OH, THAT OLD COLLEGE SPIRIT
LOURENE WISHART
Nebraska
"Lourene, quitcher bitchin'!"
That's Virginia Hadley talking. She and her friend Lourene Wishart are having lunch at the Cornhusker, as swank an eatery as you can find in Lincoln, Neb. Lourene's been bitchin' about the food, the service and the color of the table-cloth. Being 91 years old and all and having accumulated a certain amount of wisdom in those years, she figures she has a right to speak her mind. She asks a young waiter what he thinks of the Big Red's chances for the coming season. "Pretty good," he says, a little timidly.
Lourene smiles a big, round, toothy smile and lets him shuffle off. When he's almost out of earshot, she hollers, "That pansy! What the hell does he know about Nebraska football?"
Certainly not nearly as much as Lourene. She hasn't missed a home game in 61 years. "I go because I like a winner," she says. "I've always been a winner."
She's also a woman of immense vitality. She ambles around her colonial-style cottage in glasses with rhinestone frames, a lace blouse and skirt, and a pendant strung with big plastic elephants. "The fella who gave it to me said they were ivory," she says with some indignation. Evidently, she doesn't know ivory as well as Cornhuskers. Lourene wears elephants mostly because she's a lifelong Republican. Her late husband, Joseph, ran for governor as a Republican in 1946. Her other passions are raising prize Manchester terriers, the country music of Red Foley and lilacs. Lourene was born on Lilac Farm in nearby Bennet. She sold the homestead 10 years ago, but plenty of hybrid lilacs surround her house: pink lace, woodland, Carolyn Mae and snow shower.
Lourene is small and frail, and takes your arm as she walks down the wooden steps to the Go-Big-Red Room in her basement. She pokes around the shrine, shoving Husker artifacts at you: Big Red beer mugs. Big Red pennants, Big Red deck chairs. She has a crocheted doll of Mike Rozier and a gold statuette of Johnny Rodgers filled with 100-proof Kentucky bourbon. Her collection of Big Eight swizzle sticks is perhaps unrivaled in the Western Hemisphere. In the far corner stands her hangin' tree, a willow branch painted red that's modeled after the one in Boot Hill cemetery in Tombstone, Ariz. After Nebraska victories she holds mock hangings of the loser. She has strung up stuffed Kansas jayhawks, Army mules and LSU tigers.
The game she cherishes most is the 1973 Orange Bowl. "Our quarterback, Dave Humm, licked the pants off Notre Dame," she says. "Oh boy, they were mad. I got in the Irish players' bus after the game and Otto couldn't find me." Otto, her chauffeur, used to drive her to games in a lilac-colored Cadillac. "Wow!" she says. "You better not tell how much those fellas swore. I don't suppose Parseghian knows that."
Her favorite player? "Dave Humm," she says without hesitation. "He was the handsomest thing I ever laid eyes on. He used to come over here and just sit and talk. Drove the women crazy."
Lourene will never forgive Miami for stealing the national championship from her Huskers last season. "My feelings about that wouldn't be fit to write," she says. "It was the worst thing that happened in my life." But she thinks her friend Virginia is wrong in saying the '83 squad was Nebraska's best ever.
"Well, how come they won all those awards then, Lourene?"
"Yes, Virginia, they did win lots of awards, some of which nobody ever heard of."
Lourene says she prefers the '71 team that won the national title.
"Well, Lourene," says Virginia, "they didn't win the awards."
"Yes, Virginia. But they didn't lose the championship, either."
THE HOWELLS
North Carolina A&T
When President Truman's telegram arrived, Mary Howell was out on the front porch, gazing at the crowd headed for World War Memorial Stadium. Her husband, Clifton, was already at the game, cheering on his alma mater, North Carolina A & T. The telegram said that their oldest son, Clifton II, had been killed in action in Korea. Mary sent a friend to the stadium to tell her husband, and the sad news was broadcast over the loudspeaker. "That was the only Homecoming I've missed in the 62 years we've been married," she says. "I guess God was in it somehow so we could get the message."
But Mary went back the next season and every one of the 32 since. For seven decades porch-sitting and Aggie Homecoming games have been autumn constants in the Howells' lives. And except for the time somebody snatched Mary's purse—"I really only had but two or three dollars in it," she says—the Homecomings have been a lot happier. In fact, Mary's and Clifton's Homecoming Day bashes have become legendary. "We just love the fellowship," she says. "We have chicken, ham, potato salad, candied yams—everybody loves candied yams—pickles and icebox rolls."
