I knew this was another one of those “Don’t tell Mom” moments.
As I drove I always tried to demonstrate how responsible I was and that I was worthy of his faith in me. I observed the speed limit carefully and used the turn signals consistently in the middle of nowhere Iowa. We were likely to come across some farm trucks and tractors on the back roads, so I sat up straight in an attempt to look bigger and older than I was. It also helped to see over the steering wheel and dashboard.
Dad never seemed nervous while I was driving. He acted as if it was the most natural thing in the world. He would gaze out the right-hand window looking at the crops for long periods of time. He paid no attention at all to my driving or where we were going. I’d say “Dad, I don’t know where I am going.” He’d say “You are headed south. Home is down there somewhere. Keep heading south. Let me know if you cross any asphalt roads.”
Eventually we would reach the outskirts of town and we would switch drivers again. I didn’t drive in busy traffic. I also noticed that I never drove when my mom and brothers were around. I assumed that Dad wanted to keep the death toll down to two if I screwed up.
One day when I was driving on the gravel roads with Dad a huge summer rainstorm engulfed us. I could only see 10 to 20 yards in front of the car and was just creeping along. We couldn’t even see as far as the ditch on the side of the road. It occurred to me that Dad might not want to hurt my feelings by taking over the driving in the bad conditions, so I offered to switch to make it easier for him.
If I was describing myself I would say I had more balls than brains. Since it was Dad in this instance I will say he had more bravado than good sense. When I suggested that we switch drivers he said, “Nah, just drive down the middle of the gravel road. There’s nobody out here in the middle of nowhere.”
About two minutes later a huge farm tractor pulling a set of discs that stretched nearly across the entire gravel road loomed out of the driving rain. I pulled the wheel fast, slammed on the breaks, and headed toward the ditch, but wasn’t willing to go into the ditch. The tractor never made a defensive move so his discs ended up hitting our front left bumper.
There really isn’t much more to the story. Dad exchanged information with the farmer in the middle of the road in the middle of a driving rainstorm. I suppose that Dad had to “tell Mom” about this one because the police came to our house a few days later and Dad told me to stay in my room. I was more than happy to do so. Mom and Dad had a conversation with the police, but I never heard a word about the subject, the content, or the outcome. I assume it was about the accident, but I don’t actually know that. What I do know is that nobody went to court, and that jail was never mentioned for either of us, but still, for years I couldn’t help but wonder if it was only a matter of time before the police showed up to take me away.
(Still wondering)
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Intimidation
The locker room was in the basement of the school and I was trudging up a long flight of stairs. It was the winter of 1966-67 and I was leaving school after ninth grade wrestling practice. It was a normal Iowa winter, so I was bundled up for an indeterminate wait at the city bus stop; Bever Park bus, 15 cent fare. I was mentally steeling myself for the blast of cold air when I reached the top of the steps and stepped out the door.
As I made my way up the stairs I noticed there was a student at the top, slouching against the wall and peering at me intently. I knew he was a student because I’d seen him in the hallways, but didn’t know his name. He hung out with the hoods, the hoodlums of the school, a disorganized precursor to gangs that existed back in the 60’s. The school had a policy that all students had to leave within 15 minutes of the last class unless they were in an authorized after-school school program. This guy wasn’t a member of anything other than the Principal’s watch list.
It was late afternoon and most of the teachers were gone or squirreled away in their rooms. If there were any administrators left they were no longer roaming the hallways. The administrative offices were up on the second floor, and I was just making my way up out of the basement to the first floor. If there was going to be trouble there would be nobody around to hear or witness it. I was one of the last guys out of practice and out of the locker room, and the only person left behind me might be the coach.
I thought about turning around and running for the coach’s office, but that seemed cowardly and it assumed that the hood was up to no good. Maybe this was just an innocuous encounter. Maybe he was waiting for his buddies who were vandalizing something in the basement. Maybe his unauthorized presence in the school had nothing to do with me. Maybe I had prejudged him unfairly. I slogged on up the stairs, bone tired from a hard workout.
Just as I was approaching the top of the stairs he stepped out from the wall to block my path. His movement was a signal to two buddies to slip out of their hiding places around the corner and take up station beside him. These were guys I’d never seen in school before, and of a size that indicated they were well beyond the ninth grade. Actually, they looked so big, dumb, and mean that I assumed they hadn’t made it to the sixth grade, but were old enough and big enough to be out of high school.
