Max

Max Coley, whose mother was a full-blooded Cherokee, was a better than average running back in college.  He would not have looked out of place bare chested astride a galloping horse.  Max coached running backs and quarterbacks for Len Casanova at the University of Oregon where he and I became friends.  We investigated after hour establishments from time to time and I grew to appreciate his deep knowledge of the game of football.  One Saturday morning I called Max to suggest we go to a track meet that afternoon and he said no, he didn't think so because he didn't really enjoy sports where people didn't hit each other.

At a scrimmage in 1969 Max was putting in plays for the next game.  Jim Fegoni was the center who would form the huddle and Max would lean in over Fegoni's back and call the plays he wanted run.  Sometimes when Fegoni left the huddle he would take a chop step back and plant his cleated foot right on top of Max's foot.  Ouch.  After the play Max would collar Fegoni and tell him, "DO NOT CHOP STEP OUT OF THE HUDDLE".  Fegoni would do fine and then he would forget and drill Coley again.  The third time it happened Coley limped up and confronted Fegoni. He placed his hands on the kid's shoulders and looked him in the eye saying, "Jim, I think I now know why the Italians lost the war".  Fegoni,  not blinking,  replied,  "How'd the Indians do, Coach?"

Max went on to a long,  successful professional career in the NFL and was Terry Bradshaw's coach at Pittsburg in those great Steeler years.

A football Memory

Senior year. One of our early games after the Grayback pre-season training camp was against Myrtle Point High School on their field, about 70 miles from Grants Pass. We would make the trip in one of our ancient yellow school buses that had all the comfort of a railroad boxcar with benches. Coach Ingram never embraced the idea of football as a fun activity for young scholars to engage in; he saw it as a character building opportunity that required the players to observe a disciplined regimen of physical and mental commitment. And that long bus trip was an opportunity to study your book of plays and concentrate on the game plan.

Yeah, right.  Larry Aschenbrenner is going to sit quietly on a bouncing bus for more than three and a half minutes before sneaking up the aisle and sticking a paper match in somebody's shoe sole and setting it on fire for a "hot foot"? Or maybe tying somebody's shoe laces together? Or instigating plots with others to keep the laughter rolling to the distress of the coaches?

Our high school is three times the size of theirs and the game in a pouring rainstorm is essentially over by the end of the first quarter. With about one or two minutes left in the game Ingram has cleared the bench of back-up players and on the last play of the game our third-string quarterback calls a pass play to show our coaching staff why he should be a starter. His pass connects and the receiver is off for the end zone.  Whoever is running facility control for Myrtle Point figures the game is over and he throws the master switch for lighting. The field plunges into total, deep-in-the-coal-mine darkness. People are shouting as chaos ensues.  In just a few minutes the lights come back on and we see our receiver lying flat out on the grass in the end zone.  He had run full speed into the goal post.

The kid came around without major injuries.  But we never got to kick the extra point.

The Face of Safe

                                                             

In every historical decade there is opportunity for creating a solution to what 99.99% of your fellow voyagers haven't yet realized is a problem. The prescient opportunist is then rewarded with fame and fortune.  "What if I could pick up a device at the Happy Hour Bar & Grill and tell you I was working late at the office?" Alexander Graham Bell said to his wife. "What's new about that?" she replied.  But Alex saw the future and he owned it. Just as Orville Wright did.  And Bill Gates. And Steve Jobs.

Like those visionaries, I've seen the future but my opportunity to get there has been roadblocked by the Grim Reaper. So I'm handing off my insight to whomever wants to seize the brass ring and throw it in the slot.

Think face masks.  The current pandemic we are experiencing is just a shot across our bow.  New and improved coronas are in Mother Nature's pipeline and always will be so the future opportunity is how to confront that reality with a creative solution.  That is, make the face mask a fashion statement that will become as important to the individual as his/her other clothing, underwear and outerwear.  Forget that thing that hangs on your ears or drops a plastic shield down from a headband.  Think total head conversion with a helmet that when worn covers everything from your neck upward. It won't be cheap but it will be a must-have device with a patent worth $billions. You will go to a salon to have your faceshield (get a copyright on faceshield) designed and fitted. Much high concept research and development is required here but everything is doable now or could be with engineering.

A mould of your head will be created in ubiquitous Headquarters Salons with whatever equipment is required.  Simulated skin needs to be developed and the client can choose tan coloring or any other tones desired.  Natural blemishes away.  Hair to clients specification like any wig construction.  More high tech development for air vents, filtered with openings from the back.  The faceshield will be designed in two parts for ease in putting it on and taking it off.  The front and back sections will be joined by a new-easy-to-use, sealing system.  Identification chips in the headpiece will be a requirement.

The eye holes will be prescription ground if necessary and fit over nose like glasses.

Voice and hearing is technically enhanced when face is closed.

So lots of research and development would be required to make this work but concerns about safety from the virus is the future reality.   

No, no, don't thank me. Just take my idea and buy yourself a yacht.

Disunion Solution

One thing we can all agree on in 2020 America is that there is little we can all agree on.  And a nation so divided will not endure while that is the case.  Statues have become the focal point of the division in our country where if you topple my Robert E. Lee I'll unhorse your Ulysses S. Grant.  No iconic figure, apparently, is safe from an attack by some mob of true believers and our nation's pigeons are distraught.

Everybody relax, I have the solution that might bring a springtime of peace and perhaps even create an environment of tranquility between the brothers and sisters of our homeland.  How many of you remember lava lamps?  Yes, lava lamps.  We must replace every statue of a person with a giant lava lamp with its mesmerising globs of glunk floating upward to vanish and then be replaced by a new glob of a different shape rising from some mysterious vault that never empties.

