The Charlotte Clippers etc...

A couple of years ago, I wrote about the time I went out for recess at Elizabeth School and, Shazam!, in that vacant lot right next to the school playground the Detroit Lions were playing football!

I thought perhaps it was another hallucination like the time I thought I saw a Nazi fighter plane land in my backyard.

But no. It was real.

Clippers vs Lions 1946 photo by W.H. Sumner

Frankly I was surprised that so many of you  actually remembered that Charlotte once had a professional football team many years before the Carolina Panthers were ever dreamed of. A fellow named Bob Gill wrote a history of  minor league football in the 30's and 40's, which were the "golden years" for those leagues. He says the "Dixie League," which the Charlotte Clippers were part of, was one of the most successful, but least remembered of them all.

Here are the facts according to Bob Gill's THE COFFIN CORNER: Vol 10 Annual (1988)

The Clippers joined in 1941, the league's most successful season:

 1941 Standings W L T Pct PF PA

 Norfolk Shamrocks 7-1-2 
 Charlotte Clippers 7-3-0
 Newport News Builders 6-3-1 
 Portsmouth Cubs 3-7-0 
 Roanoke Travelers 1-9-0 

 In 1942 the league suspended operations for the duration of World War II.

 But in early 1946, the Charlotte Clippers, led by backs Casey Jones and Butch Butler and end Rocci Spadaccini, battled the renamed Richmond Rebels neck-and-neck until Richmond lost its 
final two games to give Charlotte the title.

 It was a great season

 1946 Standings W L T 

 Charlotte Clippers 9-1-0 
 Richmond Rebels 7-3-0 
 Norfolk Shamrocks 5-5-0 
 Portsmouth Pirates 4-6-0 
 Greensboro Patriots 4-6-0
 Newport News Builders 1-9-0

 For 1947 the league had a new president, Tom Hanes, and two new teams. The 
Greensboro franchise was shifted to Winston-Salem, and Roanoke was readmitted, 
replacing Newport News, the weak sister of 1946. But both new teams dropped out 
before the start of the season, leaving only four clubs in operation. Still, with the prospect 
of expansion in 1948 to Knoxville, Jacksonville, Atlanta and Birmingham, the league was 
determined to continue. 

 Charlotte and Richmond were expected to battle for the title again, and in the season 
opener Oct. 5 the Clippers got the best of the Rebels, 21-13, to take the league lead 
along with Norfolk, which edged Portsmouth 7-3. 

 Three days later there was no league at all.

 Here's how it happened: 

 First, Portsmouth owner Charles Aberson announced Oct. 7 that his health wouldn't 
allow him to operate his team. He transferred the franchise to a Charlottesville group for 
the rest of the season, with the stipulation that it would revert to Portsmouth in 1948.

 A day later Richmond stunned the league with the announcement that it had bought 
the failing Long Island franchise in the AFL (the re-formed American Association) and 
was jumping ship. 

 President Hanes protested to NFL commissioner Bert Bell, who agreed that he hadn't 
approved the shift, but added something to the effect that it wasn't really any of his 
business. It was clear that he wasn't going to be much help.

 That left the Dixie League with little choice but to close up shop -- and though there 
was talk of reorganizing for 1948, it never panned out. Players from the Norfolk and 
Portsmouth teams combined to play out the season as independents, and in fact did well, 
but it was no use. 

Charlotte kept going through 1949, fielding good teams each year and 
hoping for a berth in the AFL, but never getting one. 





Hats off to Bob Gill for a great job!

A sidenote: Gill noted that in 1937 Norfolk led by "Mush"Delotto, A.B. Conner and Charlie Gadd defeated Richmond for the championship. If Delotto had returned a year earlier when Maurice "Mush" Dubofsky was playing for the Baltimore Blue Birds, the league would have set a record by having the most players named "Mush."  -Ed

Margaret

I think I had one of the greatest jobs in the world. From 1966 til 1969 I hosted a local TV show in Washington, DC that allowed me to interview almost every celebrity who showed up in this town during that time.

It was a “dream job.”

But it still was a job. Not only did I have to try and ask reasonably intelligent questions of my guests and hope that their answers were good enough to keep the audience interested, but I was in charge of lining up and booking the guests as well.

Five days a week.

In an era in which everybody was obsessed with “getting on TV,” you would think that was the easiest part of the job.

Nope.

