The King of Halloween and Miss Firecracker Queen: A Daughter's Tale of Family and Football
230
The King of Halloween and Miss Firecracker Queen: A Daughter's Tale of Family and Football
230Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781614488255 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Morgan James Publishing |
| Publication date: | 05/22/2018 |
| Pages: | 230 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A Fine Romance
"You possess everything to become great."
Native American Proverb
"He who would do great things should not attempt them all alone."
Native American Proverb
"Behind every great man there's a great woman."
American Proverb
The family you think you grew up in is not your real family; it's the family you wanted; the family you hated; the family you love; the family that let you down; the family that lifted you up; the ideal family; the dysfunctional family, your family. The family I grew up in was all of these things, in addition to being middle class, two-parent, white, with two children, until years later, when there were three. While statistically we were more or less average, in reality we knew we were special.
My daddy was a small town country boy with a ticket to the big time called football. My momma was a debutante wanna-be who spent a meaningful part of her formative years in an orphanage and 'foster' homes. They met in the fall of 1955 on the campus of the University of Tennessee where he was a collegiate football player and she was, as I like to say, Miss Firecracker Queen, voted best body by one fraternity or another; a contest you could only hold in the days before political correctness and fake boobs.
The story of their meeting goes something like this. Momma was with a date at the Fall Football Banquet when she spotted my daddy. She took one look at his handsome face and thick head of brown hair and felt an electric current pulse through her body. She knew they had to meet, so she worked her way into his vision, and then, into his personal space.
"Hello," she said, cocking her head to the side and gracing him with her most coquettish smile. They chatted, and she offered him her number.
Whereupon he asked, in his rich Southern drawl, "Baby, how old are you?"
"Seventeen," she replied.
He stepped back, looked her up and down, and said, "Darlin,' I don't date anybody who's not eighteen. Call me when you grow up."
Since it was the week before Thanksgiving, Momma was not worried. Her birthday was November 27, two weeks away. Thanksgiving break came and went, and with it, her passage into adulthood.
Once back on campus in December, Momma 'arranged' to run into my father. Thus began their whirlwind courtship. Although Daddy had a long-time girlfriend from home Gwen, Momma was not the least bit worried. She knew that she had the goods, and that Gwen did not stand a chance. As she revealed at Daddy's death decades later, she chose him, and that was that.
By the Christmas holiday break, Momma and Daddy were an item. So Momma sent Daddy home with a mission: break up with Gwen. And he did. This act unsettled the entire community. In Cartersville, Georgia, Daddy was the small town boy that made good while Gwen was the daughter of a local lawyer, one of the richest men in town. Dad and Gwen had been the perfect small town, Southern couple; she was rich, and he had talent. They had been going steady for roughly five years, and everyone figured Daddy would marry Gwen right after college. The breakup changed everything. It meant he would not be coming home.
Instead, he married Paula Charlotte (pronounced Shah lot') in a small private ceremony administered by the local Justice of the Peace in Nowheresville, Tennessee. The marriage took place over Easter break, with parents and extended family being informed after the fact. There was no honeymoon. They returned to school, Daddy graduated with a degree in History, and Momma dropped out.
* * *
Lamar Robert Leachman was the last draft pick in the NFL draft that year. Such a position earns one the title of 'Mr. Irrelevant' in football lore, and so it was for him. He went to Canada to play in the Canadian Football League (CFL) for the princely sum of a few thousand dollars, and Momma went to St. Louis to live with her sister and brother-in-law. By that time, she was obviously pregnant with their first child, my older sister Lisa, and was laying in, as we say in the South, with the only family that would have her.
Daddy played the season in the Calgary cold. When the season was finished he collected his final paycheck of $500 and proceeded to go on a gambling, drinking, and smoking binge that lasted days and left him broke. When he came home to Momma she promptly asked him for his check.
"Well Paula, I cashed that. When I stopped at momma's on the way back I caught up with JR, and Radar, and Howie and the gang, and I lost it all playing cards."
