The presents had been opened and the grown-ups were sitting around talking in the easy afterglow of a Christmas morning.
An uncle was absorbed by a modern-day version of a Tinkertoy set and an aunt was helping a niece come to grips with a pair of sparkly gloves that can freeze people. A couple of us stepped outside with one of the kids, who wanted to show off the scooter Santa had brought.
“Let’s walk to the Bowl,” someone suggested. It was only three or four blocks away.
So we went, past the Christian Science Reading Room, past Steve Garner’s Twin Oaks pottery studio, past the metal dog and deer that have been standing guard in front of the Lee Home for as long as I can remember, past the vacant lot on Seventh Street that not so long ago was a lovely Victorian.
The old stadium’s press box and dressing rooms are gone. A stone gate at the east end is the only vestige of that part of the stadium’s architecture. A chain-link fence with a gate separates the grounds of Franklin Academy with the Bowl’s cement steps.
One of the adults put the scooter over his shoulder and we descended. Now painted a light brown, the walls surrounding the field were once filled with advertisements for local businesses: Nabors Ford, Fletcher Motor Co., Dill and Norris, The National Bank of Commerce, Ben Ross Business Machines.
At the bottom as we walked out on the track, I began to reminisce (not for the first time) about coming to games at the Bowl when I was young. What a spectacle it was. Lineman from Light & Water would park their bucket trucks outside the stadium walls and sit on top. Same for the firemen. For big games, like Meridian and Murrah, extra seating had to be added in the end zones and on the north side of the field.
In those days the business center at the corner of Seventh Street and Fifth Avenue North was a clay hill. The South was segregated then — blacks didn’t go to Lee High’s games and whites didn’t go to Hunt High’s games. Blacks would watch the Generals play from atop that hill, and on cold nights they would build a bonfire. As a child, I sometimes felt the tug of that fire and wondered what it would be like to stand on that hill next to it and watch the game below.
“Hey, Benjamin,” I said to my grandson, “why don’t you make a lap on the scooter.”
I wondered if he could make it around in less than a minute. The thought was all it took to conjure up the ghosts … on Christmas morning in the brilliant sunlight.
There was Ron “Big Mo” Mosley chugging down the backstretch, head thrown back, arms pumping. And Billy “Otis” Lancaster, Robert “Tapper” Cooper and Dave Barham. Long-limbed boys, all sinew and bones, who could float around the 440-yard oval well under 60 seconds and make it look effortless while they did so.
In the far curve, Benjamin was bogged down in mud and wet leaves. He made it through, and as he motored along the backstretch his little shadow played along the back wall.
I looked out at the grass before us and thought of my friend Jackie Ball with whom I played football on this field. That was the late 60s. By then the clay hill was gone and black fans sat in the stands. No doubt Jackie did them (and Lee High) proud.
He was the first black player to play in the Bowl on an integrated team. And he was a fine choice to break that barrier. Here was a running back with moves few white boys had seen; if our big, corn-fed linemen opened a hole and Jackie got past the line of scrimmage, he could work magic.
“Can I try it,” I asked my grandson.
As long as you don’t weigh 220 pounds, he said.
And then I, a 60-something-year-old grandfather, got on a small, motorized scooter and drove it around Magnolia Bowl, feeling equal parts ridiculous and wistful.
We walked down and looked at what were the tennis courts — they were overgrown even in my day. Now they are enshrouded in what could be an enchanted forest; surely a castle and princess in need of a prince are in there somewhere.
Before we headed up, I took Benjamin to the stadium steps at mid-field.
“We used to run these to get in shape for football,” I told him. “You wanna run up?
“Nope,” he said.
Then I took off running, not knowing if I would make it to the top. I did, though, and was there bent over, huffing and puffing when my companion arrived. All together, we set out for home, and the old stadium notched up yet another memory.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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