Vanity of Duluoz: An Adventurous Education, 1935-46 Read online

  But as an example of where I learned football. Because I wanted to go to college and somehow I knew my father would never be able to afford the tuition, as it turned out to be true. I, of all things, wanted to end up on a campus somewhere smoking a pipe, with a buttondown sweater, like Bing Crosby serenading a coed in the moonlight down the old Ox Road as the strains of alma mater song come from the frat house. This was our dream, gleaned from going to the Rialto Theater and seeing movies. The further dream was to graduate from college and become a big insurance salesman wearing a gray felt hat getting off the train in Chicago with a briefcase and being embraced by a blond wife on the platform, in the smoke and soot of the bigcity hum and excitement. Can you picture what this would be like today? What with air pollution and all, and the ulcers of the executive, and the ads in Time Magazine, and our nowadays highways with cars zipping along by the millions in all directions in and around rotaries from one ulceration of the joy of the spirit to the other? And then I pictured myself, college grad, insurance success, growing old with my wife in a paneled house where hang my moose heads from successful Labradorian hunting expeditions and as I’m sipping bourbon from my liquor cabinet with white hair I bless my son to the next mess of sheer heart attack (as I see it now).

  As we binged and banged in dusty bloody fields, we didnt even dream we’d all end up in World War II, some of us killed, some of us wounded, the rest of us eviscerated of 1930’s innocent ambition.

  I wont go into my junior year in Lowell High School, it was the usual thing about the boy too young, or with not enough seniority, to get to play regularly, though because coach Tam Keating thought I was a sophomore because I was fifteen he didnt let me play but was ‘saving me up’ for junior and senior years. Also there was something fishy in the state of Merrimack because in practice scrimmage he ran me pretty hard and I made perfectly good hard gains and could have done the same in any official games, or there are politics involved, none of which my father countenanced as he was so honest that when a committee of men of Lowell came to him in about 1930 to ask him if he’d run for mayor he answered ‘Sure, I’ll run for mayor, but if I win I’ll have to throw every crook out of Lowell and there’ll be nobody left in town.’

  V

  All I know is how my senior year season went and judge for yourself, or if you dont understand, let a coach judge: I started the first game of the year only because Pie Menelakos had an injured ankle. Granted he was a nice tricky runner but he was so small that when somebody hit him he flew 10 feet. Granted again, he was slippery. But because, somehow, the coach figured he needed a blocker, a ‘fullback’ like Rick Pietryka, and that neat little passer Christy Kelakis, there was no room for me the runner, in the starting backfield. Yet as for being fullback I, in scrimmage, could put my head down and ball right through for 10 yards without even looking. As for being halfback, I could catch a badly thrown pass that was zipping behind me by simply pivoting, gathering it in, and whirling back to my run and go all the way. I admit I couldnt block like Bill Demmons the quarterback or pass like Kelakis. Somehow they had to have Pietryka and Menelakos in there and my father claimed somebody was being paid. ‘Typical of stinktown on the Merrimack,’ he said. Besides he wasnt very popular in Lowell because whenever somebody gave him some gaff he let em have it. He punched a wrestler in the mouth in the showers at Laurier Park after a wrestling match had been thrown, or fixed. He took a Greek patriarch by the black robes at the bottom and shoved him out of his printing shop for arguing about the price of circulars. He did the same thing to the owner of the Rialto Theater, Buck-a-Thousand Grossman he called him. He had been cheated out of his business by a group of Canuck ‘friends’, and he said the Merrimack River wouldnt be cleaned up before 1984. He’d already told the mayoral committee what the hell he thought about honesty. He ran a little weekly newspaper called the Lowell Spotlight that exposed graft in City Hall. We know all cities are the same but he was an exceptionally honest and frank man. He was only Mister Five-by-Five, 5 foot 7 tall and 235 pounds, yet he wasnt afraid of anybody. He admitted I was a lousy hitter in baseball but when it came to football he said they hardly came better as runner. This opinion of his was later corroborated by Francis Fahey, then coach of Boston College and later of Notre Dame, who actually came to the house and talked with my father in the parlor.

