Granite State

Special feelings of sadness when I read about such a tragedy. My uncle sometimes, but not often, talked about a boyhood friend. How they played baseball and did other things together. The friend was one of the Army engineers on the Remagen Bridge doing maintenance when it collapsed. He died. Ironically the 79th anniversary of the collapse was just last week.

I first heard of Dick Butkus when he was playing at the University of Illinois, and back then the information was not readily available. Football wasn't all over the place. ABC had a contract with the NCAA and telecasts of college football belonged exclusively to them. ABC provided one college game on Saturday afternoon and that was it until next week. Any particular team might be seen on TV one time during the regular season. Usually they divided the country into four regions and each region got to see a game of two teams from their area. If Illinois was playing we would see some other game as they were in a different region. So the only opportunity to see Dick Butkus was when Illinois went to the Rose Bowl, which back then was the only bowl game the Big 10 schools were allowed to play in. So we heard about Butkus but didn't get to see him play very often. But what an impression when we did. My memory, my very vivid memory, was how ridiculous, how absolutely absurd it was for the other team to attempt to move the ball downfield when Butkus was playing defense. It simply couldn't be done. The guy needed to go to the NFL. He was just too good to be playing college football.

You can watch movies and television and see lots of actors whose faces you will never remember and whose names you won't even notice. David McCallum was in a special category. Whenever he appeared in a production I watched I always came away knowing, 'David McCallum was in it.'