The Grayback Boys

In the 1940s all Oregon high school principals were ex-coaches. Simple reason: academic teachers did their post-grad college studies in their academic disciplines while coaches did theirs in administration.  School boards hired administrators to run the schools.

Frank Thomas was Principal of Grants Pass High School when I was a student there in the late '40s and he had a belief that the way to assure getting voters to approve school budgets was to have winning athletic teams.  In my freshman, sophomore and junior years our football teams were not winners. Scores against traditional rivals Medford and Klamath Falls would be like 72-0 and 56-0. The final humiliation came my junior year when we lost to Roseburg for the first time in 30 years.

So Frank Thomas hired the Roseburg coach, Mel Ingram, a full-blooded Native American graduate of Gonzaga University where he had been an all-star letterman in three sports.  Coach Ingram was not soft-spoken and he detested losing.

His first move was to gather together prominent leaders of the business community and pick their pockets for some serious dollars.  He then took volunteer work crews to the Grayback campground in the Siskiyou mountains that had been constructed by Franklin Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) in the 1930s.  The CCC barracks were swept clean and filled with cots.  Refrigeration was brought into the kitchen of the mess tent and stocked with food. The playground became a football practice field and the beaten-down Grants Pass High School football players were rounded up, put on a bus and shipped off for two weeks of boot camp hell.

Reveille was at 6:00 AM for a turnout to calisthenics led by a coach (coaches of all the sports were in camp) then a fallout to breakfast. And what a breakfast! The full Monty.  Bacon, eggs, fried potatoes pancakes, milk, OJ.  Most of us had never seen such a display of food. And every meal was like that.

After breakfast came chalk talk with open playbooks and coaches explaining the new system (T-formation). Mel Ingram officiated college football games for the Pacific Coast Conference on Saturdays and he brought back innovations he saw there in both offense and defense to incorporate into his own schemes. At 10:00 we would put on pads and scrimmage until noon. The first couple of days were fairly light drills aimed at getting everybody into shape but then things got serious.

After lunch it was more chalk talk until 3:00 when we would suit up again (slimy wet pads from the morning sweat) and get back to full speed hitting.  Twelve days of that.  Not everyone made it through to the end.  One night a car might go down the mountain taking a drop-out to Grants Pass and in the morning there would be an empty cot in the bunk house.  My bunk mate, Shifty-hips Pollock, was a running back who dazzled the creatures, particularly the turtles, who watched our drills from the surrounding forest (his time for the mile today at his home in Bend, Oregon is just under forty-five minutes).

The team Mel Ingram led off the mountain went into the season of 1947 with no fear of any opponent. A loss to Marshfield (Coos Bay) killed a chance to go on to the state playoffs.  However, the next year the Grants Pass Caveman went all the way to win the state championship, starting long years of winning seasons. Today's football Cavemen play their home games on Mel Ingram field.

And Frank Thomas kept passing his school budgets, which led to construction of a spectacular college-like campus for the high school.

A Different America

The enemy that united America in the early 1930s was the continuing collapse of the national economy: unemployment, extreme poverty, hopelessness.  All across the nation young men were drifting from their family homes, hitting the road to somewhere, looking for something better.  And it created a culture in the country of a willingness to give support to those migrant rovers whenever possible.  Like providing a meal or shelter from a storm.  My mother, Eunice Landers, never turned away a hungry drifter.

Like Wiley Omohundro.  In his early 20s, Wiley was a lanky, tall kid from Michigan who came to our door one day and asked mother if she could spare some food. Wiley might have been a bit slow but he had a friendly, smiling face and he, of course, immediately won over my mother. She prepared Wiley a big fried chicken sandwich on home baked bread with a large glass of milk and while Wiley put that away she listened to his backstory.  Wiley hung around, doing odd jobs and eating for a few months (mother named him Wiley O'Imhungryo). He split wood. He cleaned irrigation ditches.  He went swimming in the Applegate river.

He helped mother can peaches where she taught him to not squeeze the fruit to get it into the jars.  He told her about helping his father move chickens from one chicken house to another one night and how his father told him to hold these three chickens by their legs and not let them go and how he got confused and just let them go and how his father yelled at him.  That was Wiley.

One day Wiley hit the road, never to be heard from again.  The clouds of war were gathering so Riley probably had a military future, hopefully in the commissary.

The New Normal

Sitting on my couch I dozed off while watching a rerun of Singing In The Rain and experienced the most vivid...I guess you'd call it a dream, instructing me how to prepare for the future after Coronavirus.  I knew I had better write down the instructions because I don't trust my memory.

Here is what I did as instructed:  cut a tea bag open and dumped the contents into a cup.  Added a  pinch of hair from my recent self-given haircut (retrieved from the rug), then 3 TRUTH BUDS purchased from the country fair in Eugene, Oregon in 1974. I boiled water from the bucket of collected rainfall on my balcony and poured it into the cup.  After two hours I drained the water  and spread the mixture on a baking sheet where I shaped it to look like the Andromeda galaxy.

You may find this hard to believe but it is absolutely true even though trying to describe it is difficult.  When I viewed the baking sheet of dried tea leaves the next morning the spiral galaxy had taken the form of a cursive The Prince, suggesting to me I should take my volume of The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli, published in 1532, and lay it open on the table. Something moved the pages, perhaps a breeze from the wings of a butterfly in some far off sylvan glade, and this passage seemed to glow on a page: Nations and individuals will always do what is best for their own self interest.  

Now doesn't that suck?  The freaking new normal is going to be just like the old normal.  And pretty much the same as the normal back there in 1532. Who said The past is prologue?