Ed with leaders of USAF Band

Next to getting enough interesting and entertaining guests to fill all those shows, weeding out the uninteresting and boring hoards who were constantly pestering me to get on the show, was the next hardest part of my job. Friends and even co-workers would lobby me on behalf of a friend or relative who would make a “fantastic interview..”

It was very hard for me to say “no” to these people. I tried to avoid some of the more persistent ones, but that wasn't always possible.. One of those, for example, was Margaret Runyon. She was the switchboard operator who sat only a few feet from the entrance to the lobby of the station directly in the path of everyone who entered the building.

Ed with Mission Impossible star Gregg Morris

Margaret wanted me to interview her ex husband, with whom she was still friendly and who she said was a very good writer; even though some people thought his poems were a little strange.

I'll bet.

So hardly a day went by when Margaret didn't bring up Carlos, that was his name, and how his writing career was going.

Margaret Runyon

She was good hearted and sincere and I hated to keep saying “no,” but I knew that I had to keep the level of guests up to the highest standard possible. I needed people who were nationally known and who would give my audience a reason to tune it.

But there was no way of avoiding Margaret (unless I entered the station through the window) so I had to keep telling her that the show wasn't going to survive very long if I started featuring unknown writers of strange poetry and so forth.

I guess the message finally got through because she stopped mentioning her ex to me.

Then, one morning about a month later I arrived at the station and greeted Margaret and the other switchboard operator and as I passed by the reception area she removed her headphones, turned to me and announced that someone had written an article about Carlos.

“How nice, who did it?”

“Time Magazine,” she replied.

Yep, there it was:

The Mysterious Carlos

On the cover.




“The most mysterious man in America:


Carlos Castaneda.”

That picture of Carlos with his hand over his face could well have been taken of me at that moment.  Only, I wasn't trying to be mysterious.

Just embarrassed.    -Lee





(NOTE: Now the punchline of this story may fall flat on those who either were not around or who did their best to ignore the popular culture of the 1960's. I would have been a cheerleader for the latter except that I was in the Television business, which was a major player in those theatrics.)

From Wikipedia:

“Carlos Castaneda was an author and anthropologist born in Cajamarca, Peru in 1925. He burst onto the scene with a popular book about entheogens (drugs used in spiritual ceremonies) and the magical world-view as reality in the middle of a time of academic and cultural upheaval.

His stories of a wizened old sorcerer, a man who came from a long line of peyote and mushroom-using wise men with extraordinary powers, captured the imaginations of students, hippies, and scholars. His original book is presented as a "UCLA PhD Anthropology Thesis", but it was a highly radical, postmodern piece of anthropological 'field work'. Castaneda's work was a watershed for critique and thought by cultural anthropologists and brought many new, excited minds into the field.

There is a cult of personality that is associated with Castaneda; he is sometimes called the godfather of the New Age movement. -Wikipedia”

(PS-During his early days of "fame" Carlos cultivated the "mystery" about who he really was. Heeding Margaret's advice, he avoided being photographed  lest, she argued, that people discovered that the  "purveyor of the new mysticism was a guy who looked like a Cuban bellhop."   -Ed)

Ungawa

Is geography taught anymore in the public schools?  I seem to remember hearing that they were considering doing away with the subject because with all the upheaval in the world, geography was changing too fast for the textbooks to keep up.

Piedmont Jr. High

Maybe I dreamed that.

I enjoyed the geography course that I had at Piedmont. It was all about the Tigris and Euphrates and stuff. It was not only interesting, but I felt that I learned a lot. For example, the women washed the family's clothes in those rivers, getting the real grimey dirt out by banging them on the rocks.  I don't know why that fascinated me so, but it did.

Unfortunately, I tried that one time at camp...and ripped the Hell out of my best shirt.

But I wasn't the only kid at Piedmont who was captivated by geography.  In fact, it was the most popular subject at that school.

The reason I know that is because the library would overflow with us male scholars whenever the new National Geographic Magazine would come in.

Washing their clothes in those rivers must have ripped up a lot of their clothes too, because they didn't seem to have many.

However, there was an inverse relationship in my enthusiasm for geography and the number of facial piercings of those anatomically interesting  ladies.


And never in a million
years could I have imagined that I would live to see American women doing their damdest to look like them!       -Ed

Here comes the bride

I think I know this woman

Hi Mom!