"Lamar you know we have $400 to our names, no jobs, and a baby on the way."
That was the precise moment when Momma took charge of all things financial as well as domestic.
You would have thought that my father would have learned his lesson about card playing, betting and staying out all night, but he was at heart a fun-loving man's man. This got him into plenty of trouble with Momma over the years. When he was coaching high school ball in Savannah, one night he failed to grace the door step at the appointed time. Momma made dinner and eventually put us girls to bed — without Daddy. As the evening drew on, to hear my mother tell it, she just got madder and madder. Once she reached the boiling point, she put on her shoes, checked on us girls, locked the house up, and started the car. She had a pretty good idea of where to find Lamar. Most men, she figured, are creatures of habit and comfort. So she headed down to his local hangout.
Now Momma was a natural beauty, but it did take some effort to carry off her look. Part of that effort involved those big sponge rollers and night cream. By this point in the evening she was creamed and shiny, and rolled up like a big pink bubble head. For modesty's sake she had donned her pink chenille bathrobe and that, along with her sponge rollers and penny loafers, made quite the outfit. But, as she later told me, she did not give a rat's ass what she looked like or who saw her.
As soon as she cruised into the parking lot she spotted Daddy's car. She parked hers, buttoned up that old robe, and strode into the bar with purpose. As she entered, she heard a collective breath from the bar and someone saying, "Would you look at that?" Daddy was not in the main bar, but Momma was not fazed in the least. She knew he was a man who preferred men's company to women's, competition to calm, story-telling to dancing, and card playing to watching TV. By this time she had worked out the fact that card playing and telling lies were what was keeping him out past his due-home time.
She marched into the back room, and sure enough, there was Daddy, at the card table with his buddies. Six men were smoking, sipping whiskey, and fiercely guarding their hands while they slid pennies into the pile at the center of the table. They all looked up simultaneously. Momma did not give them a chance to say a single word before she moved right in on that table and Daddy, saying, "I don't care if you are Jesus Christ and these are your disciples, you had better have your ass home in the next fifteen minutes unless you're lookin' to be crucified." She did not wait for a response nor did she she care if she got one. She turned right around, headed out the way she came in, and drove home. My daddy was home in ten minutes flat.
* * *
Given Daddy's fun-loving nature, handsome, manly looks and sporty profession, he was a man who men and women wanted to know. Men wanted to impress him while women turned giddy and flirtatious in his presence. On more than one occasion, I heard my dad say something rude and sexist to a woman, and you would have thought he had just told her she was the prettiest, nicest girl in the room. He would say,
"Darlin,' you're quite the honey, aren't you."
"That is one hard body you've got there honey."
"Baby, I could stack that rack."
Such comments would generate a charge of sexual harassment in this day and age. They would surely be considered acts of micro-aggression against woman. But in the 1960s and early 1970s it was still a man's world, and football was the most manly of popular sports. Women hearing Daddy's cracks just swooned harder. Men fell all over themselves to be his buddy. I am sure that this fact is part of the reason that, to this day, I have no patience for women who preen and fawn over men. Nor do I tolerate well celebrity fetishes or jock hounds, regardless of sex, nor does my mother.
My older sister Lisa Lucille was born on January 19, 1957. This date is exactly nine months after my parents where married. While I have my suspicions regarding the actual marriage date and the insistence by my mother of their post marriage sexual consummation, that's her story and she's sticking to it. Be that as it may, one thing that was clear throughout my parent's fifty-plus years of marriage was that they had chemistry. I recall many an afternoon when my parents locked themselves in their bedroom after forcing my sister and me to go out and play.
We did not always obey this command. Many afternoons I could be found sitting, whining and crying by my parents' bedroom door, sweating in the Southern heat and humidity, waiting for them to reemerge. If their session of afternoon delight was especially leisurely, by the time they cracked open their bedroom door, I would be back flat to the floor, knees bent, legs crossed, staring up at the hall ceiling. I would be sucking my thumb, twirling my hair, and pumping my crossed leg to the rhythm of my twirls, engrossed in my own personal twilight zone of comfort and satisfaction.