  But he had good reason to be sore as the record will show. As I say, I started the first game. Let me say, though, first, we had a magnificent line: Big Al Swoboda was right end, a 6 foot 4 Lithuanian or Pole strong as an ox and as mild. Telemachus Gringas (aforementioned) at right tackle, nicknamed Duke and brother to great Orestes Gringas, both of them the toughest, boniest and most honest Greeks to meet. Duke himself actually a boyhood buddy of mine in the short month’s duration at age twelve or so we’d decided to be friends, Saturday nights walking a mile and a half leaning on each other’s arm over shoulders from the glittering lights of Kearney Square, Duke now grown into a quiet fellow but a 210-pound blockbuster with merry black eyes. Hughie Wain right guard, a big 225-pound quiet fellow from Andover Street where the rich folks lived, with the power and demeanor of a bull. Joe Melis center, a Pole of dynamic booming dramatic crewcutted tackles, later elected captain to next year’s team and destined to play fullback and a good 300-yard runner in track. Chet Rave left guard, a strange talkative rock of a man of seventeen destined to be the only other member of this Lowell team besides myself to be seriously sought after by bigtime college teams (in his case, Georgia University). Jim Downing left tackle, a 6 foot 4 lackadaisical Irishman and beware of them. And Harry Kiner left end, speedy and good on defense and made of rocky bones.

  So I started the first game of the year against Greenfield Hi (and here’s the record I spoke of, the whole year) (game by game) and made two touchdowns that were called back, actually made five of the seven first downs in the whole game, averaged about 10 yards a try, and made a 20-yard run to within inches of a touchdown and Kelakis assigned himself the honor of carrying it over (he was the signal caller).

  In the second game of the season, despite this performance of mine, Menelakos’ ankle (Menny’s) had healed and he started in my place. I was allowed to play only the last two minutes, at Gardner High in western Massachusetts, carried the ball but twice, hit for first down both tries, for 12 and 13 yards respectively, got a bloody nose and ate some Chair City ice cream after the game (it’s made in Gardner).

  (Both those first two games won easily by Lowell.)

  In the third game I wasnt even assigned to start but was sent in for the last half only, against Worcester Classical, and ran back a punt 64 yards through the whole team for a touchdown, then knocked off two more touchdowns of about 25 yards apiece, carrying the ball only seven times for 20.6 yards per crack. This is in the newspaper records. (Lowell won that, too.)

  Nevertheless, when the ‘big test’ came for Lowell against Manchester even then I was not a big heroic ‘starter’ but sat on the bench as now the kids of school in the stands took up a chant ‘We want Duluoz, we want Duluoz.’ Can you beat or figure that? I had to sit there and watch some of those bums prance and dance, one little leg sprain and there’s heroic Pietryka making sure to remove his helmet when he was helped limping off the field so everybody could see his tragic hair waving in the autumn breeze. Supposed to be a piledriving fullback he really plowed and plumped like an old cow, and without the grim silent blocking of Bill Demmons in front of him he wouldnt have reached the line of scrimmage in time for an opening. Vaunted Manchester was overrated however, Lowell High won 20–0 and I was allowed to carry the ball just once in the last moment, the quarterback’s call being for a line dive when what I wanted to do was sweep the end, so I got buried in tackle and the cry ‘We want Duluoz’ died and the game ended a minute or less than a minute later.

