All I want to do is sing and dance
All I want is a little romance
All I want to do is take off my pants for you!
In the last 2 or 3 lines, I told you that both teams in the 1958 College All-Star Football Classic were quarterbacked by signal-callers from Rice University – my alma mater.
If you’re too young to have been a contestant on The Golden Bachelor, you’re too young to remember the College All-Star Football Classic – which I will heretofore refer to as the CASFC.
But if you’re as old as Gerry Turner – as I am – you probably watched the CASFC, an annual matchup between the reigning NFL champions and a team of college football all-stars in a preseason exhibition game that usually took place in early August.
My memories of the watching the CASFC are inextricably entwined with my memories of buying dozens of coverless paperback books for a nickel at the annual downtown “Sidewalk Sale” in my hometown. (More about that later . . .)
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The CASFC was the brainchild of Arch Ward, the sports editor of The Chicago Tribune. (Ward was also responsible for baseball’s All-Star Game.)
The inaugural CASFC drew 79,000-plus fans to Chicago’s Soldier Field, and ended in a scoreless tie.
The final CASFC, which took place in 1976, was suspended in the third quarter due to high winds, torrential rain, and lightning. During the delay, thousands of out-of-control fans invaded the field and tore down the goalposts. (So much for the fourth quarter.). The CASFC was never played again.
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All-Stars Dan Currie (L) and King Hill (R)
discuss strategy with coach Otto Graham
before the 1958 CASFC game |
The college all-star teams won only nine of the 42 CASFC games played. One of those victories came in 1958, when the all-stars (who were captained by Rice star and #1 overall draft choice King Hill) beat the NFL champion Detroit Lions (led by former Rice QB Tobin Rote) by a convincing 35-19 score.
* * * * *
By coincidence, the CASFC was often played the night before the annual “Sidewalk Sale” in downtown Joplin, Missouri – where I grew up.
The Joplin “Sidewalk Sale” dates to about 1960. Each summer, several blocks of Main Street were closed to traffic early on one Saturday morning, and Joplin’s downtown merchants would move their heavily-discounted wares to the sidewalks, hoping bargain-seeking shoppers would take them off their hands.
In those days, Joplin’s downtown had several department stores (including a Macy’s and a Sears) and a number of specialty retailers then – it was years before the Northpark Mall opened and Walmart came to town – and downtown was the only place to shop. So the sale drew big crowds.
* * * * *
I never had friends over to spend the night when I was growing up – our house was very small, and my bedroom had only one twin bed – but the night before the sidewalk sale was an exception to that rule.
Two or three friends would come over to watch the CASFC in my living room. We would then decamp to my patio, where we would play cards until the wee hours and then catch some Z’s on the patio furniture. (We always tried to stay awake the whole night, but I don’t think we ever succeeded.)
My mother would get up at the crack of dawn and pick up some Dude’s donuts for us. After we ate, she would transport us downtown in time for the 8:00 AM opening of the sale – it was only a ten-minute drive from my house. (Pretty much everything in Joplin was a ten-minute drive from my house.)
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| Dude's Daylight Donuts: simply the best |
We would wander around for a couple of hours and then head for the downtown movie theatre, which showed cartoons and old serials to the kids while the moms continued to shop. By noon, we were woozy from lack of sleep and ready to go home for a nap.
* * * * *
The closest thing Joplin had to a book store when I was a kid was Howsmon’s, which was mostly an office supplies store.
I recall that Howsmon’s had a decent supply of Modern Library hardbacks. (I know I bought the Modern Library edition of Julius Caesar’s commentaries on the Gallic War there. We were reading Caesar in my high-school Latin class, and I figured an English translation was just the ticket.) But most of Howsmon’s offerings were paperbacks.
I owned almost no books when I was growing up – my parents were very frugal, and we had a well-equipped public library, where I virtually lived in the summers – so Howsmon’s sidewalk sale paperback book offerings were always of great interest to me.
There was good news and bad news about those paperbacks. The good news was that they cost only five cents each – which was a real bargain. (I think the average cost of new paperbacks when I was a teenager was maybe 50 cents?)
The bad news is that Howsmon’s ripped the front covers off all of its five-cent sidewalk sale paperbacks. I was quite fastidious in those days, and I didn’t like the fact that the books had no front covers. But my cheapness outweighed my prissiness, and I usually went home with a dozen or so coverless paperbacks each year.
I doubt that I read most of those books. The sidewalk sale paperbacks didn’t represent the cream of Howsmon’s stock – there were no bestsellers or classics among them.
I did read Our Own Story, a ghostwritten book about the Rolling Stones that was published in 1965. (I was a y-u-g-e Stones fan back in the day.)
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Ironically, my copy of this book
about famed cover girl Jean
Shrimpton did not have a cover! |
But I don’t think I read fashion icon Jean Shrimpton’s autobiography, My Own Story: The Truth about Modelling, which was another of my coverless purchases. (Why did I buy a book about a British model? Because it only cost five cents, obviously.)
* * * * *
So why was Howsmon’s ripping the front covers off their sidewalk sale books and selling them for a nickel?
Howsmon’s seems to have been selling “stripped” books. From Wikipedia:
A stripped book is an unsold mass market paperback that has been stripped of its cover in order to be recycled. The covers are returned to the publisher as evidence that the books have been destroyed and to obtain a credit on the purchase price. The books are meant to be destroyed by pulping but some find their way to street merchants, presumably by illegal means, and are resold.
According to attorney Loretta DeLoggio,
[I]f a bookstore is selling a book without its front cover, there is a high likelihood that it is illegal. The reason for this is that when bookstores stop selling a particular book, they save shipping on returning 100 books by returning 100 book covers instead, and they get credit from the distributor. If they then sell the book without the cover, they have defrauded the distributor.
We don’t know for sure that Howsmon’s was cheating the distributors it bought paperbacks from by returning the front covers and getting a refund, and then selling the denuded books at the sidewalk sale. But if they were, they certainly weren’t getting rich doing it.
I’m guessing that Howsmon’s sidewalk-sale books were unpopular titles that the store figured just weren’t going to sell. So they stripped the covers and returned them to their distributor for a refund. But rather than throw the stripped books away, they priced them at a nickel and used them to attract customers to their store during the sidewalk sale.
I’ve read that bookstores sometimes got permission to give away stripped books to schools or prisons or nursing homes. Perhaps Howsmon’s cleared their sidewalk-sale practice with their paperback wholesaler . . . or perhaps not.
* * * * *
I recently heard today’s featured record on the Sirius/XM “Underground Garage” channel.
According to the group’s website, the Sugar Twins consisted of twins Holly and Honey Sugar and their male cousins – Lucky, Wood E., and Rusty Bottom. (You think someone’s pulling our leg?)
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| The Sugar Twins with Joan Jett |
“For You” was released on the group’s only album, Patio A-Go-Go, which was released in 1999.
Click here to listen to “For You.”
Click here to buy the recording from Amazon.
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