Chemistry aside, they were like many young couples in the 1950s; Daddy got a job as a high school football coach and history teacher, and Momma assumed the job of mothering. But my mother was smart, socially aware, and driven in a 1950's kind of way. She understood the striations of social class, and the characteristics necessary to move up. She did not possess personal ambition, but she was fiercely ambitious for her mate and her children. For that purpose, she knew that it was imperative that she go back to school and finish her degree.
She also knew that my dad had the capabilities to be really successful in his chosen field. She understood that he was a wild stallion; fierce, willful, reckless, beautiful, and strong. All of that energy needed to be channeled into productive directions if he was going to amount to much, for he was also a guy who loved to party. My mother's mission, and her compromise for the rest of her life, was to help him achieve his potential.
From the first days of their marriage my mother tutored my father. Among other things, she helped him overcome a serious stutter, since she knew it would be an impediment to his moving up the coaching ranks. Throughout Daddy's childhood, every Sunday the Leachman brood was cleaned up and marched into the First Baptist Church. The typical Sunday religious experience involved raising one's hands in praise for the Lord, and being cold-called for scripture recital from the pastor in his pulpit. In front of the entire congregation, my daddy rarely missed a hallelujah or scripture quote, but he sure did develop a furious and persistent stutter.
Some of my earliest childhood memories are of my daddy laid back in his cheap vinyl recliner — we could not afford the likes of a La-Z-Boy at that time. He would be doing the vocabulary test from the Reader's Digest while Momma cooked dinner. As the the meal was simmering, Daddy would pronounce the words, modulate his breath and stand corrected — or not — by Momma. My mother was such a good partner and teacher and, my daddy such a motivated student, that by the time he was thirty he had overcome that stutter. As his career progressed, he was often solicited for public speaking engagements, both paid and unpaid.
Daddy knew how to coach but had no idea how to teach. Momma knew she could help with that too. His needs and her ambitions led her to enroll in a teacher's college in the fall of 1957. Within a few years she had an education degree and a job teaching sixth grade in the school my sister and I would eventually attend. She gave birth to me during the spring of 1958 without missing a beat or a term.
Having been inculcated with the fear of God early on, Daddy was fiercely committed to Lisa's and my salvation. He did not care one whit where we went to church or which youth group we joined, as long as it was nominally Christian, only that we did so. The consequence of this approach was that over the years, Lisa and I attended the Baptist Church, the Presbyterian Church, the Methodist Church, the Catholic Church, the Non-denominational Church — today it would most likely be Unitarian — the Church of Fear and Righteousness, and the Church of Joy and Grace. It was a heady mix that left me with an openness to all religions, a belief in none in particular, and a healthy scorn for The Church.
Over the years, the effects of all of Daddy's early childhood religious indoctrination dissipated. By the time Lamara, my younger sister, was in school and Lisa and I were in college, attending church regularly and participating in a youth group were no longer mandatory. However, Daddy always had his eye on salvation and the devil. This probably had something to do with the fact that he had a good bit of devilishness in him, knew his fair share of temptation, and had been brought up to crave salvation.
CHAPTER 2Daddy
"Great souls have wills; feeble ones have wishes."
Chinese proverb.
"A man who cannot tolerate small ills can never accomplish great things."
American proverb.
"The most reliable way to predict the future is to create it."
Abraham Lincoln
Lamar Robert Leachman was born in the back bedroom of a shotgun house in 1932 in small-town Georgia. His father worked as a mechanic at a gas station owned by one of his brothers. Since Grandpa Leachman was one of eleven children, there were many Leachman boys and kin spread throughout this rural Georgia region. The Leachman network provided my grandfather with plenty of drinking buddies and distractions, since Grandpa was known to work hard and play hard in the days before this was a youthful slogan. He smoked two packs of Pall Malls a day and counted on his wife Eula Susie Mae to keep him right with God. Such a task was right up Eula's alley, since she was known to 'fall out with the Lord,' as they say, and speak in tongues during the many revivals that passed through the rural South.
