Ellen

The Dating Relationship That Never Was

I never got on with girls very well during my high school days.  In fact I never had a date.  After asking two or three of them for a date and getting turned down, I decided to give up on it.

There was one could have been relationship that’s worth talking about, however.   Ellen was not her real name, and I’m even going to change some of the circumstances because there are people who read this blog who knew both of us, although they probably didn’t know anything about the relationship or more accurately the lack of a relationship between us.  I don’t even know if the lady is still alive, but if she should ever run across this I wouldn’t want to embarrass her.

Girls had little use for me.  I didn’t understand them, and they didn’t seem to care much about me. Well there was one exception and it’s worth telling. Ellen was a poor girl.  Her Dad had a low paying job in Abilene, and they lived very simply.   It was pretty clear to me that she had a crush on me.  She not able to dress in the current style.  As a matter of fact I couldn’t dress very well myself.  For whatever reason I would barely give her the time of the day.     Guys used to tease me about being sweet on Ellen, and I always took exception to it.

Then a strange thing happened.  Sometime in my senior year,  I woke up to the real facts of life.   That was about the time Carl Smith came out with his country song, with these lyrics.  “I overlooked an orchid while searching for a rose.”   I decided Ellen was the orchid I had been overlooking.   It dawned on me that Ellen was downright pretty.   

She had an after school job, so I worked up my courage and went to the drug store where she worked at the soda fountain one day.  I sat down on a stool, and talked with her for a little while.   Finally I asked her for a date.   She just flat out said, “No.”   There was no explanation, no sign of just playing hard to get, just flat out rejection.  Again, I found rejection so hard to handle, that I never tried to get a day again until after I finished high school.

Ellen did all right for herself.   She got an academic scholarship at Baylor.  She married well, and had a remarkably distinguished career as an educator.  

She rose high above the people who put her down and made fun of her.  I admire her for that.   The last time I saw her was sometime after I married.   She and I attended the same funeral in Clyde.  At that time she was probably in her mid-twenties, and I thought she had turned into a stunningly beautiful, self confident woman.   Her mother attended my father’s funeral, and told me that Ellen was doing well.

Things would have never worked for Ellen and me.  It was just as well that she gave me a cold, “no” in the drug store that day.  I had it coming for the way I treated her earlier.   I haven’t seen her or heard anything about her for several decades.  I don’t even know is she’s alive.  However, I do I admire the way she overcame the obstacles in her life and made something out of herself.

And she taught me that it’s not a good thing to get too big for your britches.

Vernon Leverett – I Called Him “Coach” (2)

“Coach” taught me many lessons about life.  I believed just about everything he said.  Fortunately, he was a Christian.  In his latter years he became an elder at the Southern Hills Church of Christ in Abilene.  We visited there one Sunday and he was making announcements.  It sounded like a locker room speech from his coaching days.   He used the same techniques to “coach” the church that he used to coach his teams.  I’ll never forget the day.  He gave me a big bear hug.

In 1998, many of his former players returned to Clyde to celebrate our experience with him.  He told a lot of funny stories.  One involved the man who put the event together.  His name was Paul Petty.  Paul was a few years ahead of me, and was one of the finest athletes to come out of Clyde.  He played his college ball at Hardin-Simmons University.  Paul was named to the Little All America team, and played in the East-West Shrine game while at HSU.  

But Coach shared this story with us.  Clyde played Cross Plains in the late forties and Paul was on the team.  They went to Cross Plains and it was the first time Clyde had played a football game under the lights.  Cross Plains had new uniforms that year, so they gave the old ones to Clyde.  I guess they didn’t check them out too carefully.  Paul broke open and caught a pass.  He was headed for the goal line when his pants started falling off.  Then Paul was faced with the dilemma of trying to run for a touchdown while holding the ball in one hand, and holding his pants up with the other one.  Coach said they caught him just before he reached the goal line.

There was another teacher at Clyde named Waymon Pistole.   Waymon and Coach developed a friendship that lasted until Waymon died.  I used to run into Waymon fairly regularly at events in Abilene.  Coach was married three times.  His first two wives died.   When Waymon lay dying, he asked to see Coach, and said, “Vernon, please take care of Margie.”  Margie was Waymon’s wife.  The two of them married and apparently had a very happy relationship.  I saw he and Margie at church in Abilene the next morning after the celebration.  That was the last time I would ever see him.  I was away from home when Coach died and did not learn of his passing until after the funeral.  I called Margie afterwards and  had a wonderful visit with her.  She told me how much Coach admired what I had done with my life.

Vernon Leverett – I Called Him “Coach” (1)

Vernon Leverett coached football and other sports at Clyde High School.   He proved to be one of the great influences in my life.   Although he only coached for about 8 years before going into school administration, I still called him “Coach” until the day he died.

