Rebs 'n Dawgs

"The University is respected. But Ole Miss is loved. The University gives a diploma and regretfully terminates tenure. But one never graduates from Ole Miss."

-Frank E. Everett, Jr., B.A. '32, LLB '34, The University of Mississippi

Foggy and 46 out there. Feeling a lot better today; thanks for asking.

I suppose I could rattle on about the wave of investigations and impeachments and criminal charges, about the impotent old potentate whose only concern in the wake of his national rebuke seems to be completing the project of building and preserving memorials to himself. His Thousand Year Reich sputtered to a halt in the space of a couple years.

But I'm already bored with all that. Let's talk about football.

Tomorrow afternoon the Ole Miss Rebels host the Georgia Bulldogs in Oxford. The occasion brings a flood of memories this morning.

I have been to one, and only one, Ole Miss home game. It was homecoming, October 18, 1986, and the whipping boy invited for the occasion was the University of Southwest Louisiana. We were in town having just arrived from California for Undergraduate Pilot Training just down the road at Columbus AFB, and had traveled up to my father's boyhood home in Water Valley to spend time with family. We were staying with Aunt Alice and Uncle Happy at their tidy little red brick rancher, when their daughter Alice Faye and her husband Brooks (aka "Butch"), the only two in our entire extended clan who's attended college, invited us to the game.

Let me start by saying homecoming at USC was not the spectacle one encounters to this day in Oxford. That morning we put on our nicest khaki shorts, and I found an aloha shirt in a garish array of colors that included those of the Rebs.

When Faye and Butch pulled up in the driveway, dressed in Baptist Sunday finery, I pivoted in the carport to dive back into the house and find a collared shirt and some long pants. I was still grossly underdressed for the occasion, and I could tell my cousins were a little embarrassed.

We stopped to pick up Butch's father before the short drive up to Oxford. As we drove past fields of cotton that were just about ready to pick, the elder Chittom matter of factly told the story from his youth of how black workers used to hide up in the trees that bordered the field to avoid the back breaking work of picking cotton. He went on to describe finding a big branch on the ground that he proceeded to use to knock those ******* (you can guess the word) out of the trees and teach them a thing or two. I recall laughter in the car, and an uncomfortable glance at my relatively new wife at the time, a Yankee who'd never been around this sort of talk.

The tailgate party, such as it was, took place in a Victorian "cottage" on University Avenue. The only blacks we saw that day not wearing shoulder pads were the servants bringing cocktails and finger food like tea sandwiches and cold boiled shrimp. It was quite a spread. I was introduced as something of an exotic, Dean's Boy here from California to go fly those jets. Letting the host and other guests know I was a West Coast Philistine overcame the embarrassment of my sartorial lapse.

I don't recall much about the game except that it was a pretty day, Ole Miss won handily, and everyone was pretty drunk when we got there because you couldn't drink in the stadium back then. The undergrads from fraternities and sororities were dressed in their starched best, on a rather hot afternoon. Old times there are not forgotten.

Then I remember back even further, to a game I didn't even attend.

On October 10, 1970, the Rebels traveled to Athens to play the Dawgs between the hedges. I was six, and we'd just moved to Atlanta a little over a year before.

Dad's job with Howard Johnson's back then was Director of Franchisee Relations for the Southeast, which entailed lots of driving to franchise restaurants and getting to know the owners. The owner of two stores, one just north of downtown Atlanta and one in his hometown of Statesboro, Georgia, was the inimitable H. Lehman Franklin. Dad and Lehman hit it off immediately, even though they couldn't have been more different. Dad grew up poor on a farm, never made it past high school, and to quote John Mellencamp "earned every dollar that passed through his hands." Lehman was the scion of one of the first families of Bulloch County, and married into another. He was a graduate of the University of Georgia School of Law. Besides practicing law, he had a car dealership and these two Howard Johnson's restaurants. He summered at the family's 1930s beach house out on Tybee Island.

But Dad and Lehman shared two loves: scotch and making money. And they were both funny as hell when they were together. By the fall of 1970 they were thick as thieves.

So it shouldn't have come as a surprise when Lehman and Emma Lou invited my parents to accompany them to see the Dawgs play Ole Miss, to sit in what I know for a fact were fabulous season tickets because I've parked my backside in those very seats decades later.

Hopes were high for the Dawgs that day, and it sounds like there was a little jawboning at the tailgate party after several cocktails, directed to my father. Dad grew up loving Ole Miss football, having spent his childhood just a few miles down the road from the institution he could never have hoped to attend. It was part of his identity, and apparently that became known at this sodden gathering.

Of course, if it hadn't been known before, it became a little more difficult to hide during the game. You see, the greatest football player ever to don pads and a helmet in the Southeast Conference was on the field that day: Archie Manning, the senior quarterback of the Rebels.

All I know of what transpired was related to me later by my teetotaling mother. The game stayed close into the fourth quarter, when Arch and Ole Miss pulled away for a 31-21 victory. Dad, in his cups, was as always the gracious victor. Well, you have to know I'm kidding about that. Apparently, Dad was a little overenthused about the victory, and may have taunted those around him in the deep red Georgia alumni section that afternoon. Why do that? Dad always had a chip on his shoulder about his roots, and had a deep love-hate relationship with the Magnolia State. That, and a little too much Cutty Sark, led him to be less than his best self. Mom said Emma Lou was not amused.

But Lehman obviously didn't much care. For four years after that, we gathered every summer at the Franklins' place on Tybee, their mammy running the house and the nursery, Dad and Lehman sitting in lawnchairs on the beach turning beet red with sunburn and emptying a cooler of Falstaffs while the kids frolicked in the surf. Lehman was my godfather when I was baptised in 1972, sent me as a birthday gift minie balls and grapeshot dug from the grounds of the family plantation and "hopefully used to effect on the Yankee invaders" (written in his own hand), wrote to me while I sat in Dhahran during Desert Shield. I followed him to UGA Law, a point of pride for him and my father. As a young lawyer in Panama City I'd get a call from him every few months to ask about some Florida legal issue he'd encountered, but the real point of the call was to ask, "How's yo daddy? How's yo momma?"

Lehman worked until the last day of his life, then went home from the office and went to bed on the last night of 2020, never to wake up. Peg and I had been planning a trip to Statesboro so he could meet this amazing woman, of which he'd certainly approve (Lehman was always a bit of a ladies' man, which I figured had more to do with his wit and confidence than his 5'7" stature and paunch that stretched his braces to their elastic limit). We just never quite got there. I've always regretted that.

I reckon this post isn't really about football, is it?

Go Dawgs.