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Times of Our Lives - A Commentary

By Tom Dodge, KERA 90.1 commentator

Dallas, TX – For combat veterans, the war is the defining experience of their lives. World War II, Korea, Vietnam - these experiences grow even more intense as they age and become hallowed in their memories. They are who they are because of the war. Is there such an experience for the rest of us?

When members of the 1956 Cleburne Yellow Jacket Football team gathered last month in Cleburne, I was invited - I suppose because I was the sportswriter who lionized them every week in the Cleburne Yellow Jacket Yapper. We were infants in World War II, too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam. So we have no War Experience.

But they are bonded together by this championship season. Was this their life-defining experience? The occasion was the naming of the town's football field for their coach, Brooks Conover, the man who made them heroes every Friday night. He was a hard man, rough and so crusty he scared some townspeople who wanted to prettify his language. But when he brought Cleburne its first district title since the 1920s, his critics decided that words really never hurt anybody. He is in the Texas Coaches High School Hall of Fame and next to God in Cleburne, at least to these team members.

As they chatted about him and their near-perfect record that year, the decades seemed to fall away like slipped tackles; their white hair darkened; Dockers and Nikes became rolled-up Levis and penny-loafers. Dale McElroy, retired teacher, Charles Brown, West Point man, and David Guinn, Baylor law professor, listened intently to Perry Don Wright's analysis of one of their games. Perry Don's magical hands still flickered like birds as he talked and suddenly I see him in the end zone at Garland with Billy Shehorn's
game-winning pass clutched to his heart. While I am visualizing, Charles Jowell should still be taking out opposing linemen rather than putting in real estate tracts and suburban infrastructure.

Gary Whites is in his third decade as a coach at Burleson. He was the team's best runner and leading scorer, but leading now in heart attacks. Gary Shaw is an architect but no plan he ever had was sweeter than the one he used in the Brownwood game to return the opening kickoff of the second half eighty-five yards for a touchdown. Ben Hill Jones and Jimmy Hargrave are dentists but no tooth they ever pulled could be as memorable as the upset they helped pull at Kilgore, beating that powerhouse team twenty to nothing in bi-district.

We are in the semi-finals of our lives now and too many fumbles have dimmed the sheen on our fresh-faced idealism. No one talked of this kind of lost yardage, of such setbacks and incompletions. We have all had them but we're still here, most of us. And, in some mystical ways, nothing has changed.

So, why even try to reconcile the years that have sailed past since our lives arced so early like one of Billy Shehorn's clothesline touchdown passes? Despite our heart attacks and arthritis and colonitis and diabetes and cirrhosis, for this brief moment on an August afternoon, cheering thundered in our ears and our youth lit up in us like a scoreboard.

Tom Dodge is a writer from Midlothian.