“Coach” was a passionate man with a short fuse.   Once he deemed a referee’s call to be so flagrantly bad that he took the team off the field in the third quarter, loaded us on a bus and took us home, even though we were leading 13-7.  However that same kind of temperament  drove him to convince young men they could achieve the impossible.   Although I had no football ability, I believed all those speeches about what you could become.   I would have followed him anywhere.

He was notorious for “locker room speeches.”   He used lines like, “Those guys put their britches on the same way you do, one leg at a time.”   It was years later before I learned he borrowed that from Knute Rockne.  One of his previous players had been killed a few years earlier, so he developed his own “Win One for the Gipper” speech.  

If we were playing a poor team, he did everything in his power to convince us that we would be fortunate if we came off the field alive.  He would say, “They’ve got Number 32. You can’t stop him.  The best you can do is slow him down.”  That Friday night we would win by a lopsided score and 32 would get tackled every time he had the ball. 

One the other hand, if we played a team that appeared to be good, he would work hard to convince us that they could be beaten.  We played one team, who had an outstanding boy named Wolf.  He prepared us to take down Wolf all week. When we were doing calisthenics, we usually would count one – two or maybe one – two – three – four.   This particular week we would count “wolf meat” or “one – two – wolf meat.”  Wolf didn’t stand a chance.  He had a terrible night.  The defense was instructed to tackle him on every play whether he had the ball or not.

He also made sure that we didn’t pay too much attention to the press.  Remember high school football is a religion in West Texas, and the Abilene Reporter-News even covered us.  

About halfway through the season, A. C. Greene, who later became a prominent author, but covered high school sports for the Abilene paper at that time began to realize that our team was pretty good.  He even showed up for one of our practice sessions.   The week before we played Wylie he ran a piece on our team.  It was filled with lofty praise.   Coach Leverett came to the field with a copy of the paper in his hand and said, “Boys, I want to read you some garbage.”  He read the piece and said, “Don’t you see what’s he’s doing? He wants Wylie to win so he can write about how the underdogs defeated the favorites.  He’s setting us up.  Don’t believe any of that trash.”   

Some years later I got a letter from A. C. Greene.  He reflected on his experience as a high school sports reporter. He said that it was his job to serve as a whipping boy for the West Texas high school coaches.  If he picked a team to lose, the coaches would say, “He doesn’t have any confidence in us.”   If he picked them to win they would say, “He’s just trying to set us up.”  There was no way the reporter was going to come out on top.  He said that he was on a radio talk show out of Dallas about thirty years later, and one of those old coaches called in.  He was still mad at him.  We did manage to beat Wylie, and the score wasn’t even close.  As I recall it was something like 31-7.  Ironically, Coach Leverett eventually became a school administrator for the Wylie School District.

You've Gotta Be a Football Hero

In the fall of 1950, I began my sophomore year of high school at Clyde.   I still visualized myself as a great athlete.   I had played on the football team in the 1949 season, but I only got into games when we were about fifty points ahead.   Our team was exceptional that year.   Some of our guys later played major college football, and one of them went on to an outstanding career in the NFL.   That’s not bad for a “Class B” high school in West Texas.   Of course football is king in West Texas during the fall of the year.  No other area of the country is quite so fanatical.  Bill Hart, who grew up in nearby Baird, later wrote sports for a newspaper in upstate New York.   When a preacher moved to New York from Texas he told Bill that he would like to attend an Ivy League game with him.  Bill said, “O.K., but it’s about like AA high school ball in Texas.”   He wasn’t exaggerating by much.  One football coach told me that one of his somewhat mediocre players ended up on the football team at Bucknell.   The Bucknell coach told him, “I’ve never seen a kid right out of high school who knew so much about football.

High School football is a religion in Texas.  They have church on Friday nights during the fall.  The most talented high school players go on to greater things.  When I was in high school, Doak Walker won the Heisman Award while playing for SMU.  “Slingin’” Sammy Baugh was near the end of  his career with the Redskins.

I was never cut out to be a football player, but I desperately wanted to belong, and playing football was my ticket to social acceptance.

When I attended the pep rallies, they always sang,

“You’ve got to be a football hero to get along with the beautiful girls.

You’ve got be a touchdown getter you bet,

If you want to get

A baby to pet.

The fact that you are rich are handsome won’t get you anything in curls.

You’ve be a football hero,

To get along with the beautiful girls.”

I didn’t think myself attractive to females, so I guess I probably thought they might have some strange attraction to a guy in shoulder pads, thus I sweated through two a days, and for some strange reason the coach never cut me from the team.  Mainly I sat on the bench.   From my vantage point on the bench I became quite a student of the game, and for a time I entertained the thought of becoming a football coach.

