Wins and Losses

The Dallas Morning News, Saturday, September 29, 1962: Jesuit wins 13 - 0 over the Seagoville Dragons for the Rangers’ third straight shutout victory for the 1962 season. The Dragons held the Rangers scoreless for almost first three quarters before Don Erler scored on a 37 yard pass and run play and then Richard Jackson ran a touchdown from the one yard line, both later in the third quarter. In the fourth quarter, Seagoville made six of their nine first downs, but the Rangers held the line and the Dragons scoreless.

Fast forward 50 years, the Rangers did not do so well last night, losing to Skyline 56 -24.

Back to 1962, the lead national story was the desegregation crisis at the University of Mississippi where the governor tried to block the admission of James Meredith in the face of a court order that Meredith be allowed to register. Ultimately, the force of several hundred U.S. marshals backed by National Guard and regular army troops forced the governor to back down. A Dallas connection was that our own Edwin Walker, a U.S. Army general who retired after being relieved of command in Europe for political indoctrination of soldiers under his command, showed up in support of the segregationists. He was arrested for disorderly conduct and ordered to undergo psychiatric examination. Looking backward, there were quite a few who could have benefited from psychiatric treatment in that regard.

Weather was much as it is today. Highs in the upper 80s; lows in the upper 60s. Mostly fair.

Playing at the Delman theater was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance with John Wayne, James Stewart, and Lee Marvin. Favorite quote from that flick: "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." For more movies from that year, click here.  

Note:  As I stated in the first post on this blog, I welcome contributions and comments.  Many will think that my editorial choices of stories from the past need expansion, or otherwise editing.  I notice from the number of hits that the posts are being passed on to other classmates. To my readers, please keep it up.  I e-mail notice of posts to about 10, which is all I have right now. Thanks.



The Class of 1963: Legendary, indeed.

Dream On

The lead story in the September 22, 1962 Dallas Morning News: "Trinity River Navigation Receives Tremendous Boost" The U. S. Army Corps of Engineers report favors the development of a navigation channel from Galveston to Fort Worth to serve the "largest population in the world without access to navigation." "The idea of a navigable river tying the area into the vast network of waterways along the Gulf Coast and inland United States has been a North Texas dream for years."

Dream on, I suppose. More to the point, the economics apparently have not been there.

Air navigation was to be the future, but Love Field would be our main airport for another 12 years. Inter-city passenger trains still arrived and departed from Union Station daily. Interstate 35 was recently completed from downtown to Northwest Highway.

Friday evening, Jesuit scored its third straight shut-out win 26-0 over Fort Worth’s Our Lady of Victory. Don Erler and Sherman LaBarba were standouts. Sherman intercepted two OLV passes.

The game was played at the old Highlander Stadium, Jesuit’s home venue until? Does anyone recall?

The Cowboys and the Texans played home games in the Cotton Bowl this season.  The next year, the Texans would move to another city and change their name. 

More in the News: Weather was fair and warm. Upper 60s to upper 80s.

There were 12 pages of classified ads in that edition. Today there are two. The Internet was not even science fiction.

Two Shutouts - Fifty Years Apart

Last night in Houston, the Rangers skunked Strake Jesuit 57 - 0!!! Not a typo. Hope this means that our guys are incredibly good and not that Strake is appallingly bad.

Fifty years ago, Dallas Jesuit shut out Mineral Wells 13 - 0 there. It was the second time in the season at an opposing team failed to score against the Rangers.

The half-century ago team’s senior halfback Don Erler scored the second TD.

Back in Dallas, on that long ago weekend, the weather was forecast to be fair and warm with temperatures ranging from low of upper 70s to high around 90.

Movies playing the weekend included Phantom of the Opera at the Majestic, and The Interns with Cliff Robertson and Buddy Ebsen at the Palace on Elm Street downtown. The Majestic is still there as a live performance venue; the Palace lasted another decade or so before it was torn down to build Thanksgiving Tower. Remember the organ that rose from the floor for an intermission serenade?

In "suburban" theaters, Richard Beymer starred in Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man at

at the Lakewood, and James Mason and Sue Lyon were in Lolita at the Inwood. What ever happened to Beymer and Lyon after these two movies? Playing at the Circle, where I was employed part time, was Cimarron with Glenn Ford and Maria Schell.

On Friday, The Dow-Jones Industrial Average closed at 605.84. The four most active stocks were Chrysler, Polaroid, Lockheed, and U.S. Steel.

