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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