74 – Angelsea – Cat Stevens – 1972

Angelsea - Cat Stevens

                This song is from 1972’s Catch Bull at Four. It came out in September as I was beginning my first semester at Elgin Community College. My car at the time was the first of my three Mustangs, this one a 1968 maroon fastback which had a manual choke and got about 12 miles to the gallon (gas was about 35 cents/gallon)

                Catch Bull was another album I bought at Skipper’s in Carpentersville. I bought a lot of my albums there because they offered many for 3 for $10. Since I wasn’t working, going to ECC full time, I had no real income except what I could raise around the house by mowing the lawn, etc.

                I seem to recall that summer of ’72 playing a lot of pick-up basketball in nearby East Dundee, on a little court with chicken wire backboards near the Fox River called Triangle Park.

                At the time, kids from Algonquin, like me, went to Irving Crown High School in Carpentersville, while kids from Dundee went to Dundee High School. There was a huge rivalry between the two, that played out at Triangle Park that summer, because Dundee was the established school and Crown was where all the lower-middle class folk from Carpentersville sent their kids. Originally, when Algonquin, Carpentersville, and Dundee were smaller towns, all three went to Dundee, hence the team name: Dundee Cardunals (CARpentersville, DUNdee, ALgonquin).

                Today, with Algonquin growing from 1500, when we moved there in 1959, to over 30,000, they have their own high school, Jacobs (though where I grew up on the east side of the mighty Fox River still goes to Crown) and Dundee High School was closed and those kids also go to Crown (now called Dundee-Crown). Quite the comedown for the snooty Dundeeites.

                The old Dundee H.S on Rt. 31 in West Dundee was called Dundee Jr. High School in my yout’ (it’s long gone) and it had the single most unique basketball court I’ve ever played on. It was actually the stage of the school’s auditorium. Since it was too small to fit the full court length on it, the backcourts overlapped to the free throw line, i.e. to bring the ball into your half you had to advance the ball all the way to your free throw line, then once you’d crossed it, your forecourt became everything from your opponent’s free throw line behind you to the wall just under your basket.

                Then, because you’re on a stage, if you try to save a ball from going out of bounds towards the stage front, you had to be careful, because the stage dropped off about 4 feet into the audience about five feet outside the sideline). Made for some interesting games.

                I played several games there and watched many more when the Dundee Park District has Men’s League games scheduled there. My dad refereed for the Dundee Park District and I accompanied him to watch games when Floyd’s (a long gone restaurant that was next door to the old high school) sponsored team played.

                In the 7^th grade, I had a crush on my English teacher, Miss Thompson. She was cute and bubbly and she liked me. I cleaned erasers for her and did anything to help out and hang out around her.

`               Also, the 7^th grade was the first time I had a chance to try out for an organized basketball team (my son, Zay started b-ball at age 6!!! Like everything else, they start ‘em young these days. He attended a b-ball camp for a week this summer at age 10!). I didn’t make the cut for the 7^th grade team. I was almost 6 feet tall, but I was skinny as a rail and uncoordinated to boot.

                However, I enjoyed going to games to watch my dad ref Men’s games, shooting baskets during the time outs. I particularly looked forward to watching Floyd’s team because they had a guy who had the prettiest jump shot (and I use that word intentionally). His form was perfect, so much so that he even shot his free throws using it.

                In the 8^th grade I came back to find that my English teacher was Mrs. Strombom. Mrs. Strombom? What happened to the love of my life, Miss Thompson? When I went to my first English class, I found that Mrs. Strombom was indeed my Miss Thompson. I was a little crushed. She hadn’t waited for me!

                Then I thought a little more, my favorite player on Floyd’s, the one with the perfect jump shot, was George Strombom. Could it be? Of course it was.

                Fast forward two years to my sophomore year at Crown, my coach was George Strombom and though I made the team, I rarely played, because I was now 6’3’, 190 lbs., soaking wet, and as I wrote in #5, God’s Song, at that height I was the 4^th tallest person on the team and could only play center(?), which meant I could not dribble or shoot from beyond 4 feet from the basket, even though I could drive pretty well, like my idol Pistol Pete Maravich of LSU.

                The one thing I couldn’t do, though, was shoot a jump shot. My shot, while somewhat accurate, was a sort of one footed push off. My dad played for Elgin High School in the early 50’s, the age of the set shot. You shot with both feet planted on the floor, so he couldn’t help me learn to jump shoot. Coach Strombom took an interest in helping me, probably because he knew my dad from years of playing with Floyd’s, and so he showed me how to jump and shoot with both feet leaving the floor at the same time. 

               In the classic rags-to-riches sports story I would go on to become the star of the team with my newfound jump shot, but, alas, it was not to be. I still sat on the bench my junior and senior years. Though I did become proficient from 15-20 feet away, I never tried a shot that far out in a high school game, I’d have found myself out of the game and on the bench in a heartbeat.

             At the end of my sophomore year my parents came to me with what I found to be a very unsettling idea. Since I had started school earlier than most (I was only 4 when I started Kindergarten), I could sit out the second semester of my sophomore year, then the next year, start again as a sophomore. I couldn’t picture myself being left behind by all my friends and have to start all over with new ones, in the same school, so I said no. It would have been cool to play for Coach Strombom again, but I’ve always wondered…….(#11)

             Coach Sayre, the varsity coach, had several edicts that I can’t see today’s kids acceding to as quietly as we did. He hated long hair (this was 1969-1971) and had a rule that your hair could be no longer than 2.5 inches, or, if he came up and grabbed you by the hair and you couldn’t get away, it was too long and you needed a haircut. Also, everyone had to wear white, high-top Converse Chuck Taylor’s, no exceptions. One game we did our warm-ups with sweat bands on our wrists and when we came back to the locker room for the pre-game talk he laced into us and we quickly took them off and placed them inside our knee socks (the uniform style of the day was a jersey with a flap that hung down behind you that you pulled through your legs and buttoned on the front, with tight short shorts. I wore underwear under my jock so I wouldn’t get skid marks on the flap that crawled up my butt crack during my long sits on the bench).

                Around this time my dad gave me a copy of “A Sense of Where You Are,” by John McPhee, a great profile of Bill Bradley at Princeton University in the early 1960’s. He was an All-American who delayed entering the NBA for 2 years so he could accept a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University in England. He became my second hero. From then on whenever I made a shot from outside, I would say out loud, “#24 Bill Bradley!” And if I made a great drive and threw in a shot that came out of my ass (as it were), I’d say, “Pistollll Pete!”

             
               I also became (and remain) a fan of John McPhee and his beautiful writing on such varying subjects as shad fishing (and eating), train engineers, and Mississippi river barge pilots (all great profiles from the New Yorker).