I did manage to earn a “reserve” letter during my sophomore year.  That meant I got to play at least one play in eight quarters during the season.  I managed to earn full letters in my junior and senior year, but I was never a candidate to replace Doak Walker or Sammy Baugh.  In fact I played center.  Today centers usually weigh 150 pounds or more.  I was my at heaviest during the senior year.  I was 6’ 2’ tall and weighed all of 137 pounds.  I must have struck fear in the opposition by my sheer size.

April 28, 1950 (2)

The Clyde Tornado:  The Aftermath

After the storm was gone, we went to my grandparents’ house first in order to make sure they were safe.  Then we went to our house.  It had missed our house.  Mama went to the cellar when she saw the clouds and never knew what had happened until we told her.

We got in our truck and headed out to survey the damage.  Some our neighbors’ houses were no longer standing.  We heard stories about people getting under the kitchen table to protect themselves.   The Griffin’s house was lying in a pile of lumber.  Alene and the kids had huddled down by the side of the refrigerator, and it kept the debris off.  I couldn’t help thinking about the fact that I had eaten supper in that house the night before.

Jeff’s experience was the strangest of all.   He was sitting at the supper table and saw the roof peel off the house.   He went to the door to get a look, and the wind picked him up and carried him into the yard.   He was unconscious for a few seconds, but when he woke up the storm was still churning in the adjoining field.   Jeff noticed that a large piece of lumber had plowed a furrow in the grass just inches from his head.  He said, “I figured the rest of my family members were dead.   My first thought was, ‘What am I doing alive?’  Then I thought about praying, but I figured I had never done anything for the Lord, and it wouldn’t be a good idea to ask him for anything now.”   Jeff was a hard man, and he got worse after that.   He had an ongoing battle with the bottle.  Alene and the kids lived difficult lives.  She was a patient woman who put up with a lot.

The Griffins had been taken to the hospital for observation when we got there, so we drove on.  A couple of hundred yards down the road, we saw the ruins of an old service station.   Highway 80 had been rerouted to the other side of town (where I-20 is now).   So the station was closed.   The Tabors were, and still are, a prominent family in Clyde.  One of the Tabor families lived in the remodeled station, which now was nothing but a pile of bricks.   We saw an ambulance out front when we arrived.  While we were there, workmen were digging their bodies out.   All three residents of the house had perished.  As we drove on toward town, we realized the storm had lifted and missed the town itself.  Had it hit in a more populated area, there would have been greater loss of life.  They didn’t classify storms by categories in those days, but this was a killer tornado.  It would probably have been a category 5.     I’ve seen one other tornado in my life, and it was incredibly small in comparison to this one.

Later we learned the tornado lifted and sat down again between Clyde and Baird.   It completely destroyed the Steve Walker home.   Steve Walker was the father of Hoyt Walker, who was my uncle by marriage.  I had been in their home many times.   Nothing was left standing at the Walker house.   The engine had been ripped right out of their car.   A refrigerator landed on a telephone pole several hundred yards away.    Apparently the Walkers tried to run.  They were found in the field, a short distance from the house.  There was no way they could have survived. 

The Walkers were Methodists, and their service was held at the Methodist church in Clyde.  I remember going to the funeral service.  There was not an empty seat in the house.   I still remember someone singing, “Does Jesus care when my heart is stressed, too deeply for mirth and song/ And the burdens press and the cares distress/ And the day grows weary and long?/”  Rarely do I hear that song without remembering that moment.

The tornado had a permanent influence on my life.  It brought my attention to the fact that life is fragile and can be snuffed out upon a moment’s notice.   My experience at the Griffin’s house, convinced me that it’s not a good idea to taunt God.  While I don’t claim to know everything God was doing that afternoon, I do know that Jeff had an opportunity to praise God and didn’t take advantage of it.   That’s not a good thing.   It also seemed to me that when God gets your attention, and you turn away from him, he may just let you squirm with the consequences of your own careless decisions, at least for awhile.   When that happens, and people don’t respond, they tend to become more perverse.  Jeff as enormously cynical.  When he learned that I had decided to preach, he said, “Well I guess that’s all right, Norman, but I had just as soon make my living honestly.”

Despite Jeff’s incorrigible ways, he had a generous heart, and he was probably the best house painter I’ve ever known.  Jeff died some years later after a long struggle with cancer.   I hope he decided to make things right with the Lord.

Life can seem boring to a teenager in a small town, but it doesn’t take but a few seconds to turn boredom into terror.  If you were to ask me to give a description of “awe,” I would tell you what happened in my life on April 28, 1950.