Memories from an Eastern Shore, (Cape Charles), high school football player.
One big thing — sports! When I grew up in grammar school, Father Miller started a football program. I think they played football here maybe back in the ’20s but it sort of died down and they didn’t have it. Father Miller started football. Boys started playing football, not enough equipment, but they started. Later on, Dan Wilkins came to help him coach and then wound up being coach alone. But the teams that we had for such a little town, most of the teams we played had more kids on the football team than we had in the high school! I think George was on one of these teams. I know Mike was, I know Tommy was. Father Miller scheduled a game with a team in Wilmington, Delaware, called Salesianum High School. That was a Catholic high school that had, if I’m not too far wrong, about 2,000 boys it seemed like. It was a big school. Anyway, the town or school or somebody paid, they rented two cars on the train. Took them up to Wilmington, played football, did a fairly good job, didn’t win, but came back. Going back in my memory, I know that Granby’s junior varsity, or second string, supposedly played Cape Charles. But one of the boys that later moved over here that played first string for Granby, said that it was named their second string but it was really most of their first string that played Cape Charles. And Cape Charles did very well. It was like 31 to 13, I think was the score, in fact, I know that was what it was.
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But anyway, they played the only high school in Williamsburg. Here’s Cape Charles and back in those days they graded schools A, B, C and we were a D! We didn’t have any other schools around and we were playing B schools and some A’s! And not doing too badly. My good friend over here, Amos, in 1950 Northampton played Cape Charles and we beat Northampton 93 to nothing! There’s more! We didn’t have any lights on the field and the game lasted so long and it was getting dark, they stopped the game I think seven minutes early so the referees could get back. It was getting so dark, we couldn’t play! About a year ago, they had a list in the Richmond Times Dispatch of records, high school football records that still stood. And there was a boy in Cape Charles at that time named Amos Dickinson who scored five touchdowns as an end and that is still a high school record. I was proud of that myself because I had been center and centers don’t score and I think when they got the 92 to nothing I said, “I’ve been playing all these years and will somebody let me score?” And I remembered this, too, that all you have to do is get in the end zone and I was through the end zone and 10 feet past it! I was so happy to have scored!
But we started out playing football when we were young kids. I think back about it and Tom and George were older than us, but when it came time to play in sports, they roughed us up a little bit, but they started teaching us when we were young. And we all liked to play touch football or run-’til-you’re-down. We had a hundred kids in high school, probably sixty of them were boys, we’ve had seventy kids out there doing a football game at lunch time. Am I right? And playing soccer, we had a hundred people, girls and boys, out playing soccer and we didn’t have but a hundred in the high school.
.. I said it *in my best Stephen A. voice possible*!!!!