On the tingling eve of the big high school football game, drama was being played out in thousands of U.S. cities and towns. Girl students swirl like autumn leaves as they lived and breathed their hopes and fears in high-pitched whispers. The biggest men in school, the football stars, brooded over their assignments and the hundreds of friends who were counting on them. Mass pep rallies in front of school or on practice fields built up the excitement. Coeds mooned over their heroes in class and the popular girls set their caps for coveted dates with the team’s star players.
The tension of the adult world – even college football – seems tame beside the bubbling pressures of high school football. In Lawrence, Kan., a city of 33,000, the pressure is even greater for the Lawrence High Lions have the longest current winning streak in schoolboy football – 45 games. As Lawrence, on the weekend reported in these pictures, prepared for its big game against Shawnee-Mission North, the 1,100 students urged the ream on with usual fighting, go-get-‘em slogans. But the players themselves faced things a little differently from most. Booted in the strict religious environment of Kansas, they attend a prayer meeting and Bible discussion at a barn outside of town, where on of them wisecracked, “He who playeth hardest beateth Shawnee-Mission North.”
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San Francisco is the city where the War on Drugs was lost. Many times throughout the day, in different parts of town, one walks through a cloud of the familiar yet unusual in the streets of Kansas City smell and immediately takes another whiff just to make sure it’s not a mistake. In the middle of the day in the touristiest of the tourist areas, next to expensive stores and restaurants, a nicely dressed woman produced a mini-bong out of her pricey purse and turning her face ,to the wall, proceeded to treat her glaucoma (if you know what I mean). When my kid came out of the store, I started to recount that mind-blowing event, but then realized that she may not know the meaning of the word bong. She knew. Thank you, O-e School District for taking care of that awkward conversation!
San Francisco is beautiful city, with many different faces, amazing food of a mind-blowing variety, endless number of things to do, enough weather changes to keep an army of meteorologists busy, and more homeless people than an average resident of Midwest will encounter in a lifetime. My only advice is that if you are not in the greatest of shapes, visiting the Crookedest Street in the World is better done on a bus. It’s not that exciting and you almost need a Sherpa to get up on the damn hill. If you have time, check out SF Playhouse, we really enjoyed My Fair Lady, much better choice than a magician we originally set out to see.
On this day 22 years ago a young German pilot Mathias Rust landed a small Cessna in the middle of the Red Square in Moscow, bypassing all the “impenetrable” air defenses. In the aftermath a huge shake-up was conducted in the Soviet Army leadership, and Rust spent 432 days in jail. Just 35 years before that it would have been a bloodshed. Times, they were a-changing…
I didn’t attend an advertising school, so I don’t know if they teach the rule about limiting the number of billboards using the word ridiculously to one per square mile. If they don’t, maybe it’s a good time to start.