The three of them blocked my path, so I just stopped and stood there just short of the top of the stairs. I was too tired to run, didn’t know where I would run to anyway, and couldn’t fight my way through the three of them. I decided not to speak so they couldn’t twist my words into something they could use as provocation. This was their game and it was their move. It was up to them to either state their business or make a move. I hoped their move wasn’t to stab me or push me down the stairs and kill me, which seemed real possibilities.
The original hoodlum stepped close to me, as did his two buddies, and warned me to watch myself in wrestling practice, wagging a finger in my face while doing so. Though scared to death, I tried to look impassive and unintimidated, as if the threat meant nothing to me. The threat was delivered emphatically, and then the three turned and exited the door directly behind them. I stayed on the steps for several minutes to give them plenty of time to get away, concerned that they might have changed their minds about beating me up and were lying in wait for me outside. I also needed the minutes to quell the shaking in my legs.
Eventually I got up the courage to exit the building and make my way to the bus stop. The entire time I was watching left, right, and behind me to see that they weren’t coming after me. That seemed unlikely given the houses I was walking past and the cars on the street, but I suspected they didn’t care about such things. I could imagine them giving me a pretty good pounding in only a few moments and then disappearing into the neighborhood.
The threat about wrestling practice perplexed me. I was trying to be the model athlete. As I recall I’d been picked as a team captain. The only thing I could figure is that I’d recently been paired in practice with a gifted but lazy teammate. When the coach was distracted this guy wanted to skip the workout drills we were supposed to be doing, and I wouldn’t let him get away with it. I’d do the takedowns, escapes, and reversals on him, generally pounding him, while he made no effort at all. He was hoping that if he did next to nothing, I’d go easy on him. I didn’t. He told me to ease up, and I wouldn’t. I was doing the workout the way the coach wanted it done.
Nothing ever came of the threat, but I was wary and intimidated just the same. I did the wrestling workouts as directed, but also tried to avoid my lazy and suspect teammate. He ended up in my weight class in high school, and I never beat him in 2 out of 3 tryout matches to make the varsity squad. He was a talented wrestler, but sometimes I wonder if there was another reason why I couldn’t beat him in 2 out of 3.
As I made my way up the stairs I noticed there was a student at the top, slouching against the wall and peering at me intently. I knew he was a student because I’d seen him in the hallways, but didn’t know his name. He hung out with the hoods, the hoodlums of the school, a disorganized precursor to gangs that existed back in the 60’s. The school had a policy that all students had to leave within 15 minutes of the last class unless they were in an authorized after-school school program. This guy wasn’t a member of anything other than the Principal’s watch list.
It was late afternoon and most of the teachers were gone or squirreled away in their rooms. If there were any administrators left they were no longer roaming the hallways. The administrative offices were up on the second floor, and I was just making my way up out of the basement to the first floor. If there was going to be trouble there would be nobody around to hear or witness it. I was one of the last guys out of practice and out of the locker room, and the only person left behind me might be the coach.
I thought about turning around and running for the coach’s office, but that seemed cowardly and it assumed that the hood was up to no good. Maybe this was just an innocuous encounter. Maybe he was waiting for his buddies who were vandalizing something in the basement. Maybe his unauthorized presence in the school had nothing to do with me. Maybe I had prejudged him unfairly. I slogged on up the stairs, bone tired from a hard workout.
Just as I was approaching the top of the stairs he stepped out from the wall to block my path. His movement was a signal to two buddies to slip out of their hiding places around the corner and take up station beside him. These were guys I’d never seen in school before, and of a size that indicated they were well beyond the ninth grade. Actually, they looked so big, dumb, and mean that I assumed they hadn’t made it to the sixth grade, but were old enough and big enough to be out of high school.
The three of them blocked my path, so I just stopped and stood there just short of the top of the stairs. I was too tired to run, didn’t know where I would run to anyway, and couldn’t fight my way through the three of them. I decided not to speak so they couldn’t twist my words into something they could use as provocation. This was their game and it was their move. It was up to them to either state their business or make a move. I hoped their move wasn’t to stab me or push me down the stairs and kill me, which seemed real possibilities.