A person can watch a lava lamp for hours in peaceful fascination as anxieties float away like the rising globs.  And pigeons have no place to perch.  The initial cost of creating all those giant lava lamps  as well as the labor cost of the operation will be borne by placing a tax on caramel corn.

Solving national problems isn't difficult.

Sign Man

There are four floors of apartments in this place I call home.  The hall on each floor is a square passage 1/7th of a mile long so walk seven halls and you've done your daily life-sustaining regimen.  If you choose halls on different floors you are able to do a walk-by of all your fellow inmates and among that group of brothers and sisters is the Sign Man.  I've never met him up close and personal but I admire his door-posted signs.  Cum'on memory, do your duty:

Don't knock and disturb me.  The voices in my head have told me to sharpen my knives.

Don't whine to me, I didn't vote for him.

See, I told you this would happen.

Get back to me and I'll tell you who did it.

Shove it under the door.

I was told there'd be a handbasket.

A Pillow To Dream On

I skipped the graduation ceremony at the University of Oregon in June of 1954 but that didn't invalidate my Bachelor's degree in History that landed me a job as an executive trainee with the Bon Marche department store that was opening in Eugene, Oregon.  I would be the assistant to Ralph Robinson, Divisional Manager for domestics (bedding, towels, yardage, notions) and women's lingerie. My pay was not quite as much as that paid most school custodians and in all the years I worked there no one ever asked me to explain the American cultural influences generated by post-Civil War policies of the federal government.  So much for my B.S. in History.

But I learned to fold towels to make attractive displays and how to make buying plans for trips to resource markets. And as an executive trainee I could work off-the-clock hours without overtime pay.  Not to mention learning the techniques for circumventing certain policy rules that were not beneficial to Divisional Manager Robinson's bonus objectives.  Like the price tags on merchandise that carried a date indicating how long a particular item had been in the store. Ralph's bonus was penalized for old merchandise so his assistant could work after hours in the warehouse making new tickets to put on old merchandise.

And then there was the pillow crisis.  One day the State of Oregon pillow inspector (What? You didn't know Oregon had pillow inspectors?) came through and took one of our pillows to be inspected by a lab. A week or two later the report came back and it wasn't good.  Among a number of unfortunate contents in our pillow, some of the feathers contained traces of urine.  Apparently the New York pillow resource we used purchased feathers from Europe where citizens would sell the feathers from their own bedding to the feather buyers who would then use those feathers in their pillows.  So we took our pillows off the sales floor, which had a serious negative impact on Robinson's bonus.  He got on the phone to New York and told the feather merchants to send him the best pillow ever made that would pass an inspection.  The new pillow came to us by air and on the inspector's return he got it for the lab which gave it a glowing report.  Our pillows came back onto the sales floor.

Best of all, Ralph gave me the test pillow and I enjoyed years of peaceful sleep on America's finest goose down urine-free pillow.

Leo's 20 Year Crusade

The University of Oregon hired its first professional athletic director, Leo Harris, in 1947.  A successful administrator of a large school district in California, he had played football at Stanford and coached both football and basketball at Fresno State.

Leo Harris had the solid build of a football guard and his administrative style was a gruff, take no prisoners assault on roadblocks to his objectives.  He looked a bit like Jimmy Hoffa with a similar demeanor except Harris was open and honest.  There was never a doubt of what he meant in the decisions he made. The athletic program he took over in Eugene was in shambles. Financially depressed and faced with old facilities for the major sports of football and basketball, the challenge to the new administrator was daunting. Doing a triage audit of all the problems, he pinpointed the football stadium at Hayward Field as his number one priority.  It may have been historic but in the family of big time collegiate sports it was an embarrassment.

Harris created a secret piggy bank and no contribution to Porky was too insignificant to be dropped in the slot. Head coaches (much to their dismay) to save travel expenses, were required to call alumni and ask to surf their couch on recruiting trips.  He limited the football coach as to how many players he could take on away games (Leo loved the early years when the same players played both offense and defense). He scheduled football games with the major powerhouses in the country (Ohio State, Miami, Penn State, Nebraska and on and on) to get a piece of those huge stadium gates.  On those Saturdays it was always skinny David facing a giant Goliath and unlike the Biblical David, David's sling shot for Oregon rarely dropped the giant (at Ohio State players filled double rows of benches and their offense featured three enormous fullbacks taking turns crashing into Oregon's defensive line).  All elements of Leo Harris' conduct of Oregon athletic affairs were colored by the central focus of feeding Porky. 

And so it went, year after year, with Porky putting on weight until one fine day Leo Harris grabbed his sledge hammer and said,  "Thank you, Porky, for your years of loyal service but your work here is done." Leo had his $1,000,000 nest egg and now he sold 1,000 seats for $1,000 each (giving a 20 year licence to buy tickets for the best seats in the stadium.) The special section was filled with chair-back seats covered with a roof that held powerful electric heating units. Naming the stadium for alumnus Thomas J. Autzen brought in $250,000 (way too cheap) and the finished cost of the magnificent facility was $2.5 million. Unbelievable!

On September 23, 1967 the Colorado Buffaloes spoiled the opening of the stadium with a 17-13 win over the Ducks led by QB Eric Olson.  The years that followed buried that loss as Autzen earned its reputation as one of the premier football arenas in the nation.

For me it will always be LEO HARRIS STADIUM, Home of the Ducks.