Clifton High School - Rotunda Yearbook (Clifton, NJ)

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Buck, you see, had been brought up on a farm and was six feet two and as wide as he was long. He hadn't been actually sure what the students thought until that time he left his coat in the gym locker room and had gone back for it only tlq fglpd that someone had put a wide stripe down the back of it with yellow c a . That season he had gone out for football and made the second team. This was his last year, and he had made first string tackle, but, although it took two good men to move him and he opened ponderous holes in the line, there was something missing. That all important thing-fight! II. In the growing dusk they trotted off the field, sweating from their laps , those hated circuits of the field which inevitably come at the end of a hard workout when your muscles ache and your joints seem to creak. They dove into the steam-filled locker room. Forty wild animals pulled each other's jerseys off over shoulder-pads, linesman shoulder-pads raised high by secondary straps underneath and with air spaces between, backfield pads, flat and light. Heavy, cleated shoes were thrown crashing into steel lockers. Varsity men pulled off pants with elastic stripes on the legs. Substitutes pulled off much-patched and adhesive-taped pants. Student managers took great delight in ripping tape off weak ankles and wrists, for much hair came off too, and the accompanying howls were very gratifying. The inexperienced left their towels in their lockers and came back from the shower rooms dripping water and questionable language as they found that their towels had already been used by four or five other players who had forgotten theirs, and who also, to go by the evidence of the towel, had for- gotten to take off all the grime in the shower room. The general bedlam was augmented by a flury of towels being snapped at the players returning from their shower, much to the delight of the snappers and the discomfort of the snapped-at. Buck Serrini secretly loved all this tomfoolery but somehow he was not accepted by the rest of the squad. They sensed his dislike of the game as a whole and unconsciously resented it. He sat there on the bench before thc lockers in the midst of the fun and yet not part of it. He pulled on his socks slowl . Y Terry Ackerman always managed to be the last one out of the showers and this night was no exception. He was immediately descended upon by a howling Dervisher in the forrn of Bop Starrett. Now Bop was a lunging, line-plunging fullback, with arms about as beefy as Little johnny's legs, an asset which made him a foe to be respected, especially while snapping a wet towel. Terry dove for the first opening in sight, which happened to be the door leading to the lower hall. Immediately he realized his mistake, for the door was quickly slammed and locked behind him, leaving him in a rather drafty corridor in an extremely The REFLECTOR -2:-1' 16

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way through practices and scrimmages and a veritable army of recruits. He had made a place for himself on the third team two years in a row. One thing he didn't know, however, and that was that when the final out was made in his first season, the assistant coach had said to that Almighty Personage, Don Wilson, the Head Coach: What about that Johnson lad, Don? And Wilson had replied: I don't know about him. He's too light, but that kid's a fighter, gr football player if I've ever seen one! He nodded. We'll let him play. What johnny would have given to have heard that! Well, this was another year and his hopes were high. He might even play in the Woodclili game, but he didn't dare let himself hope for that. As he trotted out onto the field that day in a pair of borrowed football shoes and his trousers rolled almost to the knee, he found practice about to start. Coach Wilson was out already in spotless white ducks, which, although he always demonstrated his points, stayed miraculously clean. Another season was under way! And again johnny fought and struggled and worked mightily. Two weeks before the opening game he had made a place for himself-on the third team. Terry Ackerman, in his sophomore year, had been told by three doctors that he could never play football. His heart, they said, was weak, a condition which could only be remedied by rest. And so he rested. The next year the same doctors told him that for some inexplicable reason his heart was better and that he might even play football if he took it easy. He was remembering that season as he ran through signals in his posi- tion at left end on the first team. Even as they drove against a non-existant opposing team in a three play right, he shuddered at the thought of how he had played through that season happy in the thought that his heart was all right, and how in the Thanksgiving Day game with W'oodcliff he had caught a pass, run sixty yards for a touchdown, and then crumpled into a heap. A heart attack, the doctors had called it. And now after those endless days in bed he had once again been pronounced sound, but still, every time he pulled a long forward out of the blue, he thought of that horrible sinking sensation and that blackness, and an awful fear tugged at something down inside. People wondered why he some- times dropped passes or hesitated too long after he had them. But now it was the eve of the Woodcliff game and he had to forget, he HAD to forget-THAT GAME MUST BE WON. And yet Buck Serrini, the massive left tackle, who was running listlessly through the plays next to Terry, didn't care especially whether they won. or not. He didn't like this crazy game anyway. It was all nonsense to him. He certainly would not be playing except for the fact that deep down inside him he knew that during his first two years in high school his fellow students had jeered at him behind is back and thought him yellow becausehhe pre- ferred Algebra and Biology to football. It was all because of his size, for 'rhe REFLE-cToR 15

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unclothed condition. Well, it was only a question of time, now, philosophized Terry. They had to open the door sometime. As he had his choice between exercise and pneumonia, he began to trot up and down the hall with water dripping at every step and his bare feet making odd little slapping noises as he ran. All would have ended well had not the principal decided to go through that corridor at that particular time. At any rate, the principal gasped, and Terry gulped, and the situation was brought to a sudden denouement by someone's opening the locker room door. Terry didn't make any apologies but actually dove into the room. Someone was telling the well-known story about another humorous incident that had taken place the previous year, when someone had imitated an assistant coach's pep talk to Little johnny and then turned around to find the coach in question standing directly behind him. Coach Wilson came through the doorway quietly and stood silent, watching his boys . He was a coach such as you might find in any school in the country, hard as nails on the outside, but underneath a human being in the finest sense of the word. He was the sort of fellow who would batter to a pulp a man who tried to steal his watch, and when he found out that the fellow was half starved would pawn that same watch to buy him food. His eyes and his hair were gray. He loved this gang of his, these boys with men's bodies. Fine fellows everyone, these bronzed, homely gridders who had graduated from the dust and dead-grass smell of the sand-lot to the alcohol and wintergreen odor of the locker room. He tried to think of something to say to the squad. This was the last time they would be together before the Turkey Day game and he ought to say something to them. People were beginning to blame him because they hadn't won more games. He tried to think about tomorrow's contest, but always that other thought crept in like some insidious demon to torment him. It was money that was preying on his mind. He didn't need such an awful lot, either, a hundred would stem the tide. Yes, he had .rome money. Perhaps he could scrape together fifty or so, but that was not enough. It must be a hundred. There was his salary but he needed every cent of that. He had a family to support. He must think. He turned and left the hot, steam-filled room and went to his own quarters to light a cigarette. He was sitting there lost in a cloud of smoke and staring at the blank wall when jeff Miller stamped in, a little breathless from the exertion of climbing up the hill to the club house. He eased himself into a chair, but not until he had lit the ancient briar which he always followed around did he speak. Somethin' on your mind, 'seems if', he started. What's a matter, Don ? Nothing much, jeff, Don lied in a voice that was almost a shout, for jeff was almost as ancient as his pipe, and his hearing wasn't what it used to be in the old days . Why, Great Tophers, Don, y' ought to know I know you better'n The REFLECTOR - 17