Both Howells are in their 80s. Their faces have the burnished look of old leather covering fine and learned books. Mary is a warm, comfortable woman in a cheery floral dress. The number "50" glitters on a gold chain around her neck. A dentist friend made it for her 50th wedding anniversary. On the wall of the Howell home in Greensboro, she proudly displays her diploma from the Academy of Millinery Design and a citation for "excellence and creative achievement in the subject of the bridal veil." Clifton is a happily mismatched kind of guy who'll wear a powder-blue shirt, bright yellow pants held up by red suspenders and Converse lowtops he keeps loosely tied because of bunions. He walks with a metal cane, and when he's not walking, he's rocking and chewing Juicy Fruit gum at the same pace.
When Mary and Clifton met, she was just a local girl and he was an Aggie football hero and president of the student body. He'd seen her drive across campus in a red Chevy, and said, "Now that girl is for me." He asked her to be his guest on the next hayride. "From then on we became friends," she recalls. They eloped in Clifton's senior year, but they didn't live together. "We still courted like we always had," Mary says. "We knew Clifton's daddy would pull him out of college if he knew we'd married."
A touch of rheumatism has cramped Clifton's style a bit on Homecoming Day, but he gets riled up all the same. "Clifton is still a wild man," says Mary. "He gets too nervous, and I have to calm him down. He'll scream, 'Play 'em off the field! Hold 'em! Get 'em below the knees! That's not the way to tackle!' "
Clifton became an expert in tackling in 1922. That was the year his crucial hit helped the Aggies beat Virginia Union, a victory that earned them football respectability. Dr. Albert Spruill, the historian of A & T football, wrote in Great Recollections from Aggieland, "He [Howell] caught up with his adversary and made him the victim."
The truth, Clifton says, was somewhat less heroic: "Coach was shouting at me from the sidelines, 'Big man, if you don't get that guy, I'll kill you.' "
WALTER MAY
Clemson
If you ever find yourself in Columbia, S.C., cruise up Main Street past the Ta-kin' Five 41-item salad bar, past Taco Cid, past Wigs 'n Things and the Duck-In restaurant ("Quackin' Good Food"), past the Seoul Restaurant & Lounge and the sign that says SWAMP WIGGLER'S, RED WORMS, NITE-CRAWLERS, MINNOWS, PRODUCE AND CRICKET and turn right after the Krispy Kreme Doughnut shop. At the bend in the road you'll come to a brick bungalow. That's where a retired bookkeeper named Walter May has lived for 61 years. "There's nothing fine about it," he says, "but it's comfortable and paid for."
Which is about how South Carolina fans regard May at Williams-Brice Stadium in Columbia: not exactly interesting, but modestly monumental. He has attended every Clemson-South Carolina game since 1911, the year he dropped out of Clemson. All May remembers about that first game is the score. "We beat them 27-0," he says. He doesn't know why he left school. "To tell you the truth," he says, "I never have been able to figure it out."
May is a homebred Southern boy, born in Columbia, where he learned to love country music, go to church on Sunday and ignore the University of South Carolina, his hometown team. His one year at Clemson made him a lifelong Tiger fan. His devotion to the university 140 miles to the northwest earned him the nickname Clemson.
May is thin and wiry, and his hands are strong and embossed with veins. He's 92 and he talks slow and easy, like a courthouse whittler. If you've got a minute or two he'll remind you that a couple of Heisman Trophy winners, George Rogers and Herschel Walker, failed to cross the Clemson goal line. He'll also tell you how Banks McFadden, a Tiger quarterback in the '30s, flummoxed South Carolina with a quick kick on first down.
The closest May ever came to missing a Clemson-South Carolina game was in 1942, when an inner-ear infection nearly felled him at the gate. "My head started spinning and people thought I was drunk," he recalls. In those days, South Carolina was always the home team, because the big game was played at the state fairgrounds in Columbia, and highway patrolmen used to prowl the bleachers for bootleg liquor and take-out rowdies. "I got inside and the thing hit me like that," says May, snapping his fingers. "It kinda—heh-heh—held me up. So I set down on a Coca-Cola crate for 10, 15 minutes and it passed off." May has many down-homey anecdotes like that, in fact exactly like that.
He loves Clemson, but he has never worked up much of a distaste for South Carolina. "I'm not the type of guy that hates the Gamecocks," he says. "But Lord knows, I sure don't pull for them."