  I admit they didnt need me anyway in that game (20–0), but when the fifth game came, I didnt start that either, but was allowed to play one quarter
of it during which I scored 3 touchdowns, one called back, against Keith Academy, which we won 43–0. But quite understandably, if you understand football, either by now or before, quietly in the background I was now being scouted by Francis Fahey’s men at Boston College who were already preparing to move to Notre Dame, in other words, I was getting interested attention from the highest echelons of American football, and on top of that the Boston Herald ran a headline on the sports pages that week, right across the top, saying DULUOZ IS THE 12TH MAN ON THE LOWELL HIGH SCHOOL ELEVEN, which was strange no matter how you slice it. Even in my own sixteen-year-old dewy brain there lurked the suspicion that something was wrong though I couldnt altogether (or wouldnt) believe my father’s claim of favoritism. The coach, Tam Keating, seemed to glance at me sometimes with a kind of distant rugged regret, I thought, as though this misattention to my palpable straight powers was out of his hands. My father by now was enraged. A sportswriter, Joe Callahan, who was later to become publicity director at Notre Dame in the Francis Fahey regime and then president of the Boston Patriots in the American Football League, began to hint in his sports column about me that ‘figures dont lie’. An enemy sportswriter who hated my Pa wrote of me as ‘looking’ like a football player. Wasnt that sweet?

  VI

  The next game against Malden was a meeting of the titans of Massachusetts high school football that year, tho I’d say Lynn Classical was tougher than both of us. Malden’s huge beefy guards and tackles with grease under their eyes like war-painted Iroquois held us to a 0–0 tie over the whole afternoon (I still say Iddyboy Bissonnette should have been there but the coach told me his marks were not good enough, they’d sent Iddyboy home after a few practice sessions where he clobbered everyboy and coulda clobbered Everyman too). Nobody was hardly in possession of the ball all that Malden afternoon. But our magnificent line of Swoboda, Wain, Rave, Downing, Melis, Gringas, etc. brooked no boloney from them either. This afternoon made no difference whether I carried the ball, or started, or played just a quarter or not; it was a defensive pingpong B LONG of a game: dull enough but watched by interested observers.

  My only real goof of the season was in the Lynn Classical game: they beat us 6–0 in Lynn, but had I not dropped that damned pass with my slippery idiot fingers at the goal line, a pass from Kelakis staight and true into my hands, we might have won, or tied, one. I’ve never gotten over the guilt of dropping that pass. If there had been no pigskin in football but just a good old floppy sock like you play with at ten. In fact I used to carry the pigskin with one hand while running and fumbled often. This was one thing the coach may not have liked. But it was the only way for me to run hard and dodge hard with full trackman’s range and I didnt fumble any more than anybody else, anyhow.

  Malden game was followed by a ridiculous game to be played at New Britain Connecticut, big team, with all our whole squad screaming in hotel suites the night before the game, not drinking beer or anything like the kids must do nowadays but just no chance to sleep like at home on Friday nights, and so we lost that one cold. (Some had sneaked out to a dance.)

  So now, being all discouraged, the great starters of the team, the heroes, had to rest after that fiasco in Connecticut, so I was left with a bunch of second-string kids to face Nashua (hometown of both my parents) in the raining mud, and as I say, it was an example of how they were treating me. After the game, mind you . . . well wait a minute. It was the toughest game of football I ever played and it was the game that decided Fahey and also caught the attention of Lu Libble of Columbia and other sources like Duke University. Naturally, the heroes resting in Turkish baths at the Rex, I started this one, in mud that smells so sickly sweet, facing a lot of big tough Greeks, Polocks, Canucks and Yankee boys and collided with them till we were all caked beyond recognition of face or numerals on the jersey. The newspaper account concentrated on a report of the scoring plays, 19–13 favor of Nashua, but didnt keep tabs on the yardage by rushing because with my head down I averaged 130 out of 149 total yards for Lowell including one 60-yard run where I was caught from behind by a longlegged end but did make a 15-yard touchdown run with a pass in my arm. There were slippery fumbles on all sides, blocked kicks, sliding into the waiting arms of sideline spectators, yet this game remains in my mind the most beautiful I ever played and the most significant because I was being used (along with Bill Demmons) as a workhorse without glory and played the kind of game only a professional watcher could have applauded, a lonely secret backbone game piledriving through the murk with mud-blooded lips, the dream that goes back to old Gipper and Albie Booth games on old rainy newsreels.

  With the regular team of course we could have won this one, nobody’s a one-man team, but no, the heroes didnt like rainy mud.

  That night at home I woke up in the middle of sleep with bunched cramp muscles called Charlie Horses that made me scream: yet no one had offered me a Turkish bath at the Rex after all that insane piledriving slippery plowing and bashing with mostly children on my side.

