Chapter 87: Big News and Big Smells

Tuesday, February 7, 1984

Sue had big news for us at lunch. Wellesley had come through with a very good scholarship offer, which meant she and Gene were set. As of now, it looked like they would look for apartments near Wellesley and Gene would commute to Boston College (likely by train, though they’d have at least one car). We made tentative plans to come visit.

Andy and Cal reminded everyone (as if we’d forgotten) that tomorrow was National Signing Day and that we should expect big announcements. I was eager to hear them, and so were most of the others.

Mel and Cammie were hinting that they were going where their boyfriends were going. I had no idea how long their relationships would last, but Andy and Cal would need ‘beards’ for a long time — quite possibly forever, if they went pro. That didn’t mean those ‘beards’ would always be Mel and Cammie, though, and I suspected that, at some point, they’d part company with the girls.

They were hardly the only two with announcements. Graham would definitely be playing football at some fairly major program, as would two other guys, Kenny Price (a running back) and Dave Nederman (an offensive tackle). Three more would be in a lower division, or they might try to become walk ons at a major program.

The odds of more than two winding up at the same school were low, though, but anything could still happen.

We kept it mostly to business at Study Group. Even so, some naps were taken.

Andy and Cal refused to give us any early information, insisting that it would be more fun if everyone found out all of the destinations tomorrow. At least it wouldn’t be the absolutely crazy National Signing Day reveal events from the 2000s, which had gotten more and more elaborate. And at least there weren’t internet ‘fans’ who would defame and threaten violence against kids who’d decided to go to the ‘wrong’ school.

As much as I liked some things about living in 2021, there were so many things I hoped we could do better. All of the technology, all of the ways to connect and communicate, and so much of it seemed to lead in the wrong direction.

It was a tough problem. The technology would happen, and I wanted it to happen, but somehow we’d have to do better as a society. I didn’t want my kids in this world growing up in a world where cyberbullying and social media cliques were the defining characteristics of high school life, not if I could find a way to help it. My ex and I had done fairly well at managing it, but it shouldn’t have had to be ‘managed’ in the first place, or at least not at the level of management we’d found we needed.

I talked briefly with Candice after dinner. We made plans to meet at the mini-golf place at three on Saturday since Sherry had something until two. After that, we’d figure out a plan for dinner and maybe something else.

Wednesday, February 8, 1984

They ran the school on a pep rally schedule today. It was, as far as I could remember, the only spring day we’d ever used the pep rally schedule. Pep rallies were for football, not basketball or anything else. Maybe we’d have one if the basketball teams were doing well in the playoffs, though, and needed a boost. We’d see. They probably would do well this year.

It was, in most respects, a normal pep rally. The cheerleaders cheered, the coach spoke, and Principal Riggs spoke. The difference was in his turning the event over to the players after a while.

They went in reverse order of offers — the players going to smaller schools came first. Izzy Martin, our center, went first, accepting an offer to play at Sam Houston State. If he did well, he might well transfer somewhere. Paul Leonard, a wide receiver, took an offer from Southeast Louisiana. Both of them might play against their teammates one day.

The big surprise was Larry Grieg, one of our safeties. He’d been not quite good enough to get a Division I offer, though I’d heard it was close. He opted to try to walk-on at A&M. If he didn’t succeed, he said he might transfer to Blinn. I wondered if he was trying for A&M’s ‘12th Man’ walk-on squad. He might have a solid shot at that. He got a deafening round of cheers from the kids planning on A&M (and most of the others, too).

After that, they moved on to the bigger names. Kenny Price announced that he’d be playing for UT. I was absolutely sure that he’d never been on the field for UT when I went there, but that was a different universe. He’d played somewhere, but he’d never made much of a splash, wherever it was. Of course, there was no guarantee that he’d make a splash at UT, either. He did get a fairly deafening round of cheers as well. A lot of kids at Memorial were planning on UT.

Dave Nederman was going to Michigan. Dad would love hearing that! Dave would almost certainly do well up there. They played his type of football, or he played theirs, and he was the kind of guy who could bulk up into a first-string college offensive tackle. He had the brains to be a pro tackle, too. Many people don’t know it, but those big guys playing on the line in pro football tend to be both smart and well-educated. The skills needed for a good lineman require intelligence, and careers tend to be shorter than many ‘skill’ positions, encouraging people to get a solid education for their second career. Michigan was a great choice for that aspect of his future.

