Why Did It Have to Be Hawaiian Punch?

As Thanksgiving Holidays go, I have had better than the one I experienced in 1976. 

I was a freshman at BGHS that fall, struggling through a very long year on the basketball team. I was floating between slots 8 and 12 on the depth chart of a 16-man roster, not seeing much playing time, but working really hard and sticking with it. I ended up starting one or two games at the end of the year, but I was strictly a role player.

It is silly to carry that many players on a team - 10-11 is the ideal number - enough so you can scrimmage with an occasional sub in, and everybody gets adequate reps in the drills. 16 players and, unbelievably, only 15 uniforms - so to close out every practice the day before a game, there would be a 1-on-1 game between the poor souls sitting at slots 15 and 16 on the depth chart to see who got to suit up. It was such a wonderful morale builder. 

You'd think with all the hush money the Catholic Church was throwing around those days to abuse victims, they could have ponied up some coin for a complete set of decent uniforms. The ones we were wearing looked like they were in use when my Mom graduated from Altoona Catholic High in 1944.

So at the end of practice on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Coach said that the next practice would be on Monday evening, with an outside chance of a practice on Saturday. 

The holiday started off well enough. Rich came in from DC on Wednesday, which was always a big deal at our house, and Mom prepared her usual turkey feast. 

At our house, Turkey was consumed the whole Thanksgiving weekend. 

• The main meal of course on Thursday.
• Friday was leftover day: Cold turkey sandwiches and/ or hot turkey and gravy over bread. No meal was prepared.
• Saturday was either leftovers again or Mom's usual menu of hamburgers.
• Sunday and Monday (a school day off for the start of hunting season) usually featured some other use-all-the-turkey cuisine (turkey stew, turkey pot pie) - This is starting to sound like Bubba's shrimp rap in Forest Gump, but you get the picture.

For some reason, that weekend, it was decided that a few of us would travel back to DC with Rich - I think he was staying at an apartment in Annandale and his roomies were out of town for the holiday. We left Friday morning and then spent a day and half at Rich's place and would head back to Altoona on Sunday. 

Apparently Coach decided to call a practice on Saturday afternoon and tried to contact us via phone on Friday - while I was on the road. So that was an unexcused absence from practice for me - and the 7 other players on the team who missed it. Unexcused absences (rightfully so) were serious deals - it was my only one of the year (and I thought it should have an asterisk by it).

On Sunday when I got back, one of the guys on the team, who did attend the practice, warned me that Coach was going to be kicking ass on Monday night and to expect a lot of running. This wasn't a rare occurrence. Whenever we lost a game, particularly one where Coach didn't deem the effort satisfactory, the next practice would invariably be a "practice without a ball" - sprints and running and defensive drills etc. Everybody in those days was trying to out do Bobby Knight.

Strike 1. So the "eight men out" rolled into the gym Monday night expecting the worse. Sure enough, after the normal drills to open practice, we gathered at the baseline. Coach asked  each of us the reason why we had missed the practice - all of us muttered the same general response of "didn't know there was a practice" or "was out of town" or both.

So we got the standard lecture about commitment and dependability and sacrifice. We then got paddled (this was a first :-) and had to do 30-second pro-sprints for about 30 minutes in front of the other players. It wasn't that bad - the expectation and waiting for that practice were much worse than the actual punishment.

There were certainly no text messaging or Facebook in those days, but there was still a pretty robust communication network called the grapevine. The word of our spanking was spreading like wildfire. Tuesday morning (first day back from vacation), before first period, 4 separate classmates came up to me with some variation of "Nedee - I heard you guys got paddled last night - that must have hurt!" No shit Sherlock. The embarrassment was the worse part of the whole deal.

Strike 2. It might have been Mom's turkey stew on Sunday. Or maybe safe food handling and preparation for poultry hadn't evolved that much in those days. In any event, by the time I got home from school that Tuesday, I could feel myself getting sick. Some chills alternating with fever. Shaky stomach. But there was no way in hell that I was not going to go to practice that evening. 

So the hours between 7:00 and 9:00 that night were two of the longest hours in my life. I excused myself a couple of times to go to the bathroom during the practice. By the time I arrived back home, I was shaking with the chills.

Strike 3. My sister Joni graduated high school in 1974 and continued to live at home while she was working, first as a secretary for a local doctor and then at Mercy Hospital. Joni was very generous with her money and poured a lot of it back into various home improvement projects for our house. 

I am pretty sure she paid for the complete remodeling of our TV room, with paneling and various other upgrades. The last part of that makeover in the TV room was the installation of wall-to-wall carpeting and, as fate would have it, that was completed the Tuesday after Thanksgiving in, you got it, 1976.

So I roll into 1521 Ninth Street around 9:15, shivering and thirsty. Grab a huge plastic glass and blend a 50/50 mixture of Hawaiian Punch and water. (I always mixed in water with my Koolaid or juices in those days - quantity over quality). 

I stumble over to the natural gas register in the TV room, sitting to the left of the television and bordering the living room. The register produced some serious heat and I sat sitting down on the floor, back against the TV wall. I was straddling the register, bogarting the heat and nursing my HP, feeling like crap and trying to warm up.

Then it hit me. The downstairs powder room was only 12-13 feet away, but I didn't even make it to my feet. That is right, the carpet was only about 5 hours old when I christened it with Hawaiian Punch and three days worth of turkey-related meals. 

Joni didn't speak to me again until 1977.