Well, this weekend wasn’t good for the Jesuit Rangers, now or 50 years ago. Friday, Lake Highlands won 20 - 17 with a record breaking 42 yard field goal with four (4) seconds left in the game. The winning kick came after Jesuit missed a 51 yard FG with 17 seconds on the clock, and Lake Highlands set up the game winner with a 40 yard pass. All in all, it seems to have been a thrilling game.
No so a half-century ago when the Rangers had their derrieres kicked and their collective head handed to them by Corpus Christi Miller: 47 - 0. I recall one of our players then remarking that there is a different brand of football played in Corpus. ‘Nuff said about that.
Today, like the same day was in 1962, is the last day of the State Fair. Big Tex was 10, back then. He made it to 60, and then burnt up, with 2 days to go. Not to worry; he’ll be back – just as big. (Those interested might see the story on my other blog www.bobreagan13.com).
Beneath the surface, the news reported a great deal of activity in Washington was taking place under tight security. "Lights Burn Late in Capital Offices" was the lead headline. The next day, of course, was President Kennedy’s announcement of a naval quarantine of Cuba, citing the presence of Soviet offensive missiles on the island. The Cuban Missile Crisis was under way. Many of the cognoscenti have claimed this was the closest we came to nuclear way with the USSR. I reserve judgment on that, but Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s statement that we were "eyeball to eyeball and the other guy blinked" certain gave a popularity boost to JFK when it was all over.
An interesting recent revelation: It seems like former President Eisenhower told Kennedy that Ike didn’t believe the Soviets would start a nuclear war over a U. S. Invasion of Cuba. That conversation is in a recently released recording of a telephone conversation between the two Presidents. For those interested it is in Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy published 9/25/2012 and includes two audio discs. Ike and JFK’s transcript is on p. 158.
There are some op-ed pieces in today’s (Sunday) Dallas Morning News rehashing theories about what the facts and the spin were regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis from a half-century perspective.
Most of us, me included, were uninterested in politics and foreign affairs at the time. Getting through our senior year, football, and girls, not necessarily in that order, were our concerns. We let leaders in far off capitals ensure we had a senior year to get through.
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