When I was a kid, really young, I stared at my father's photo in his college yearbook. It was a football photo. My dad was posing with the ball, his other arm outstretched as if to stiff-arm a would-be tackler. But there was plainly no tackler there, since Dad wasn't even wearing a helmet, probably to best show off the crop of dark hair blooming over his equally dark eyes. Years later, I would replicate that pose, only with full pads and a helmet, in my Clarence Olson Junior High School uniform, ready for would-be tacklers who might pop out at me from behind the closed door in our dining room.
Even then, however, what had stayed with me more than my Dad's quarterback pose (because he was, in fact, the University of Dubuque's quarterback), was the caption next to the photo, which proclaimed that my father was, "...small, and not very heavy, but his gameness and grit have earned him the nickname, 'Fighting Bob.'"
It was perhaps weird for a kid in sixth grade, but, perhaps under the spell of my dad's apparent football prowess, I listened avidly, over and over, to the story of how they met. One fall day in their hometown on the banks of the Mississippi atop the left shoulder of Illinois, my dad strolled by my mom's house wearing his college letter sweater. My mom, by all accounts and evidence the smartest, prettiest, and probably the poorest kid in her high school, was out in the yard raking leaves. He saw her, she saw him, and that was that.
My mom's vivid descriptions of the figure my dad cut in those days drove me back to his college yearbook, to get a sense of the guy who got the prettiest girl in school. And I noticed something peculiar. Paging for the first time beyond the Sports section, I was startled to see that people had defaced the book with hand-written notes, page after page of them. There were hearty wishes for success in life, but just as often, or more often, there were glancing references to events that appeared to have nothing to do with studying. Or quarterbacking, for that matter. One such inscription mentioned a girl's name and chortled, "Only one date? You old tool hound!" In fact that sobriquet, tool hound, made repeat appearances throughout the book. I didn't quite know what a tool hound was, but I had a sneaking suspicion he wasn't taking apart carburetors in his dad's garage.
I don't know how much time passed before I got what my dad was up to in college, but I do know it was sometime after I was trying, albeit unsuccessfully, to be up to the same thing. I figured I'd get there by and by, but meantime, I couldn't quite get over the fact that the thing had been going on, anywhere, all those years ago, and that my dad knew about it. I assumed that anything appearing on my horizon, of course, had to be new.
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