Cherry Blossom Champs

Tommy Huffhines provided this item:

In the Texas Catholic newspaper dated February 15th 2013 on page 5
Diocesan Time Capsule
50 years ago
Jesuit High School debaters became national champions when they won first place in the National Cheery Blossom Tournament at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. the weekend of February 21. The Ranger debate team beat out Holy Family of Belmont, MA to cop the top award among 120 high schools from throughout the nation .

Jesuit Pioneer

From today’s Dallas Morning News:

Arthur Allen, one of the first black students to integrate a Dallas school, overcame discrimination to earn an education that would shape his life.

Allen, 72, died last week after a long illness. A memorial service will be at 3 p.m. Monday at the Aria Memorial Chapel on Preston Road in Dallas.

Allen was one of two black students who enrolled in 1955 at Jesuit High School, which is now Jesuit College Preparatory School. They were the first black students to

attend a white school in Dallas, said Kevin Mullan, director of alumni relations for Jesuit.

Allen endured racism during his years at Jesuit, but over time, he grew to love his high school, where he was later honored as a distinguished alumnus and top

athlete.

"As he grew older and things kind of came into perspective … he realized that it was a good experience for him," said his wife of 47 years, Dee Allen of Carrollton. "It

sort of shaped who he was as a person."

At first, Allen didn’t want to attend the all-white boys school, which was far from his South Dallas neighborhood. But he enrolled as a freshman at the insistence of his

father, George Allen Sr., who became the city’s first black City Council member.

For the entire obituary see  http://www.dallasnews.com/obituary-headlines/20130210-arthur-allen-one-of-first-black-students-to-integrate-dallas-schools-dies-at-72.ece  (might need a subscription, but it’s in the print edition, also).

All of the  class of 1963 who grew up here remember the "white" and "colored" signs, that the back of the bus was for "colored" only, as were public rest rooms and even drinking fountains. Jesuit was one of the first schools in Dallas to admit black students. We called black people "Negroes" in those days, a name not favored today but not a slur, after all it means "black" in Spanish. The Dallas public schools were not fully desegregated until the late ‘60s Some private schools remained so even later.

We had a few black kids in our class. Don’t remember thinking too much of it, at least most of the time. I do remember a city bus driver on the Oak Lawn/Ervay route expressing incredulity than we went to school with "niggers" – a word we were not allowed to use at home, even then. I considered the source, and resented that a bus driver had the temerity to question who could attend my school. ("Temerity" was probably not in my vocabulary then, but the thought was.) Didn’t do more than resent it, maybe I should have. I suppose that one reason Jesuit didn’t have more black students was that here in Texas few were Catholics. I suppose a number of Jesuit students weren’t either.

To its everlasting credit, the Catholic Church was in the forefront of the civil rights and one of thee earliest institutions to desegregate. Around our time in school, the New Orleans archbishop even went so far as to excommunicate the more virulent protestors against desegregation there. John Steinbeck related some of that in his Travels with Charley. Seems like Dallas escaped much of the unpleasantness back then, after all racial segregation was bad for business, and many of our leaders recognized it as such. (I do NOT mean that pejoratively – good merchants and industrialists care about what one can do, not who they are or the shade of their complexion.)

Arthur’s dad, George Sr., as the obit states, was a Dallas City Council member in the late ‘60s and ‘70s. He was appointed to be a Justice of the Peace @ 1977. My one contact with Judge Allen was requesting a search warrant when I was DPD detective. The County Civil Courts building is named after him.

Rest in Peace, Arthur.

In Memoriam

 

Tom Land provided this list of decease alumni for the Class of 1963

 

 

Bradley Billings

Stephen Calabria

Stephen Chunn

Daniel Dennehy

Michael Gell

Scott Klein

Tim Marron

Robert Mason

Don McCaffery

Ismael Morales

Phillip Sampeck

Leo Schindler

Dennis Sliter

John Vincent

Robert Wagner

David Calabria-1964 ( Oak Cliff rat)

Edward Krebbs- 1964 ( Oak Cliff rat )

 

Chris Bird also reminded us that Mike Vance also passed in 2011.