The original hoodlum stepped close to me, as did his two buddies, and warned me to watch myself in wrestling practice, wagging a finger in my face while doing so. Though scared to death, I tried to look impassive and unintimidated, as if the threat meant nothing to me. The threat was delivered emphatically, and then the three turned and exited the door directly behind them. I stayed on the steps for several minutes to give them plenty of time to get away, concerned that they might have changed their minds about beating me up and were lying in wait for me outside. I also needed the minutes to quell the shaking in my legs.
Eventually I got up the courage to exit the building and make my way to the bus stop. The entire time I was watching left, right, and behind me to see that they weren’t coming after me. That seemed unlikely given the houses I was walking past and the cars on the street, but I suspected they didn’t care about such things. I could imagine them giving me a pretty good pounding in only a few moments and then disappearing into the neighborhood.
The threat about wrestling practice perplexed me. I was trying to be the model athlete. As I recall I’d been picked as a team captain. The only thing I could figure is that I’d recently been paired in practice with a gifted but lazy teammate. When the coach was distracted this guy wanted to skip the workout drills we were supposed to be doing, and I wouldn’t let him get away with it. I’d do the takedowns, escapes, and reversals on him, generally pounding him, while he made no effort at all. He was hoping that if he did next to nothing, I’d go easy on him. I didn’t. He told me to ease up, and I wouldn’t. I was doing the workout the way the coach wanted it done.
Nothing ever came of the threat, but I was wary and intimidated just the same. I did the wrestling workouts as directed, but also tried to avoid my lazy and suspect teammate. He ended up in my weight class in high school, and I never beat him in 2 out of 3 tryout matches to make the varsity squad. He was a talented wrestler, but sometimes I wonder if there was another reason why I couldn’t beat him in 2 out of 3.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Smile
I was in my senior year of high school during the winter of 1969-70 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Coe College let the local high schools use their 13 laps per mile indoor track in the basement of Eby Field house a couple of afternoons each week. I often ran there.
I remember I was hammering through a particularly difficult workout at Coe one afternoon when Coach Wilkinson interrupted my workout. He rarely did that because rest during a workout is prescribed in carefully measured doses. A conversation is unusual in the middle of a workout because it results in too much rest, but again, I digress.
Wilkinson barked, “Millen, get over here!”
I trotted over, “Yes sir?” wondering what was up.
“Why do you have to scowl and grimace while you are running?”
“It’s a hard workout. It hurts to run that fast. I was concentrating on running.”
“You are scaring the sophomores! How the hell am I supposed to get anybody to run distance if you make it look so hard? Try smiling! Make it look like fun. Get back to work!”
“Yes sir!”
I thought that was funny as hell. I did try running with a smile on my face for the remainder of that afternoon, but it was a distraction from the workout and felt completely unnatural. I abandoned the experiment the next day. I did try to be friendlier to the underclassman during warm-ups and warm-downs after that. Wilkie never razzed me about it again.
Postscript
Speaking of warm-ups: After a warm-up run of a couple of miles we were required to get on the ground and perform a series of stretching exercises. As a team captain I felt esprit de corps was my responsibility, so I made it my habit to occasionally pounce on unsuspecting teammates and allow them to learn first-hand the names of my favorite tortuous wrestling holds. It was all good-natured tomfoolery, quite literally, and generated laughs from all, even my victim of the day. I tried to pick on a variety of victims so no-one felt left out. From time to time my teammates would gang up on me and give me a shellacking. It generated a sense of camaraderie and was great fun. I continued the practice in college.
If your buddies aren’t harassing you in a good-natured fashion, then something is wrong. I suspect that it may be different with females.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Fond Memory #2 – Blackboard
It’s not much, but it meant a lot to me at the time. I guess the very fact that I still remember it indicates it still does mean something to me.
The high school sports teams had a locker room dedicated for their use in the deepest bowels of the gymnasium. As each season ended one team would vacate their lockers and the next team would take their places. Many of the guys were year-round jocks and kept the same locker throughout the year.
As you entered the athletes locker room at the bottom of the stairs there was a small office for coaches on one side of the hallway, and a blackboard on the other side of the hallway. Every athlete had to pass that blackboard four times each afternoon. Once on the way in to change clothes into practice gear, a second time on the way to practice, a third time coming back to the locker room to change back into street clothes, and a fourth time on their way home for the evening.