  (But was somebody trying to raise the odds on the big Thanksgiving football game coming up next in ten days?)

  VII

  Okay, but comes the big Thanksgiving Day football game, the hallowed enemies are to meet, Lowell vs. Lawrence, in a zero weather field so hard it was like ice. Now the ‘heroes’ were ready and started without me. The heroes had to have their day on radio with eighteen thousand watching. I’m sitting in the straw at the foot of the bench, with, as they say in French, mon derrière dans paille (‘my arse in the straw’). Comes the end of the first half, no score whatever. Second half they figure they might need me and put me in. (Maybe they figure I looked awful bad in that Nashua game and nobody’ll care.) At one point I am almost loose, but some kid from Lawrence just barely trips me with a meaty Italian hand. But a few plays later Kelakis flips me a 3-yard lob over the outside end’s hands and I take this ball and turn down the sidelines and bash and drive head down, head up, pause, move on, Downing throws a beautiful block, somebody else too, bumping I go, 18 yards, and just make it to the goal line where a Lawrence guy hits me and hangs on but I just jump out of his arms and over on my face with the game’s only touchdown. The score is 8–0 because Harry Kiner has already blocked a Lawrence punt and jumped on it in the end zone for a 2-point safety. We could have won 2–0 anyway. Some line we had. But as the game ends, pandemonium and et cetera, I run immediately into the locker rooms in front of everybody else on the field so I can change fast for Thanksgiving Dinner at home and who’s in the locker room of Lowell High cursing and kicking his helmet around, but Pie Menelakos, as though we’d lost, and cursing beause it was I and not himself who scored the only touchdown of the game?

  So there you have it.

  He gets an offer from Norwich in Vermont while Francis Fahey comes to my house followed by Lu Libble’s men a few days later.

  So in this case, wifey, I could be bitter, I am bitter, but God gave me my chance to help myself.

  Poor Pa meanwhile, at home, turkey, cherry pies, free bowling in the alleys, hooray, my dream of going to college was in like Flynn.

  Still I say, what means it? You may say I’m a braggart about football, although all these records are available in the newspaper files called morgue, I admit I’m a braggart, but I’m not calling it thus because what was the use of it all anyway, for as the Preacher sayeth: ‘Vanity of vanities . . . all is vanity.’ You kill yourself to get to the grave. Especially you kill yourself to get to the grave before you even die, and the name of that grave is ‘success’, the name of that grave is hullaballoo boomboom horseshit.

  Book Two

  I

  Bragging still, but telling the truth still, during all this time I was getting As and Bs in high school, mainly because I used to cut classes at least once a week, to play hookey that is, just so I could go to the Lowell Public Library and study by myself at leisure such things as old chess books with their fragrance of scholarly though
t, their old bindings, leading me to investigate other fragrant old books like Goethe, Hugo, of all things the Maxims of William Penn, just reading to show off to myself that I was reading. Yet this led the way to actual interest in reading. Led to a careful reading of H. G. Wells’ Outline of History, stupid examinations of the Harvard Classics, and deep awe in the tiny print on onionskinned pages white as snow as found in the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Ency Brit XI Ed.) with its detailed record of all that ever happened until 1910 as compiled for the last time in copious happy terms by Oxford and Cambridge scholars — loving books and the smell of the old library and always reading in the rotunda part of the back where was a bust of Caesar in the bright morning sun and the entire range of cyclopedias in semicircle shelves. What even actually furthered my education there was that, at about 11 A.M., I’d saunter out of the library, cut through the Dutton Street tracks near the YMCA so as not to be seen out of the window maybe by Joe Maple my English teacher, cut across the railroad bridge near the Giant Store, over tracks that ran over naked crossties through which you could see that whirling deep canal with its plop of floating snows, then down Middlesex to the Rialto Theater, where I’d sit and study the old 1930s movies in careful detail. Well of course most of us have done this anyway but not when playing hookey at eight fifteen and after reading at leisure in library till eleven, hey?