 

 

Take a Hike

There was an item in today’s Dallas Morning News that around this time in 1963 President Kennedy recommended the 50-mile hike as a path to fitness. I recall some of us Jesuit boys (I was not among them) took up the challenge. Seems there was a photo or two in the Roundup of intrepid hikers. Anyone recall that? Did any reader of this blog actually take such a hike?

Super Sunday, and some history

Ah! Super Bowl weekend. Of superlatives it has plenty. These include record numbers of chicken wings, chips and dip, and cases of beer consumed on one day. Even those who are not football fans tend to watch, ostensibly to see the commercials, expensively designed to reach the widest television audience of the year. Advertisers vie for 30 second spots at millions of dollars per. I could go on.

Here in Dallas, though we hosted a Super Bowl locally in 2011, our team hasn't participated in one for the past 17 years.  Our first of eight appearances (5 wins) was in 1971; the last was 1996. The Cowboys came close to appearing in the first two. But really, Dallas came close to being in the first Super Bowl in another sense.

In 1963, the Super Bowl didn’t exist. There was a National Football League, whose teams were mostly in the northeast, with a couple on the West Coast, and a three year old American Football League. The AFL was then regarded as second rate by the NFL and most of its teams’ owners.

As it turned out, the AFL was to become respectable and the leagues agreed to merge in 1966, that merger to be completed with the 1970 season. The first AFL-NFL Championship Game – the first Super Bowl, though it wasn’t called that yet – was played in January 1967. The Green Bay Packers, NFL champions after defeating the strong contender Cowboys for the NFL championship, that year defeated the Kansas City Chiefs for the "World" Championship. The Packers again defeated the Cowboys in the infamous "Ice Bowl" and went on to beat the Oakland Raiders in the second Super Bowl. In 1969, the AFL New York Jets led by quarterback Joe Namath, decisively defeated the Baltimore Colts in the first officially titled Super Bowl III.

Dallas had two pro football teams from 1960 through the end of the 1962 season: the Dallas Cowboys of the NFL and the Dallas Texans of the AFL.  But on February 9, 1963, Texans owner Lamar Hunt announced that his AFL champion team would move to Kansas City to become the Chiefs for the next season, leaving the Cowboys as the only pro-football team in Dallas. (Of course the "Dallas" Cowboys haven’t actually played home games in the city for 41 years, and their offices and practice facilities have been in the suburbs for over 30.)

Despite the league championship, the Texans had been financially disappointing to Hunt. The AFL League was then an upstart to the established NFL, the Cowboys league. The NFL was the real deal as far as pro football went in those days. Still the Texans had a loyal core of supporters, and the AFL championship was, still, a championship. Having two pro teams gave Dallas a certain status up there with New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, other two-team towns. Nevertheless, as it turned out, if we had to lose one team, keeping the Cowboys was the best. While the Chiefs, nee Texans, went on to win Super Bowl IV in January 1970. That was it. The Cowboys, on the other hand were dominant during the 1970s into the early 1980s, and again in the mid-1990s.

Note: The Texans name lives on in the Houston NFL franchise, founded in 2002. The Dallas Texans who became the Kansas City Chiefs, however, were not the first team to bear that name. Dallasite Giles Miller in 1952 acquired a franchise for a new team and the roster of the defunct New York Yanks. The new Dallas Texans played their first game in the Cotton Bowl on a 105 degree day in September of that year. They lost, as they were to for every game except one, including their final one in Dallas on November 9, 1952. With attendance pathetic – only 17,500 fans showed up for the first game and less than 10,000 for the last – Miller ran out of money and returned the team to the NFL. The still named Texans moved their offices to Hershey, Pennsylvania and played their last "home" game in Akron, Ohio where they actually defeated the Chicago Bears 27-23. The remains of the Texans operation were purchased by one Carroll Rosenbloom who had obtained a franchise for his new Baltimore Colts. In 1983, the team moved team moved to become today’s Indianapolis Colts.