Coach Wilkinson was the head track coach, but spent all of his time working with the sprinters. Coach Rosenberg worked with the field events guys, and Coach Drury held the stopwatch for the distance runners. Wilkinson wrote the workouts for the distance guys to do each afternoon, and Coach Drury timed us during our repeats and read out split times. The specification of the workouts was the only real coaching going on with the distance runners.
Coach Wilkinson wrote the distance workouts on the blackboard each afternoon during track season. We’d come down the stairs to the locker room and there would be our workout for the day on the blackboard. We’d look it over on our way into locker room, ponder it and mentally steel ourselves for the effort while changing clothes, then look at it again on the way out to the track to be sure we had it right.
Wilkinson didn’t put the sprinters workout on the chalkboard. He was working directly with them and I expect he tailored the workout to how they were doing that afternoon. The same thing was true with Rosenberg’s field events. He worked directly with the guys. Nothing was predetermined. He simply critiqued each throw and jump and offered suggestions for improvement.
There came a time when the other distance guys just could not do the same workouts that I could. I’d been running all year, except for my final season of wrestling, and the rest of the distance guys had not kept in shape during the off-season. It made no sense for me to do their workouts, as they were too slow and did not have enough distance in them, and it made no sense for them to attempt my workouts because the workouts were too fast and too long for my colleagues.
When I came down the stairs each afternoon I would find my name at the top of the chalkboard and my workout listed underneath. Underneath that Wilkinson listed “Distance” and their workout separately. Everyone could see the differences between my workout and the rest of the distance guys. I am embarrassed to admit it, but I enjoyed the fact that I had qualified for my own harder and longer workout, and every athlete in a spring sport was walking by that blackboard four times a day to see it. It was a form of recognition that I don’t recall anyone ever speaking of, but I sure got a kick out of it. A shameless glory hound – that’s me.
A blackboard in the basement of the gymnasium with my name on it –
It was a small thing, but it meant a lot to me.
February 27, 2011
The high school sports teams had a locker room dedicated for their use in the deepest bowels of the gymnasium. As each season ended one team would vacate their lockers and the next team would take their places. Many of the guys were year-round jocks and kept the same locker throughout the year.
As you entered the athletes locker room at the bottom of the stairs there was a small office for coaches on one side of the hallway, and a blackboard on the other side of the hallway. Every athlete had to pass that blackboard four times each afternoon. Once on the way in to change clothes into practice gear, a second time on the way to practice, a third time coming back to the locker room to change back into street clothes, and a fourth time on their way home for the evening.
Coach Wilkinson was the head track coach, but spent all of his time working with the sprinters. Coach Rosenberg worked with the field events guys, and Coach Drury held the stopwatch for the distance runners. Wilkinson wrote the workouts for the distance guys to do each afternoon, and Coach Drury timed us during our repeats and read out split times. The specification of the workouts was the only real coaching going on with the distance runners.
Coach Wilkinson wrote the distance workouts on the blackboard each afternoon during track season. We’d come down the stairs to the locker room and there would be our workout for the day on the blackboard. We’d look it over on our way into locker room, ponder it and mentally steel ourselves for the effort while changing clothes, then look at it again on the way out to the track to be sure we had it right.
Wilkinson didn’t put the sprinters workout on the chalkboard. He was working directly with them and I expect he tailored the workout to how they were doing that afternoon. The same thing was true with Rosenberg’s field events. He worked directly with the guys. Nothing was predetermined. He simply critiqued each throw and jump and offered suggestions for improvement.
There came a time when the other distance guys just could not do the same workouts that I could. I’d been running all year, except for my final season of wrestling, and the rest of the distance guys had not kept in shape during the off-season. It made no sense for me to do their workouts, as they were too slow and did not have enough distance in them, and it made no sense for them to attempt my workouts because the workouts were too fast and too long for my colleagues.
When I came down the stairs each afternoon I would find my name at the top of the chalkboard and my workout listed underneath. Underneath that Wilkinson listed “Distance” and their workout separately. Everyone could see the differences between my workout and the rest of the distance guys. I am embarrassed to admit it, but I enjoyed the fact that I had qualified for my own harder and longer workout, and every athlete in a spring sport was walking by that blackboard four times a day to see it. It was a form of recognition that I don’t recall anyone ever speaking of, but I sure got a kick out of it. A shameless glory hound – that’s me.
A blackboard in the basement of the gymnasium with my name on it –
It was a small thing, but it meant a lot to me.
February 27, 2011
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