GILES PELLERIN
USC
Then there's the story of the game that almost got away from Giles Pellerin. He was pledging allegiance to the flag at a Rotary Club meeting in Burbank four days before USC's big game with Stanford in 1949. One of the Rotarians told Pellerin he looked as white as a polar ice cap. "It was appendicitis," says Pellerin. "The first question that entered my mind was how long I'd be in the hospital."
He didn't want to mess up his streak. The doctor at Queen of Angels Hospital said he didn't think Pellerin would make the game, but Pellerin had other ideas. Clad in his hospital gown, Pellerin had his brother Oliver walk him up and down the corridors so he could regain his strength. And when the physician didn't show that Saturday, Pellerin slipped on his street clothes, snuck out of the hospital and rode to the game with Oliver.
When Pellerin returned to the hospital later that afternoon, his face was a little sunburnt. "Where have you been?" asked a nurse. "Oh," answered Pellerin, "I've been getting a little exercise."
He has been getting a little exercise now for 58 years. Neither rain nor snow nor appendectomy can keep Perpetual Pellerin away from a USC game. The Trojans haven't played without him since 1926. At his first game he watched them innundate Whittier 74-0. That's 618 games in a row and counting.
Pellerin graduated from USC with an engineering degree in 1923 and spent the next 45 years working at Pacific Telephone. He has traveled more than 750,000 miles to see the Trojans play. He's dapper and goal-post slim, and looks a good deal younger than his 77 years. During the season he watches the Trojans practice two or three times a week, and on the road he hangs out in the team's hotel lobby, talking to the boys and meeting their parents. "We've played in cities like Austin, Little Rock and Ann Arbor," he says, "and each gives me the opportunity to see college campuses and go to pep rallies and make hundreds of friends throughout the United States and correspond with them." At Christmas he sends out about 150 cards to people he has met in his Pellerin peregrinations.
All his old ticket stubs are held together by rubber bands in a shoebox in his San Marino home. He used to have all the programs, too, but he lost most of them in a garage fire. He still has the gold watch USC gave him to commemorate his 500th straight game, the 1973 Rose Bowl. "Sure, I could sit in my rocking chair and grow old," he says. "But I don't intend to do that. You've got to have something to look forward to."
Oliver had a streak going himself, but he took a break for World War II. He hasn't missed a USC game since 1947. Pellerin's youngest brother, Max, had his streaks interrupted by the Korean War and an assignment with Northrup Aircraft in Saudi Arabia. Max is now working on a modest 50-gamer. And then there's Pellerin's wife, Jessie, who has accompanied him to games since 1935. They courted at USC games for almost two years. "When we die," Pellerin says, "we will bequeath $750,000 to the team. We consider them our children."
His extended football family includes such favorite sons as Anthony Davis, Gary Jeter, Lynn Swann, Pat Haden, Mike Garrett, Marcus Allen and Frank Gifford. Gifford's 1951 squad gave Pellerin his quintessential football experience, a quasi-mystical event that began at halftime when USC was trailing Cal 14-0. "At the start of the third quarter," he says, "off in the distance you could hear drumbeats. They got louder and louder. Suddenly, in marched the Trojan band, which had been waylaid by a train wreck. With the beating of those drums you could almost see the momentum building." The Trojans scored the next three touchdowns and won 21-14.
"Every year I tell myself I'm not going back," Pellerin says halfheartedly. "Then I look ahead to something like this season's Arizona State game, in Tempe. We've never won in Tempe, and, I just have to be there with 'em." He can hardly wait until 1992 when, he reckons, he'll see his 700th straight game. "That is," he says, "unless USC goes to the Rose Bowl two or three times before then."
ROGER CONNERS
Lafayette
In that misty era before brittle quarterbacks and 300-page playbooks, a rugged brand of football was played between the Lafayette Leopards and the Lehigh Engineers in the rolling hills of Eastern Pennsylvania. Legend has it that the colossal Leopard linebackers could strip an Engineer halfback naked with a single sweep of their paws and pull off his toes as if they were daisy petals. It's said that the officials in those days were usually prison wardens, and instead of meting out yardage as penalties, they decreed sentences varying from two days to 25 years.
Of course, not many people think of Lehigh and Lafayette as football schools anymore, but a few relics survive from that time. The Lehigh-Lafayette series, which dates from 1884, can claim the all-time greatest fan anywhere in Howard Foering, who had seen 99 games in a row before he died nine years ago at 106. (The teams played twice a season through 1901, and in 1943 and '44.) Lehigh has a dozen alumni who have witnessed at least 50 Double-L games. Heading the list is a retired steel-mill superintendent named Albert Chenoweth, 91, who saw his first Big Game in 1912, the year he was a backup quarterback as a freshman. He missed the 1918 game because he was in France serving with the U.S. Army. Since then he has been to 67 consecutive Double-Ls.