From an early age, Daddy knew that sports were his love and his ticket to a bigger life. As the middle child of three boys — his sister Eva being a girl did not even register on his radar — he practiced physicality early and often. By high school it was clear that Daddy had the gift for football. He was such a talented player that in those days he played both offense and defense. This fact clearly contributed to the eight youthful concussions he recalled having. Despite those injuries, his accomplishments on the Cartersville Hurricanes athletic field were legendary. He won many awards, both social and athletic. In fact, in the early 1950s Lamar set the Georgia High School Football Rushing Record. He held that record until it was finally broken by Herschel Walker in 1979. For those of you who are not football aficionados, Walker went on to win the Heisman Trophy as a star player for the University of Georgia. For his efforts, Daddy was recruited by General Robert Neyland to join the Volunteers, receiving a football scholarship to the University of Tennessee (UT).
He spent five years at the University of Tennessee playing with Johnny Majors, Doug Atkins, and numerous other football greats. He and his teammates played in the 1952 Cotton Bowl. Here again, his talent was such that he played both offense — as #10, center — and defense — as #55, linebacker. During his freshman year at UT he was red-shirted, and at some point in his college career he hurt his knees, resulting in the five-year college plan, the last place in the 1955 NFL draft, and the serendipity of meeting my mother in her freshman year.
* * *
Once he cut his ties to Gwen, Daddy never appeared to want to go back to Cartersville. But for a brief time in 1967, our family had to live there. We were moving from Richmond, Virginia, to Atlanta, Georgia, so that Daddy could take a coaching job at Georgia Tech. For the first two months of that move, Momma, Lisa, and I lived with Grandma and Grandpa Leachman in their little house off of the Access Road — that was indeed its name — of Interstate 75. Daddy, however, stayed at the office and came up only on the weekends. Lisa and I slept heel to head on a brick-hard fold-out couch in the living room while my mother, and father on the weekends, slept in the spare bedroom. We all sweated through the night listening to the trucks whoosh by, while Lisa and I had the added burden of trying not to touch each other.
After one particularly sleepless night when Lisa and I tortured each other with touch and sweat, and each effort to descend into sleep was interrupted by the sound and vibrations from passing trucks, I said to Grandma Leachman, "The noise from the road is so bad we can't sleep." My grandmother replied, "I love the traffic. It soothes me." We knew there was nothing to be done about our predicament.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The King of Halloween & Miss Firecracker Queen"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Lori Leachman.
Excerpted by permission of Morgan James Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword Phil Simms xiii
Foreword Harry Carson xv
Preface xix
Introduction The King of Halloween xxi
Part I Spring Training and Draft Season 1
Chapter 1 A Fine Romance 3
Chapter 2 Daddy 11
Chapter 3 Momma 19
Chapter 4 Sisters 27
Chapter 5 Southern (Dis)Comforts 37
Part II Training Camp or Pre-season 51
Chapter 6 Moving Up and Out 53
Chapter 7 Rambling Wrecks from Georgia Tech; and then there were three 73
Chapter 8 Tigers and Gamecocks 91
Chapter 9 Crossing the Mason-Dixon Line 105
Part III The Playing Season 113
Chapter 10 Crossing the Border 115
Chapter 11 A Giant Leap 133
Chapter 12 Motor City 149
Part IV The Off Season, the Recruiting Season, the Season of the Combines 155
Chapter 13 Return Migration 157
Chapter 14 Too Many Hits to the Head 169
Chapter 15 The Price for the Life 177
Chapter 16 The King of Halloween 187
Conclusion Miss Firecracker Queen 195
About the Author 197
CTE Related Resources 199