College Hijinks

 

It was two years ago tomorrow that the Kingsport Times News published my last column. I was 71 years old.

I had been 21 when the University of Tennessee Daily Beacon published my first newspaper column.

I had no idea at the time that I would last 50 years as a newspaper columnist.

I thought I would be a filmmaker. As a senior in college I made a film that won the Duke Film Festival. I’d been accepted at the University of Southern California Film School.

But then Katie Worrell at the Kingsport Draft Board reclassified me 1-A, in that long ago parlance that meant, “You’re in the Army now.”

I figured if the Army was going to draft me and send me to Vietnam, they were going to have to pay for those first 2,000 miles. I was not going to California on my own dime to make the flight shorter.

So to bide my time I went to grad school at Tennessee. And that’s how I became a newspaper columnist.

If you follow the link below you can read a story about my most famous exploit as a UT Daily Beacon columnist.

https://www.knoxtntoday.com/50-years-since-vince-was-quee/

But I did much more in the 86 columns I published in the student newspaper.

I wrote a column that drew a response from the governor of North Dakota. (I posited that there was no North Dakota, that no one had ever met anyone from North Dakota, that no one I knew had ever even been to North Dakota, that North Dakota was a government plot to hide the fact that there was a hole in the map. He assured me there was a North Dakota and invited me to visit. But didn't include round trip tickets.)

Another time when word leaked that controversial UT Chancellor Charlie Weaver was being considered for a position at Georgia Tech, I printed a letter of recommendation and asked my readers to fill it out and mail it to the president of Tech. (Weaver still didn’t get the job.)

And when Ed Boling was named the new president of the University, a controversial choice, as if anything on campus in 1970 wasn’t controversial, I went to the UT library and dug out Dr. Boling’s 1950 master’s thesis and wrote a column about it. In 1950, when the University’s enrollment was 4,000, he predicted that by 1970, enrollment would jump to 9,000. In 1970, at the time I wrote the column, enrollment was 26,000.

There were other columns and other college hijinks. But enough already. Read the story at the link.

 

Addressing the Address

 

I was thumbing through an old D-B football program, this one from Sept. 6, 1957 for the Lynn Camp game, and two things jumped out at me:

First, how small the players were.

End Freddie Begley weighed 135 pounds. Guard Wayne Droke was 151 pounds. And halfback Bill Bowen was 123 pounds. Take away David Steadman, 222 pounds, and the rest of the team could have passed for a modern freshman team.

And second, how casually the program included each player’s home address.

That was par for the course in those days.

If you made Eagle Scout in 1957, the story would list your home address.

If you won the Eighth Science Fair at Robinson (only an example; I didn’t), the story would list your home address.

And if you held up a liquor store and got in a slugfest with the arresting officers, the story would list your home address. (Again, only an example; I didn’t).

Nobody worried about their privacy. Their address was already in the phone book.

That was starting to change when I first got into the newspaper business in the early seventies. Soon the home addresses of miscreants (and their victims) became a little more imprecise: Stick Up Artist, who lives in the 1300 block of Maple Street. Burglary Victim, who lives in the 300 block of Main Street.

The rationale was that the newspaper didn’t want to aid curiosity seekers who would drive by the scene of the crime and point and gawk.

In the current atmosphere of Intense Privacy, that Eagle Scout may only be identified by his Troop and City.

All of which is a little odd since you can Google almost anyone and find out the home address.

Take one TV business reporter, famous for protecting her privacy, including marital status (I won’t name her). I not only found her home address, I found out who she bought the house with (her partner/husband/I don’t know) and how much the two of them paid for it in 2017.

But it is still jarring to read the roster of that 1957 D-B team and see that Darwin Compton lived at 1429 Miller Street: “Son of Mr. and Mrs. A.E. Compton of ….”

(I used Darwin as an example because I went to church with him and I know that the A. stood for Albert.)

I would think that could have been unwise, even in ’57. What if Darwin had taken a punch at a Lynn Camp player during the game and the Lynn Camp player’s family decided they needed to talk about it after the game.

Of course they didn’t have GPS in 1957 so finding Miller Street would have been a challenge, even if you asked a local:

Lynn Camp Parent: “How do we get to Miller Street?”

Local: “Okay, do you know where the Upper Circle is? No, okay, how about the Garden Basket? Poston’s? I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

So maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea.

 

(1957 football program on permanent loan from the Bob Beck and Jim Beck Collection)

 UT-Alabama Football Tickets - Only $4!

...in 1952

The University of Tennessee, like many colleges, is struggling during the pandemic to support the over-sized budget of its athletics department, in particular its football program.

The current solution, proposed in a recent email to season ticket holders, is that they donate the money they have already sent in for their tickets.

(There was no mention of any coach taking a pay cut.)

That will make up only a tiny portion of the gushing losses caused by the pandemic.

All the hand-wringing over ticket sales reminded me that I have a ticket application for Tennessee’s 1952 football season.

There were six home games at Shield-Watkins Field, beginning Oct. 11 with a game against Chattanooga and concluding six weeks later with a contest against the University of Kentucky.

Tickets for Chattanooga and a later game against Wofford were priced at $3. The other four games, which included Alabama and Florida, were $4 per seat. There was a 50 cent postage charge for each ticket.

Tennessee was coming off one of its most successful seasons, a 10-1 record, “consensus National Champions” and co-champions of the Southeastern Conference.

The only loss was a 28-13 Sugar Bowl game against third ranked Maryland. UT retained its national championship designation became the polls then closed after the regular season and before the bowl games.

An Alabama ticket for $4? Sounds dirt cheap but was it?

The usual way to compare prices is to plug $4 into an inflation calculator to see what that would be in 2020 dollars (It would be $125).

But I think it is more interesting to see what else you could buy in 1952 for that $4.

So I found a Sept. 1952 ad for Kingsport’s Cut Rate grocery, an early supermarket located at 440 East Sullivan (not far from Five Points).

A 25-pound bag of White Rose flour was $1.69. You could buy two of those – that’s a lot of flour – and have enough left over for a 16-oz T-bone steak.

Or you could buy 8 pounds of 80 percent lean hamburger.

Head over to produce. You could load up for $4: 3 pounds of bananas cost 29 cents. 3 pounds of green beans came in at 25 cents. A 5-lb. bag of yellow onions was 39 cents. We’re not even to a dollar and we have bananas, green beans and onions.

A jumbo honey dew melon was 49 cents. A No. 2 tin of cherries – enough for a cherry pie – was 19 cents. Add a 46-oz. tin of grapefruit juice for 19 cents and we still aren’t up to $2.

Catsup was 18 cents, margarine was 35 cents and a box of vanilla wafers was 29 cents. We are still under $3.

Finish up with an 8-pound pail of lard – every cook’s friend in ’52 – and we have $4 worth of groceries.

Of course today you could get all that and a lot more for the $124 current dollar value of an Alabama ticket.

So maybe those ’52 tickets weren’t so cheap after all.

 

Bonus post

Ancestry.com gave me a free week of access to its yearbook collection. So of course I used the time to look up old (girl)friends.

And also Cybill Shepherd.

She was never a girlfriend but she went to Memphis East with a college friend of mine.

So here’s a bonus post of Cybill, future star of “The Last Picture Show” and many other films.

Please note Cybill won first place in the Memphis East Science Fair but didn’t win first in the Homecoming Queen contest.