Bowling League Champs, 1962

I joined a Saturday morning bowling league in 1958. To do so, I had to give up piano lessons with Mrs. Delano, a kindly woman who went to the church I attended. Her hobby was painting rustic scenes on rocks. I think took my decision to stop taking lessons with with disappointment. We both understood that I was too lazy to practice the piano regularly and had no special musical talent.

While quitting the piano lessons disappointed my grandmother and my parents (they had bought me a piano), I was quite relieved to be heading to the Ozark Bowling Lanes on Saturday mornings instead of butchering some simple-minded piano tunes because of my lack of practice.

My dad, who worked at the Arkansas Western Gas Co. at the time, had been in a weekly bowling league on the Gas. Co team. He seemed to enjoy it and the group of men had lots of fun. I went with him some nights and mostly hung around the pinball machines. When I had a few extra nickels, I would play a machine with a baseball game. For this game, the player controlled the bat and swung at pitches offered up by the machine. More often than not, I did not get enough runs to win extra games, but it was a sweet feeling when things went well and the I got enough runs to hear the machine giving me free games.

I learned to bowl pretty quickly. An elderly man with thinning white hair ran the league taugh me the basis and was very encouraging. He seemed to always be in a good mood. Among the other bowlers, I recall Ricky Cowen, Carl Gabbard, Larry Bentley and Newt Land.

The second year, my bowling team won the league championship and ranked highly nationally. Somewhere in storage I have a trophy. I used to get it out to look at it when I started feeling bad about quitting piano lessons.

FHS Basketball, Justin Daniel and J.D. McConnell, 1961-1962

The 1961-1962 Fayetteville High School Bulldogs had an outstanding basketball team led by two superb athletes whose talents were augmented by several other excellent athletes. The best two players are shown in these pictures. J.D. McConnell played guard, putting to use his height, fluidity, and almost magical no-look passing. Justin Daniel was the center, though he was the same height as J.D.; he was a warrior with a hook shot.

I have written a few pages about the season of Justin and, J.D. It is available at this site:
https://www.scribd.com/doc/48613345/The-Season-of-Justin-and-JD

That article tells how the Bulldogs lost narrowly to the North Little Rock team in the Arkansas State Tournament. During that game, the team's main problem was getting the ball up the court: both Justin and J.D. played well against NLR, but the NLR team disrupted the guard play. One of the reasons for this problem was that Troy Steele, a fine player who had been the team's main guard, was missing (see his picture below, front rwo center). When I wrote about the FHS-NLR game, I did not know why Steele was not playing in the tournament. I have been told that he was kicked off of the team (by the principal, not the coach) because he got married during the season.

Young love cost FHS a state championship.