Chenoweth, however, lags behind Roger Conners of Lafayette. Conners, who attended Lafayette but never graduated, has seen every game in the series since 1912. "There doesn't seem to be the enthusiasm there used to be," he says. "But because of this record, it's hard to miss. Besides, by going to college football games, you meet a nice class of people."
Conners, 82, lives in Easton, the Leopards' den. He spends much of his time between games hanging out at the insurance company he founded, which is now run by his son and grandson. Conners remembers that he went to his first Lehigh-Lafayette game with his father and Dr. Arthur Fox. He treasures a souvenir ticket that he keeps in his wallet. Unfortunately, it's from his second game, in 1913. Conners almost didn't make that game because Dr. Fox's Model T lost the plug in its oil pan. Dr. Fox jammed a corncob into the hole, and they made it to Taylor Field in time for the kickoff. Chenoweth threw a touchdown pass to give Lehigh a 7-0 win.
Conners remembers the old players best. Like Joe DuMoe. "Joe was sort of a tramp athlete from Syracuse and Ford-ham," he recalls. "They found out he was a professional hockey player and tossed him out of school." And Doc Elliott, a freshman who took over as fullback midway through the 1921 season and scored every Leopard touchdown in a 28-6 rout of the Engineers. "After the season Doc got mixed up with a bad crowd," says Conners. "He and some guys cleaned out the York Restaurant and threw a safe out the window. Doc was thrown out of college, too."
The one game Conners didn't particularly care for was the Engineers' 78-0 win in 1917. "We always claimed all our boys went to war," he says, "and theirs stayed home and went to Lehigh."
The Leopards have won only three times in the past 13 years, but they still hold a 65-49-5 edge. "We're so far ahead that they'll never catch up while I'm alive," Conners says. "At least I have that satisfaction."
WES SCHULMERICH AND CHARLES THARP
Oregon State
Wes Schulmerich seems as tall as a Douglas fir and has a booming laugh that sounds like an eruption at Mount St. Helens. He's 83 and his face has a crisp ruggedness to it. Charles Tharp, who is 79, is a rotund, short-legged former Chrysler dealer with steel-frame glasses that make his ears bug out. His hair has thinned considerably, and his face has some well-earned lines.
Schulmerich and Tharp share a love for gin rummy, trout fishing and Oregon State football. They've been to every Beaver home game for 62 years. They've sat in row 34 at Parker Stadium in Corvallis for the last 35 years, though not necessarily together. They argue too much. Usually Schulmerich's wife, Cecile, sits between them as a buffer. Schulmerich tends to yell his head off, and Tharp looks on with plump-cheeked amusement.
Schulmerich might say he thinks Terry Baker was the greatest Beaver of them all. "I wouldn't go for Baker," says Tharp. "Never did like him personally."
"That isn't the object Charlie."
"He wasn't any better at his position than Leonard Younce was at guard."
"Well, that's your opinion."
They have such a boyish camaraderie that you half expect one of them to burst out singing, "Here's to good friends, tonight is kinda special." Their friendship has endured moose hunting trips to Alaska, the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City and a trek across the Outback of Australia. "It keeps us young," says Tharp, who lives a block from campus with his 15-year-old apricot-colored poodle, Beethoven. His wife, Jane, died in 1979. "After the games we all come to my house for a big feed and to tip a few," Tharp says.
Schulmerich and Tharp both went to Oregon State in the '20s. When Tharp got out of college he sold Chryslers and eventually opened his own agency. He got out of the car business six years ago. Schulmerich still drives to games in the Dodge Charger his best friend sold him in 1978. "That s.o.b. has kept me broke since 1945," says Schulmerich.
"Are you kidding?" says Tharp. "That s.o.b. kept me broke every time I traded with him."
In 1927 Schulmerich turned down a $100-a-game contract to play football for the Frankford, Pa. Yellowjackets of the NFL. He kicked around bush-league baseball for a while and even played in the majors for four seasons with the Braves, Phillies and Reds. In 1933 he started in the same Philadelphia outfield with Chuck Klein. Batted .318, too, fifth best in the National League.
By then, he and Tharp were well into their string. They only go to home games, and they never go to Eugene to see the rival Oregon Ducks. "Wes and I don't like them, and they don't like us," says Tharp. "Walk down the street and they'll throw mud at ya."