Andy went next, and immediately motioned Cal up. They jointly announced that they were going to Texas A&M, to yet another loud round of cheers. I’d both thought and hoped they would. It’d be fun watching them in college, even though I knew that if I was watching them, we’d probably changed the world yet again. I was fine with that, considering.

Graham Beckett was the last one to announce, and he surprised everyone by announcing that he was going to Berkeley. I really didn’t know Graham that well, and didn’t know that he was Berkeley material. Who knew if he’d help the Golden Bears all that much? It might not matter — he could suffer through whatever seasons they had and write his own ticket in terms of education. It might cost him a trip to the NFL — but it might not, too. I wasn’t sure Graham was an NFL-level quarterback, but I could be wrong about that.

Cal, Andy, Dave, and maybe Kenny were NFL-level talents, though, if they developed. That’s always the key: if they developed.

When I got home, I had a message from Maxine telling me she had big news (and that it was good) and to call her tomorrow. I would, of course, do so.

I told Angie about the call, then called Jas to let her know. Angie called Paige at the same time.

One step closer to our goal, hopefully!

Thursday, February 9, 1984

School stunk today. Literally. We’d had another round of locker shenanigans. Some guys (Mike among them) found their locker contents splattered with perfume that had been sprayed through the vents. The culprit had used a very strong perfume, easily noticed when anyone victimized brought the splattered goods to class.

This turned out to be more serious than perhaps expected. At lunch, I heard that one girl, a junior, had left the school in an ambulance from a perfume-triggered asthma attack. They said she would be fine, but it upped the ante on what was otherwise juvenile sabotage.

People were starting to plug their locker vents with things like duct tape or cardboard, but I suspected such efforts would fail. The person on the outside had the leverage to push anything out of the way or cut through it. I considered it myself (heavy-duty tape and a metal sheet?), but decided against it. I’d live with the consequences if I got victimized, but I’d also prefer someone went after my locker rather than Jasmine’s or Angie’s (or Paige’s, though few people knew that Angie and Paige were connected).

Assistant Principal Blaine made an announcement promising ‘serious consequences’ for future mischief. That only mattered if someone was caught, though. They didn’t have the resources to monitor the lockers all day. There were too many times when they were unguarded, too many opportunities for a culprit to plan ahead and simply wait for the right moment. It didn’t matter if the perfume, or the cockroaches, or ... whatever ... arrived on a certain day, at a certain time, or anything else.

Even a decade later, they’d have solved this by deploying security cameras, but that wasn’t a cheap or easy solution in 1984.

The college news continued to trickle in. Morty, Mark, and Emily had received full scholarships to UT. I’d probably have to figure out some way to clue them in about needing to register for classes as quickly as possible. Timing made a big difference in my first go-round.

Of course, UT in this universe might be better run. I doubted it was significantly different, though, but how would I know that? Even if they did have problems, it wouldn’t prove things were the same. Confirmation bias is always a major pain in the butt.

I might have been thinking about it more than usual because Tom Myerson was doing a unit on confirmation bias and other issues in psychology and cognition. Heady stuff for a high school government class, but an important subject (at the least) in 1984. In 2021 it’d been practically required, yet most people had no real understanding of it, and it had been far easier to immerse oneself in a self-reinforcing bubble of non-challenging ideas, all while thinking one was ‘well-rounded.’

The flip side of much of this, for us, was ‘analysis paralysis,’ which Tom had already covered and kept coming back to. When confronted with many fallacies or difficulties (confirmation bias definitely being one of them), the temptation to stop and ‘analyze the situation’ could be overwhelming. We did it all the time, and there’s virtue in it. Still, the bigger the stakes, the more tempting it was to form a five-star committee to pick the five-star committee who would analyze the situation, then deliver a report to another five-star committee, who in turn would read the report and issue its conclusions — which would probably be ignored by the five-star committee tasked with actually implementing any recommendations.

In other words: a bunch of people would spend years doing a tremendous amount of work while not solving the problem. Worse than that, anyone actually trying to solve the problem would be told to stop, because the ‘experts’ were developing a solution.

Haste makes waste, and slow and steady wins the race, but sometimes necessity is the mother of invention and the early bird gets the worm — speaking entirely in aphorisms.