SMU President Willis Tate announced that Paul Elaine Jones enrolled as a full time undergraduate there. She was the first Negro (as black people were termed then) to do so. Hardly anyone noticed. That would not to be the case elsewhere. Jesuit, of course, had admitted blacks with little fanfare at least since our freshman year.

In somewhat grimmer news, on Friday, 9/14/1962, two jet fighters, a National Guard F86 and Navy F8 collided at the Dallas Naval Air Station in Grand Prairie killing two pilots. Two brothers were indicted for pilfering oil from adjoining leases in East Texas using slant well drilling.

9/11/1962 - 9/11/2012

1962 was the year Ray Stevens' novelty song "Ahab the Arab" was a top forty hit. As the song indicated, we didn't take the Middle East all that seriously then. That would change in a decade or so, with the first Arab oil embargo.  The worst took a while longer, but it finally came with a vengeance.

 

Eleven years ago, on the same day of the week, our country suffered the first attack on our soil by a foreign enemy since Pearl Harbor.  It was also the first enemy incursion on the U.S. mainland the raid on Columbus, New Mexico by Pancho Villa in 1916.  Before that one has to go back to 1814.

Fifty years ago on this morning, the Jesuit seniors were settling in their classes.  Like this present week, there was a respite from the summer heat, welcome in our un-airconditoned classrooms.  Most of us were oblivious to a threat from a different enemy.  Some were paying attention..

 

Dallas Morning News 9/11/1962, page 1

 

Communist Cuba is still with us, though it has mostly been merely a nuisance for most of the intervening years.  It turned out to be more than that for several days a month later.

 

 

Jesuit Wins its Opener

Friday evening, September 7, the Jesuit Rangers shut out the St. Mark’s Lions 13 – 0 in their season opener. The field was slippery for the whole game due to misting rain. That, and a tenacious Ranger defense deprived the Lions of the ability to make a single point.

"Jesuit faces a rebuilding job this year," opined a sportswriter in Friday’s newspaper. Their coach noted that only two starters returned from last year’s impressive 8 – 3 team, which gave the city’s champion Woodrow Wilson a scare before losing by one point.

So reported the Dallas Times-Herald. The Times-Herald? Well, it was 1962, after all. By quirk in the calendar, it happens that in that year, the days of the week are the same days of the month (March 1 and after, that is) are in 2012, a half-century later.

The 1962-63 school term was our senior year. It was the last year that Jesuit held classes in the old building at Oak Lawn and Blackburn. New construction of what were to become high-rise apartment/condominiums was already taking place on what had been the lower practice field along Turtle Creek. This was perhaps a harbinger of the new age to come, after all, we were in the latter part of President Kennedy’s second year in office, and we had been promised a New Frontier. As it happened, we could not imagined what it brought.

There was some inkling. In July 1962, the first Telstar communications satellite was put into orbit, the start of a communications technology revolution that made possible our present global, high quality telephone and television transmissions. Computers were around, but only in mainframe form that required large, environmentally controlled facilities. Calculations in physics class were to be made with slide rules.

Back to the present a week ago, Jesuit play a football game against Chicago’s Loyola High in Dublin, Ireland. The Rangers won!   One or more of our grandchildren (and even - shudder - even great-grandchildren) could be on that team.

Playing a game in that venue would have been possible in 1962, but expensive, and so inconvenient as to be practically unthinkable. There would not be a DFW Airport for another 12 years. The Boeing 707s and DC-10s didn’t have the range if there were. In the early '60s, travel to Europe meant leaving from a northeast coast airport, such as New York’s Idlewild, as it was then known.

The differences between then and now are astounding. I intend to mention them from time to time on  this blog (blog? who would have thought?).

Oh, by the way. The two returning starters for the 1962 Rangers were Caesar Ricci and Steve Seward. The quoted coach was Milt Gaudet. A junior quarterback made the first TD, and Bob Neuhoff kicked the extra point. Caesar recovered a slippery fumble to set up the second touchdown, but the PAT failed. Who remembers who made the TDs?

All members of the Class of 1963 are invited to comment and post on this blog. Nearly anything, remembrances, recollections of what was happening during our school years, subsequent biographical info, including accomplishments and family are welcome. 

To comment, just register.  If you wish to post, send me your information, including present address, e-mail, telephone, and I will set up permissions for you.  Keep it clean and respectful. All post and comments will be subject to review and, perhaps, deletion.  I do not expect any problems in that regard, but impostors and other malefactors are rampant in the blogosphere and elsewhere on the Internet.
 
Cheers!

Bob Reagan, J '63
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