Thanks for These Memories...
- The way your sneakers or cletes would get damp from the early morning dew.
- The youngest peewee teams represented local elementary schools. Unis (to use Bidwillian terms) were not "busy" - simply red & white, blue & gold, green & white etc. My team's unis were black & white with gold helmets. From the eye-level view of an hero-worshipping 5 or 6-year old, they were the coolest looking things I had ever seen. I think our coaches wanted to emulate the championship war-time (Blanchard & Davis) Army teams - aka "the Black Knights of the Hudson."
- Helmet Painting (it was fairly easy to spray-paint leather helmets, but the paint just beaded off the new-fangled plastic helmet my folks bought for me).
- Drawing up exotic plays in study hall.
- Riding our bikes from home to the playing field with helmet and shoulder pads on the handle bars.
- Chafed thighs from having to wear a cup.
- How much harder it was to hang onto a forward pass when you wore shoulder pads than when you were running around in shorts playing touch football.
- A handful of legendary ballcarriers with (at least from the viewpoint of a tiny 10-11 -year old) exotic names - Speedy Glass, Lex Smith, Ricky Benfield, the McEldowny Brothers, Pete Schulte, Kevin Reynolds
- Pete Kernan, a mauler who was too big for eligbility as a ballcarrier so they made him the deep guy on kickoffs (where anyone can touch the ball). Kernan's other claim to fame was when he ran onto the high school field the first time as Water Boy only to trip (he went one way, the water pail & water went the other) to the delight of the crowd.
- Playing against a team coached by my girlfriend's father.
Good times (the best!). Fortunately, no one ever got seriously hurt. (I think my worst injury was a bruised tailbone which took a week to heal. 60-years later, I'm still looking for the dude who clipped me).
I'm guessing most of us have similar memories.