Tharp says the "meanest, nastiest thing" he ever did was after a game in 1924 with Oregon. The Ducks had just beaten the Beavers, and a couple of Oregon fans had stolen Tharp's rooter lid, which is what he called his hat. "I stood behind a tree and waited until their car came around the corner," says Tharp. "Then I threw an oak branch through their windshield and ran off."
"You see what a disposition he's got," says Schulmerich.
If the Beavers win when Schulmerich has his letter sweater on, he'll keep wearing it to games until they lose. He hasn't worn his sweater three games in a row since 1978. Still, he and Tharp remain loyal. "They need you more when they're losing than when they're winning," says Tharp. "Everybody comes to see a winner. We've never quit 'em."
Schulmerich, a retired fishing-resort guide, has beaten cancer. He says he refuses to die until the Beavers win three games in one season. "Every year they don't do it," he says, "and I say I'll be back for the next campaign. My ambition is to live long enough to see it, but I don't think I'm gonna make it."
"I think this year's team is good enough to win two games," Tharp says.
"I'll bet you right now that we don't win two games."
"A bottle of booze?"
"A bottle of booze."
PAUL RIDINGS
TCU
Paul Ridings is spinning his Yard-O-Matic punting wheel—a cardboard contraption that measures the lengths of punts—in the press box at Amon G. Carter Stadium and is wearing these clothes: lilac pants, mulberry blazer, violet shirt-with fuchsia cuff links, prune-colored tie, lavender cowboy hat and magenta cowboy boots. A TCU pinkie ring adorns his right hand. He looks great.
Ridings loves the Horned Frogs with a purple passion. In the bedroom of his Fort Worth home he keeps more than 50 purple shirts, 15 pairs of purple socks, four purple jackets and one purple suit. And those are just his lounging clothes. On road trips he takes along his purple pj's and purple smoking jacket and purple-and-white bedroom slippers. Guess what color his underwear is.
Ridings has attended 381 straight Horned Frog home-and-away games. He hasn't missed one since a 13-9 loss to Ole Miss in the 1948 Delta Bowl. He has traveled as far as Seattle and Miami, paying his own way, to keep the string intact. He figures he has seen 521 TCU games all told. That's 63% of the games the school has played since its first one, in 1896, against Toby's Business College. "We won 8-6," he says, consulting his voluminous library of statistics. Ridings was TCU's statistician for 35 years.
"I'm infamous now," he says. "My wife, Freddie, wishes I'd quit, but it's some idiot thing I can't stop." Ridings likes action. He's 67 and he doesn't want to sit around waiting for an opening in a_ retirement village. He runs a public relations agency, and he's there every workday from 9 to 5:30. He has been an action guy since 1929 when, at age 12, he was the Horned Frogs' mascot during their first Southwest Conference championship season. Young Paul sat on the bench and wore a little Frog uniform. Naturally, he went to TCU. He had a 100-game spectator streak going that ended in 1937 when he left Fort Worth to attend Missouri's school of journalism.
His current skein started when he returned to become chairman of the journalism department at TCU. The string was nearly broken 13 years ago against Penn State. Ridings and several cronies chartered a private jet to fly them to the game in University Park. Fog grounded the plane in Wheeling, W. Va. They had to take a commercial airliner to Pittsburgh, rent a car and race the 124 miles to Penn State.
"We didn't get to the stadium until halfway through the first quarter," says Ridings. "By that time Raymond Rhodes had scored TCU's first touchdown. Then Penn State ran it up in a barnburner." Rhodes's TD is the only Horned Frog score in 36 years that Ridings hasn't seen.
Ridings has preserved his streak despite a cataract operation and a heart attack. "Paul always manages to arrange all his problems in the spring," says Freddie. The Ridingses were married one autumn night in 1939 after a TCU-Texas A & M game. They flew home from their 25th wedding anniversary in Acapulco in time to see the Horned Frogs beat Clemson 14-10. They cut short their 30th anniversary in Honolulu to catch the night owl to Dallas and make a connection for Florida only to see TCU lose 14-9 to Miami.
Ridings admits the decline of the Froggies in the last decade has taxed his loyalty. His record for the past 10 seasons is 15-90-5. Very few people know this, but TCU has never lost to Texas when Ridings delivered the pep-rally speech. He always ends his call to arms by saying, "Frogs, go give 'em hell—but do it in the Christian spirit!"
