Charlie Brown and My Youngster Thanksgivings
You remember those Peanuts cartoons where Lucy pulls back the football just before Charlie Brown tries to kick it to start the game? Charlie never really got to enjoy Thanksgiving football, and neither did I. I always looked forward to Thanksgiving dinners when our extended family got together to visit and eat turkey, mashed potatoes, and cranberries. The problem was that I always kept an eye on the clock so I wouldn’t miss the local college football game. I don’t know why, other than my love for football, because our team almost always lost. I often felt like Charlie Brown because no matter how hard the team played and no matter how loudly I yelled, we almost always lost.
Well, in 1945, my two favorite college teams, Army and Notre Dame, faced off on Thanksgiving Day for the National Championship. Both teams were undefeated and featured All-Americans like Doc Blanchard, Glenn Davis, and Johnny Lujack. At least on THIS Thanksgiving, I would have a winner because I was a fan of both teams. The two teams were very evenly matched and played right down to the end of the fourth quarter, tied at zero. Near the end of the third quarter, “Doc” Blanchard, whose father was a doctor and who would later become the head general of our armed forces in Europe as World War II broke out, was on the field with only Lujack, who was playing safety, standing between “Doc” and the game-winning touchdown.
As you might guess, Lujack made a one-handed tackle of Blanchard, and the game ended in a tie. I had been sure one of my favorite teams would win, but no, neither did. It was a tie. Another ironic Charlie Brown Thanksgiving Day game. As my grandpa used to say: “Sometimes you can’t win for losing.”
2 responses to “”
Hi, Jerry!
Sorry I have been distracted from your blog. Throughout this year I have been struggling with a pesky little skin cancer that hid its true nature and then dodged surgical removal until surgeons had to go into the underlying tissues of my left cheek. I have had 10 operations, the last one being 4 hours long and without general anesthesia, as they were afraid the complexity of that rised too much. Instead they keep you calm with local anesthesia and, of all things, a hefty shot of fentanyl. That was a trip down a dreamy lane. My cancer has been a bit like Charlie’s football thing. Every time I go through the scary critical phase of switching my anticoagulant for my artificial heart valves to the one they need to use for surgery (Fragmin) and then back again, endure the surgery, avoid infection, get the stitches out, care for the scars, here it comes again. I take a run at the football of life, ready to kick things off again, and I land on my back. I do understand Charlie.
I went to all my high school and Berkeley home games but lost interest in football during my time at Eastern Oregon. My younger son, however, has been a big Dallas fan since his elementary school days. Thanksgiving used to mean Cowboys v Redskins to him. When we were in Austin, TX for 6 months, our sons came for Christmas. Jeremy wanted to see a Dallas game, so we drove up for their season finale, and Too Tall’s last game. Dallas had such a bad season, and it was so cold the toilets froze, that we had no trouble buying tickets at a discount from parking lot sellers. Lately I’ve been following Oregon games, even once spending the time to watch a whole game.