My activities at Waukegan Township High centered on sports – football in the fall and track in the spring.  I only weighed 85 pounds my freshman year.  So I had to rely on the reckless style that would get me into so much trouble later on.  Partly because my Uncle Steve was one of the varsity coaches and partly because of my intensity, I won a starting position at linebacker that first year.  I was knocked so silly one Saturday at Highland Park, that I had to ask our star defensive back, Johnny Sacramento, “Where are we?”

Later in the season, I broke my collar bone when I was tackling a 200 pound Jim Pilon in practice.  Football was the only sport that really counted for my dad and uncles.  I just couldn’t succeed; I almost quit.  In my senior year, the coach finally put me in with one second left on the clock.  When I saw ex-teammates at reunions in later years, they would introduce me as the “Rudy” of the Waukegan Bulldogs.

At my 40^th reunion, I ran into a guy I had sat on the bench with for all four years.  He was a great big African American guy.  Everybody liked him for his gentle and clownish behavior.  His nickname was “Tweetie”.  So I said to him, “Tweetie, why was everybody saying that you were killed in Vietnam?”  He replied, “Oh you heard that too?”  He explained that he had been MIA for a mobilization because he was staying over with a “girlfriend”.  That day his entire company was wiped out by the North Vietnamese.  Tweetie was court marshaled but they could not convict.  All of the witnesses were dead.

He later told me that he had been recruited by the Black Panthers when he was doing 2 to 5 at Pontiac in the 70s.  We speculated that maybe we had played football against Fred Hampton.  Fred had been on the squad at Proviso, which was one of our Suburban League rivals.

There weren’t any African Americans at Immaculate Conception grade school.   And being in the pre-professional track, I barely had any of them in my high school classes.  We were all surfers.  The kids in the other tracks were minorities or greasers.  But my interaction in sports made me start to realize huge cultural differences.  I enjoyed listening to African kids in gym class play the dozens.  The rejoinder that shocked in my young mind was this: “Well, your momma played first base for the husky whores”.  I remember a locker room incident when some white guys were pestering a Black athlete with the question, “What nationality are you?”  The poor guy really didn’t how to answer.  He responded, “I’d rather not say”.

All this time the sounds of soul music were so captivating to us.  Smokey with “Tracks of my Tears” was a favorite of mine.  In 1959 Ray Charles came out with the sexy stride anthem, “What I’d Say”.  One day I found a note that one African American girl had written to another about sex with her boyfriend.  It was a vivid description.  She wrote “It was like a hot knife in warm butter”.  When our basketball team beat George Wilson and the Marshall Commandos for a sweet sixteen berth in 1959, I was mesmerized by the sexy, energetic routines of the Marshall cheerleaders.  It gave me a glimmer of what we later called Black Pride.

 

I applied myself diligently in academics.  I tried to do as well as my big sister, Jane.  That was not possible.  She was at the top of her class, diligent and smart.   I managed to come in 14^th in my class ranking.  I can remember one solitary philosophical musing.  I concluded that the effort of humans at work was the source of value and life.   I had good enough scores to get accepted to the Honors Program at Marquette, my father’s alma mater.

Saying goodbye to the classmates was like the movie, “American Graffiti “.  We had a huge party on my parents’ front lawn with garage band music, cars, pretty girls and handsome boys.  Three of our classmates would not be there.  Emil Dokmanus had been killed drag racing.  Michael Bukantis and Jimmy Adams drowned trying to save each other in a sand quarry pool.  There may have been a few African American athletes who felt comfortable with this crowd, but I can’t remember if any showed up.   There probably was a party on the south side that looked like the movie, “Cooley High”. Several of the guys from our graduating class would be killed in Vietnam.  That was not something that any of us imagined.  Dozens of others would be protesting the Kent State killings by 1970.