Mayberry Gets Harder to Find All the Time

 

Betty Lynn, who played Barney Fife’s girlfriend Thelma Lou on “The Andy Griffith Show,” has moved from West Hollywood to Mount Airy, N.C., the town upon which fictional Mayberry was based.

What does this have to do with sports? Nothing. But I’ve got nothing much to say about former Iowa football players Cedric Everson and Abe Satterfield and their sexual assault charges. If it’s true, it’s purely rotten. If it’s not true, it’s rotten for the accused.

In years past, I would have been leaping for the first available soapbox to scream about something rotten in the state of Hawkdom. But it just wears you out after a while.

All those arrests in the last couple years, so many players who left the program prematurely because of legal nonsense. But this, if true, is far worse than anything than any Hawkeye football player has done in a long, long time.

Maybe the worst offense will be the last. Maybe, in time, some semblance of innocence will return to the program so many of you love. As the Beach Boys sang a long time ago in supposedly more-innocent times, wouldn’t it be nice?

Thelma Lou moved to Mount Airy because her Hollywood home of 57 years got broken into twice last year. But the Hawkeyes can’t escape to a Mayberry. Heck, we used to think Iowa City was a Mayberry compared to a lot of places.

Here’s a link to the Thelma Lou story:

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=19723578&BRD=1817&PAG=461&dept_id=222087&rfi=6

Parkersburg — A Dynasty Must Rebuild

The loss of human life from the tornado that ravaged Parkersburg Sunday – there are no words to adequately describe the horror.

The loss of homes and meaningful personal property are devastating to the survivors.

And a high school has been destroyed. Aplington-Parkersburg High must relocate, rebuild. The high school is the focal point of most small towns, and this one was no different.

The name “Parkersburg” already registered with sports followers across the state who had never stepped foot in the town. A-P has been a perennial participant in the state football playoffs, and has two titles and four runner-up finishes under head coach Ed Thomas, who has coached at the school since 1975.

In 2005, Thomas was named the NFL’s High School Coach of the Year. He was nominated by his four former players who currently play in the NFL — Jared DeVries, Aaron Kampman, Brad Meester and Casey Wiegmann.

“He taught me as much about being a gentleman as he did about football,” DeVries said.

Falcons football has never been fancy. A-P runs and runs on offense. It’s blocking and tackling. The four NFL players from A-P are all linemen.

“We would drill and drill,” Kampman said.

“I always said my job is not to prepare our kids to be college athletes,” Thomas said in an interview a few years ago. “My job is to make football a learning experience, and there are so many things they can learn from being a part of our team that will help them be successful later in life as a father, member of a church, or member of the community.”

That’s a Coach of the Year attitude.

A-P’s tattered football field, with mangled goal posts and a battered scoreboard, is named Ed Thomas Field.

“When I’m done and out of coaching,” Thomas once told the Waterloo Courier, “I hope they let me come back and take care of that field. I want it to look really nice.”

For quite some time, the football field in Parkersburg was called “The Sacred Acre.”

The walls of Thomas’ classroom – he teaches government and economics – were covered with photos and clippings of his former athletes. That’s all part of rubble now.

Thomas was one of the many Parkersburg citizens who lost a home Sunday. He spent part of Monday directing his A-P athletes in moving weightlifting equipment out of the shambles that was left of the high school.

How does a community bounce back from something so destructive? Trite as it may sound, it starts and ends with strong people like Thomas refusing to surrender.

Someday down the road, I suspect Ed Thomas will again be keeping the weeds out of Ed Thomas Field. And it’s not likely Aplington-Parkersburg’s football team will give an inch this fall, no matter where it has to play its games.

The Los Angeles Times had an especially good story on the Parkersburg tornado. Here’s the link:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-storm27-2008may27,0,917663.story