BOBBI HOVIS AND TWEEDIE SEARCY
Navy
Claiming to be Navy's greatest fan is more slippery than dredging oysters from an icy Chesapeake Bay skipjack in midwinter. But one Middie follower is more dogged than any other. She's Teako Taco, a 6-year-old miniature dachshund the color of a football and the shape of a bratwurst. She lives in Annapolis and goes to Navy home games with a couple of other ladies named Bobbi Hovis and Tweedie Searcy, who are retired U.S. Navy nurses.
They take Teako to the games in a personalized duffel bag. She wears a tiny Navy bridge coat to pep rallies, a dinky sailor cap to tailgate parties and a woollen GO NAVY sweater to the games. She eats subs and drinks navy-bean soup poured from her own thermos. She even has her own gate pass. The only other animal that regularly attends Mid-die home games is the Navy goat.
Teako has been going to Middie home games since she was a pup. Six seasons may not sound like much in human terms, but in dog years it's 42. Bobbi, 58, and Tweedie, 61, have missed only a handful of games at Navy-Marine Corps Stadium since 1968. The ladies used to take another dachshund named Snoopy, but she died in 1978 after 11 campaigns, which may be all the Navy football a dachsie can stand.
Bobbi is the more adventurous of Teako's companions. She owned a plane before she owned a car, and was the first woman to fly a Navy jet, an F3D Sky-knight. She was also the first Navy nurse to volunteer for Vietnam duty and the first woman elected to the Naval Academy Sailing Squadron. She keeps a 22-foot Catalina moored to the dock behind the house where she and Tweedie live.
These two Navy hellcats met 33 years ago while stationed in California. Bobbi was making medical evacuation runs between Hawaii and the Alameda Naval Air station during the Korean War. Tweedie was a nurse anesthetist at the submarine base on Mare Island.
Bobbi is the bigger football fan. She bicycles to practice two or three times a week, often with Teako bundled up in the basket. She grew up in Edinboro, Pa., wanting to be a flight nurse and listening to Navy games on the radio. She was particularly inspired by the movie Navy Blue and Gold, in which halfback Truck Cross (Jimmy Stewart) radiates the all-American virtues of decency, optimism, idealism and wholesome naiveté.
Tweedie didn't care for football all that much. She saw her first game in 1949, but she doesn't remember a lot about it, except that the opponent was Army. Tweedie got her name from a parakeet named Toby. Toby pronounced Owedia, Searcy's given name "Tweedie." Tweedie joined the Navy to see the world. And she has. Her tours of duty have ranged from Cuba to Alaska to Southeast Asia. She has attended cooking school in Dieppe, France and written a cookbook called Tweedie's Treats. Included in it are recipes for Parfait Peggy Sue, Mocha Mambo and Warm Clyde. Her game-day party meatballs are enlivened by grape jelly.
If every dog has its day, then surely Teako's was the 1979 Oyster Bowl in Norfolk, Va. Navy trailed William and Mary at the half by a TD. "We changed her from her little blue-and-gold T shirt to her blue-and-gold sweater with the anchor," says Bobbi. "The kids came out steaming, and we won handily." Now, whenever Navy is behind at intermission, Teako does a quick change.
Teako hasn't disclosed which of the 48 games she has seen she liked best. It probably wasn't when she came snout-to-snout with the Yale bulldog. She also appeared somewhat chagrined during her lone encounter with Navy's human mascot, a Middie in goat's clothing. "Teako barked and barked at him," says Tweedie. "She's not used to goats who wear boxing gloves."
Teako's favorite player is Joe DiRenzo, '82, a second-string placekicker. "When she sees Joe," says Bobbi, "she just wags and wags and wags and slurpy-slurpies." In fact, Middie players seem to look forward to Teako's visits. As Tweedie points out, Teako smells a lot better than the goat.
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At the drop of a hat, Wishart will give you an earful on anything from slipshod restaurant service to her favorite Husker team.
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Mary and Clifton: tasty Homecoming fetes.
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No wonder May, a Tiger fan for 73 years, hasn't switched allegiance to South Carolina.
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A toast to 618 and counting: from left, Giles, Max, Jessie, Oliver, Max's wife, Gladys.
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A broken oil pan in Dr. Fox's Model T nearly made Conners miss his Leopards in 1913.
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Conners still has his 1913 ticket stub.
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Schulmerich (left) and Tharp have survived moose hunting in Alaska, an Australian Outback trek—and 62 seasons of Beaver football.
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Mr. Purple has seen 381 consecutive Horned Frog games—plus 140 before that, to boot.
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Hovis (left) and Searcy have nursed Teako through Navy games for 42 dog years.