Today, school sports teams of all types travel state wide and some "traveling/All-star teams" can be found playing the width of the whole country. That has become the norm.
Not so in the 1960's. When I was a junior, we played in a "non-conference" football game and had to travel some distance to do it. The game was in a town called Union. The school was called Union-Whitten a consolidation at the time of the two schools or towns.
My school, Laurel, was roughly ten miles south of Marshalltown, Iowa and then it was another ten or fifteen miles to Union. That was quite a distance at that time. Not used to traveling in that area for any reason, it seemed like we were headed close to Minnesota. Plus, traveling in a slow moving bus and not any of it on an interstate or four-lane highway didn't help any.
We were playing a much larger school. Laurel's population was 250 or so and Union alone was twice that size. A regular Chicago. We held our own pretty good. We lost by only 20-7. One of my best friends still to this day, Jerry Roberts, was the center on the team. On one fourth down play he hiked the ball to me so I could punt it away. The ball went blazing over my head and by the time I went back in the end-zone to retrieve it, It seemed like the whole opposing team was on top of me.
Union-Whitten had used real lime to chalk their field. I had a skin burn along my left sideburn. It didn't go away for some time. Another classmate, Ben Wunn, had a burn along his one hip.
A funny footnote or reminder happened that same year when we played a conference school of Le Grand. Someone tackled me around the head and I pulled loose and kept running for a touch-down. I'm sure the guy, who attempted to tackle me, felt funny standing there with the helmet in his hands.
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