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[rhinodriver77]

The Homecoming Float Saga

As the 1965-66 school year started, the Chess Club reassembled with its original core of characters. I mentioned ADMMG in the first post. He was one of my better acquaintances from the group. His family had come to the U.S. during World War II, and we were from similar socioeconomic backgrounds. Culture was a different story. I learned a lot about migrant workers and the hard life they lived in agriculture. His dad had learned some skills (welding, equipment repair, etc., and was thus able to settle down in a farming community northwest of where I lived. Since my earliest days were in small-town south Texas, where my dad was the owner of a small business running jukeboxes around Corpus Christi, Kingsville, and the area south of San Antonio, I was passingly familiar with life where there was not a lot of cash around. We weren’t real poor, but we weren’t very high on the hog either. He was Catholic with Spanish roots, thus the long string of names (and it actually went on a bit more) my roots are largely Celtic from the British Isles with a smattering of other Northern European genes. We had some interesting conversations.

Other characters included John the Poet, an English major and a folk singer. Then there was Tall Joe (TJ), and Engineering student, the son of a Policeman and probably the biggest nerd of the group. He was about 6′5″ tall, intelligent beyond belief, could recite the Pi ratio to 200 places (3.14159...) and was on the academic honor roll every semester. There was DD (the second D was for dwarf, the genetic condition). He was a History major with a wicked sense of wry humor. I also started out in Engineering was a Basketball player (freshman year only) and ran track as a Long- and Triple-Jumper. Richie got his nickname not only by shortening his name, but he was also, like the comic book character, handsome and rich -- his family was in the oil business -- but he was a really nice guy unlike in the comic. He was a Business/Econ major with an odd view of life that he expressed quite well. A week or so after the semester started, SHE arrived as noted in the first entry, and brought along Big E -- a tallish gal, very introverted at the time -- very quick witted so that she fit right in with the group. Big E had gone to a different middle school than SHE or I did, but SHE had befriended her and they became lifelong friends. In all, the group was an unlikely amalgam of nerdy, intelligent, witty young people with little in common except Chess at the hobby level, and who had been mostly loners before college.

One of the outside of school hour activities that the group met for was the school football games. The Junior College was one of the national powerhouses at that level, and usually won its games with scores like 66-0, or 72-12. By the third quarter we usually had the reserves playing, with a 50+ point lead, and the crowd would begin cheering for the opposition to at least score.... We would all meet at the stadium and sit in the student section together, and then go to the post-game dance at the Student Union. By this time, I had almost exclusive use of a small window VW Beetle, so I was driving to the games. After the dance, we would often go to one of the Drive-In diners in town, have a soda and snack and hang out for a while, then make sure that everyone had a ride. I would often have one passenger (John the Poet, or someone else) from the south side of town, Big E, and HER in the Beetle as we headed out as they both lived out of town in the same direction I did, but I was about 10 miles beyond them. Needless to say, I dropped HER off last so we could talk for a bit by ourselves....

School was progressing merrily along and the football team was undefeated when the school paper began talking about Homecoming. That afternoon, DD mused about how the Chess Club could participate in the festivities. By the time the football game and dance, etc., were done, we had settled on maybe building a float for the parade. That next Monday, we talked t over again, and DD said he would find out what we needed to do to enter. On Thursday or so, he came into the Union with a stack of papers and announced, “We are in!” He had dealt with the school administration, devised a set of by-laws, filled out all of the appropriate forms, convinced one of his teachers to be the advisor, and chartered the B.C. Chess Club as an official, school-sponsored organization, and entered it into the Parade.By the time the weekend was over, we had the basics of a design, and were in the scrounge mode for materials to build with. Richie had an Uncle that was a farmer, so he got us a 50 foot long flat-bed trailer to use, and a roll of chicken wire, and we were on our way. we finalized the design during the next week -- a living chess board display. The next Saturday. we moved the trailer into position into the building at the county fairgrounds where all the entries were being built and stapled the chicken wire around the edges of the trailer to form the structure of the skirt to hide the undercarriage. By this time, the other entries had been under construction for at least a couple of weeks, and were looking pretty good. There was one month to Homecoming. We had a bare trailer and chicken wire....

During the week, we procured enough black and white poster boards to cover the bed of the trailer. On Saturday, about half a dozen of us showed up to staple the poster boards down to make the checkerboard. There were now three weeks to go, and we had a trailer with a black and white checkerboard, surrounded by chicken wire....

