Okay, so now I am feeling slightly old. The Abilene Reporter-News yesterday took great pains to report that Friday night's Abilene High-Cooper High football game marked the 50th anniversary of the first game played at Shotwell Stadium in Abilene, on Sept. 11, 1959.
I played in that game. I was a junior fullback for Abilene High, and we beat San Antonio Thomas Jefferson that night, 14-12. Fifty years! And I was already 16 years old! I had to check the score in my yearbook; I remembered it as 26-12, so you see how reliable memory is. I do remember the best player on the Jefferson team: Tommy Nobis, who starred at Texas and then Atlanta in the NFL. The best player on our team was David Parks, who was an All-American at Texas Tech and All-Pro with the 49ers.
In the yearbook, 1959 looks modern. Not personally. The way kids dressed at AHS in 1959, you could mistake it for a Catholic school. For boys, the uniform was Levis, a shirt, black penny loafers, and white socks. For girls, the uniform was a dress, black suede penny loafers, and white socks. But there are color photographs, and the school, which opened in 1955, looked modern. The cars had transitioned from the black humpmobiles of the 1940s to cars with long lines and wrap-around windshields.
It's the black humpmobiles that are in my mind today. If I played in the first game at the new Shotwell Stadium, it means I also played in the last game, in December of 1958, at the old Fair Park Stadium, where Eagle teams had played since the 1920s. I find my links to the first half of the 20th century are becoming increasingly awesome. I remember thinking what a strange life it must have been for my grandmother, who rode in wagons before cars appeared. My own life assumes the same strangeness, as I check in at Facebook, remembering a day when I lived in a house with a telephone that was on a party line. A "party line," kids, meant that your phone, and others in several other homes, shared the same line. I picked up the phone many times and heard other people talking. It WAS, I guess, sort of like Facebook. I remember what a big deal it was when we got a private number. It was 7973. Later it became 4-7973. After that, we heard that phone exchanges were coming. I was excited. I had been in big cities with phone exchanges like RIverside, KLondike, FEderal, and SEquoia. I was disappointed when the phone company said our choices would be ORchard and OWen. Ick. At least we got ORchard.
Then, in the same online edition with the Abilene-Cooper story (Abilene won, 49-37), was a story about the Abilene Candy Company burning down. When I was but a boy, in those days in the first half of the 20th century, the Abilene Candy Company made the Jo-Boy candy bar, which was like a Baby Ruth but with a pink center. I loved Jo-Boys and was so impressed that they were made in my home town. The company was still in business, making candy suckers for worldwide distribution. The photos with the story showed it totally engulfed. The building was on North 3rd St., in an industrial area east of downtown.
Downtown was still downtown then. Two hotels, the Windsor and Wooten. Three movie theaters, the Paramount, Majestic and Queen. Two high-tone department stores, Minter's and Grissom's. A drugstore with a soda fountain. Head-in parking, for the black humpmobiles. Texas and Pacific steam engines huffing through the middle of town. A Christmas Parade down Pine Street. No television. No air conditioning. Bottles of milk on the front porch. No traffic roar. So quiet a place, it seems, it was.
Then came the '50s, and modernization. A shopping center. A new stadium, that I played in, and they are still playing in today. That doesn't seem so long ago. But 1949 sure does.
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