 |
| Our beloved Morris Area High, MACA sports hub (B.W. photo) |
Best source for news imaginable: "Overheard someone in Willie's."
I remember back when I'd scramble to get photo caption info for Morris paper - name of someone that was not practical to acquire at the time of the picture-taking - a good strategy was to just go to Willie's. Look for someone with a promising connection.
Another resource might have been the restaurant where Riverwood is today. The restaurant had the Kelly's name for a long time, then became Ardelle's. It was the type of main street gathering place that I think this town misses now. There was a community meeting room with a piano. The place had fine food for middle class prices. A fine salad bar. Will we ever see salad bars or buffets again, in the wake of the health scare/turbulence? Will restaurants even survive? Will the higher prices finally discourage a substantial number of customers?
Seems unthinkable that restaurants as an institution could vanish. But many surprising trends come along, right? Things we could not have easily envisioned. I began full-time at the Morris paper when the Jimmy Carter era "malaise" situation existed. It wasn't something that he necessarily imposed on us, even though his story about the swimming rabbit in the swamp caused head-scratching. "Malaise" denotes a period when doubt reigned about a whole lot of things. Cynicism.
We were still in a post-Vietnam war funk. Don't underestimate that element. I made rounds for the Morris paper and heard talk about how the small schools near Morris surely were headed for demise. "Oh my, they won't be going on much longer": a typical remark. You might say it was a glass-half-empty attitude. People got bored easily.
So I could not have envisioned at all, our current times where the Hancock school literally has to turn students away! And, where money is being plowed into facilities there including sports facilities, e.g. a softball field where I've read that fans can sit on top of the dugouts. Boy, that's enterprising. Looks like the people in Owl country are more trailblazing than in Morris. We have a vaunted new softball complex that could use an innovation or two, or five or seven, for serving fans better.
Chokio still offers a grades K-12 education. No more Chokio-Alberta sports - a sob uttered here - but certainly these little schools didn't just up and die. Well, Cyrus did. Cyrus had a varsity basketball program which as late as the '80s could compete with Morris. I know that seems like "news of the weird." Does to me, anyway.
But my mind was on a quite different wavelength from many Morris community leaders and pacesetters. I assessed things for how they appeared really to be, not based on whether I'd find agreement within a certain social clique. I deserve no medals for that, except maybe one for stupidity. Remember the slogan for Goldwater? "In your heart, you know he is right." And Goldwater got clobbered, eviscerated in the election.
I think back to when our beloved boys basketball coach, "Torgy," got the head basketball job. Seemed as plain as the nose on one's face, that he and friends acted as if he was simply entitled to it, like the job could not realistically be considered "open." I most certainly thought it was open. And while the late Dennis Rettke confided in me that he actually preferred someone else - this was after the fact - who knows in these matters who is really telling the truth?
My supervisor when I began at the Sun Tribune advised early-on: "Brian, people will lie to you." He looked me right in the eye. Maybe Mr. Rettke knew my biases and was simply catering to me. Biases? When it comes to the "toy department" of sports, doesn't everyone have biases? Isn't that baked into the cake? It's merely entertainment. It's fun, Kemosabe. But in Morris in the 1980s, it was a gravely serious matter where you could court personal or professional hardship if you expressed views not in line with certain other people.
So yours truly grated on certain people. When all that reached a head, I remember the very wise Mick Rose stopping in one day. I had such a convenient office for people stopping by, chatting. Nothing like the Pacific Avenue location of the newspaper now - "the boonies," to use Jason Kirwin's term. And Mr. Rose - how we bemoan his health issues of today - gave insights into how yours truly was perceived. He summed up my problems thusly: there was a "professional class" in Morris - doctors, lawyers etc. - that had come to resent me, had me in their crosshairs.
It takes all kinds
No wonder it was a dentist, my own personal dentist in fact, who dropped off a letter to the editor that the professional class probably felt would spell my doom. But people read it and figured it was just a typical obsessed sports parent. A tantrum. (He wasn't my family's dentist any more.)
Mick Rose said that when you're a sports parent, your oldest kid to go through the system gets you all excited, out of proportion. And then when the younger ones come along, you calm down. The dentist didn't just have things out of proportion, he seemed rather out of orbit. I could be less charitable in words chosen.
So, according to Rose, the doctors and lawyers of the world and other such brethren had it in for me. Why? Well, they had reached consensus opinion on certain things that were contrary to moi in some cases. They resented like hell that I had the influential position of newspaper writer. Those were days when newspaper writers felt their oats because of Watergate, along with the role they/we played in getting U.S. servicemen home from Vietnam. So we thumped our chest a bit.
Why did this bother the stuffed shirts of the legal/medical world? Well. . . Maybe it's because someone like me could come to occupy my position without any special degrees/"stud papers." So, I wouldn't be in hock forever because of college loans to get through all those rarefied post-high school studies. And yet I could put myself forward as an erudite person, fully capable of expressing myself as well as any lawyer! (I can hear the teeth gnashing.)
And if I really was stupid as alleged by some, why did such a broad swath of the community come to act like they feared me? I mean, just because I considered the boys basketball position to be "open" after Bob Mulder's exit? It was an ignoble exit but let's not get into that.
Sources told me that "Torgy" was never a slam-dunk for the spot even though a certain clique tried blessing it as such. They all had the right to lobby as they chose, naturally, and also to lobby hard for a certain girls basketball coach in the late '80s who very sadly wasn't cutting it. That individual had been a UMM superstar. I'm sure Fred Switzer thought he looked real good for guiding this person onto our coaching staff. What could look better? New London-Spicer meanwhile got Mike Dreier established. I would say the latter appointment was at least 100 percent better than what we did.
Our community of Morris seems to fumble at so many things. Why? And why do we just seem to accept it? Maybe because most of our community leaders, including the doctor/lawyer types, live for going to their "lake place" in the warm weather months. I think the Beatles had a song with the line "life goes on." And so life goes on in our Motown.
I'm writing this post on "Black Friday." Sounds like a commemoration of an awful massacre somewhere.
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com
No comments:
Post a Comment