By Loretta Humble/Around the Town
Well, I’m into my third week of kid visiting, and I’m still loving it. Actually, I had to go home for a couple of days this weekend, as Carl had some car problems and needed transportation. That wasn’t bad either, kind of a vacation from my vacation. A drawback to this, however, was that I didn’t get to stop by my niece Margaret’s house on Sunday to see if she would feed me breakfast again.
I did stop at her house one day though. Carl and I wanted her to keep a couple of rods and reels for us till we got back from Tyler. She wasn’t there, so we hid them behind some plants or something on her porch. I keep forgetting to go get them or even bring up the subject about their being there. I hope she hasn’t thrown them out. She doesn’t put up with a lot of trash laying around.
The highlight of this week for me was the Malakoff Exes Reunion. It was great seeing old friends – our class of ’56 had the largest number of attendees – and it was especially great seeing some of those friends getting big honors during the MHS Sports Hall of Fame Awards. Sitting right beside me were Leamon and Bobbie Rogers and their offspring, Benny and Mandy. Bobbie was in my class.
She and Leamy are super people, and that is the kind of kids they raised. Mandy was a record-setting basketball player in high school, then coached at Malakoff for a while before moving on to bigger things. She came back to induct Skyja Drinks, a remarkable player she coached while at Malakoff, who had been the first one to break the record Mandy had set as a player here. Then, brother Benny Rogers, former sports editor for the Athens Review, and now Sports Information Officer for TVCC, had the honor of inducting Mandy into the Hall of Fame as well. Benny had some good stories about Mandy. He promised not to embarrass her, and he mostly kept his promise.
Then Donald Hughes got honored. Don was my classmate and is now my neighbor. He and Hilda were sweethearts all through high school, got married and raised a whole passel of good kids. Sadly, some years back he lost Hilda. Then after a while, Don and Charlene, an old friend, also widowed, got together and are now on their second happy marriage. They are sweet people, and it just makes me happy to be around them. Makes me kind of jealous, too, as I didn’t even manage to keep one going, much less two. Anyhow, back to what I started to tell you…Don was inducted into the Sports Hall of Fame by his son Danny, who is now a girl’s basketball coach at SMU.
I wish I had room (if I could remember) to tell all the great things Danny said about Don, and the good stories Benny told about Mandy. And all the good things they all said about growing up here and what Don said about raising kids, and about playing basketball on a dirt court, and how glad they all are they did it right here in Malakoff.
The whole thing touched me a great deal. A bunch of really good people had a really good night, and they totally deserved it.
But while I’m on this subject of sports and great kids, let me slip in a little about one of my own. My granddaughter Pepper was quite a basketball player at Cross Roads High School, and when Danny heard she got accepted to SMU last year, he called her parents and asked if she would be interested in a manager’s job (for pay!) They went up and toured the basketball facilities and she got the job! Pepper loves basketball so much getting paid was just icing on the SMU cake, plus it is helping with college costs a lot. I asked what her duties are. Her mom says things like running shot clock (whatever that is,) keeping stats, passing balls to girls practicing plays, and she said, of course, laundry. Laundry? But she says the Athletic Department really treats the managers great. Perks (besides getting paid for doing something she’d nearly do for free) include going wherever the team is playing, getting all new Nike sports wear just like the players do, being fed lots of free goodies, and after three years she gets her class ring paid for. That in itself is no small perk. I wasn’t sure about the laundry, but Tina says that’s no big deal. Just uniforms and towels thrown in washers and dryers divided between several managers. But I guess that does wear Pepper out, because she still brings her own laundry home to Mama.