Two weeks later, a few of us showed up early in the afternoon to organize for the big push to finish. As we arrived, we interrupted a crew that was preparing to move our “float” out of the way as it had been sitting inactive for two weeks. Since several commercial entries had come in, space was at a premium, and they assumed we had lost interest or otherwise dropped out. After we got that taken care of, we prepositioned the tissue paper to fill in the skirt (there is a lot of that for a 50 foot trailer!), then we took a break to get something to eat. We had arranged for the rest of the group to meet at 5:00 pm along with boy/girl friends, cousins, or whoever else they could convince to help, to do the pomping of the skirt. By 5:30, there were about 35 or 40 people stuffing tissue into chicken wire. Of course there was off site work going on during the meantime. We had built thrones for the King and Queen, a variety of props -- shields, spears, swords, etc., and we were all assembling our costumes. The on float crew (DD as King, a very tall girl as Queen (memory fails on the details), ADMMG and TJ as bishops, John the Poet as the White Knight, and Richie as the Black Knight) had written a short skit that ended with the Black Knight victorious over the White Knight, and the Queen turning the Black Knight into a statue. Anyone else that wanted to be in the parade would be a pawn walking alongside the float.

During that time, SHE and I were together almost every day working on costumes. I made spears (foil covered dowels) and shields (painted cardboard) while SHE sewed simple muslin tunics for Pawns. We made up about a dozen sets. This is where I found out that SHE was quite a seamstress and otherwise quite crafty as well. And our romance was beginning to bloom! Somewhere in that period we shared our first kiss, and the rest of the story will follow in later posts.....

At about 2:00 in the morning, we were done with the float. the next stage was marshalling and judging on the day of the parade. The float was nice: white skirt with red script on the side relating Chess to the parade theme and education somehow -- one of those quick constructions that have some meaning, but are also quickly forgotten. We were ready.

Parade day was bright and sunny and even  little warm.We showed up in costume at the appointed time, the stage characters ran through their routine  couple of times and we were ready for the judges.At 1:00 pm, the parade moved out and we marched through, performing the skit every block or two during stoppages of the flow. Once the rute was finished, we descended on our favorite drive-in for hamburgers, etc., in costume, and having a great time.

The winners of the float competition were announced during the Homecoming Coronation. To the absolute astonishment of every one, especially the other competitors, we won the Best Student Float, and Grand Prize awards. We had gone into this whole scene on a lark, with absolutely no expectations and ended up winning the whole shebang!

As part of the celebration that night, I screwed up my courage beyond belief and asked HER to go steady with me. I actually felt a physical relief when she not only said yes, but also threw HER arms around me and gave me a KISS like I had never received before! SHE had me completely awed, starstruck, quivering and panting like a puppy, wanting more than ever to do things to please HER. 

More of the story as we go along.

June 20, 2020

[rhinodriver77]

The Adventure Continues

This is the epitaph on the columbarium cover that hides the urn that contains HER ashes. I have a photo of it on my phone, but I don’t look at it often -- the memories are too many, and my ADD mind gets lost in them too easily. It was a wonderful 50 years of marriage but it came to a premature end. Looking back, there is very little I would change in the themes of our relationship -- only a detail or two in how I said or did some things here and there.

The blog will be an effort to try to understand myself and my surroundings more fully, as well as leave something for my children and grandchildren to puzzle over. Perhaps following generations (the first of which is now 3 years old) will read it too.

Today is a cool, rainy day on the southerns plains of the USA. We both started life near this longitude -- SHE in southeastern Oklahoma and I in the heart of Texas. Perhaps this is the ideal kind of day to start this project as it more or less reflects the state of my soul since SHE passed to whatever is beyond this life. It is certainly a contrast to how our relationship began.

The first time I ever really talked to HER, we were both in college California. While we had gone to the same high school, and and even been is a study hall class together, we moved in different worlds. I was a teacher’s kid and a good enough athlete to play basketball and run track, and we were just not on each other’s radar. That changed one fall day in 1965.

The prior year as a freshman, I had fallen in with a rather amorphous group of about 10 or 12 guys that had little in common. We came from several different major areas of study, highly varied backgrounds, most of us had been pretty much loners through high school, but we shared a rather strange sense of humor and were all pretty nerdy. Later, we found out that we all played chess and thus the completely unofficial, disorganized, BC Chess Club came into being as a running joke on campus. We spent our time poking fun at one another, talking over the problems of life in general, occasionally playing chess, and just generally hanging out. Eventually the chess boards attracted some attention, and the group grew slowly to about double size and also coed by the end of the school year. Those that stuck to the group were just as nerdy as the the original bunch. Life was good.....

When the summer was over, we reassembled in our usual habitat in the Student Union and began drifting along through the new school year. Somewhere in the first week or two of classes, SHE attached herself to the group. I did not even recognize HER as coming from the same high school. In talking with ADMMG (a Mexican American from a different part of the county) I remarked about that I found HER attractive. Over the next few days I began to chat with HER, and I was quickly convinced that this was the type of person that I wanted to marry. Since my romantic life to this point had been rather nonexistent (rather much of a failure even, but that is another story), I took great care to be as charming as I could be through the first stages of acquaintance. As it turned out through a series of group gatherings away from campus that ended with me driving HER home afterward (I lived about 10 miles further from the school than SHE did, but in the same direction) the relationship developed rather well. By the end of the calendar year, I was head over heels in love, but it was a while before I let her know that....

The next entry will be about how the Chess Club helped in the building of the relationship.

June 19, 2020