Book Description

David D. Ferman describes the fall of 1951 when a sweet young coed tricked him into signing his Letter Of Intent with a small, remote junior college; a football coach who some thought could not pour urine out of a boot if the instructions were plainly printed on the heel, but he just kept winning anyway; and a quaint little college town where a guy could easily get an enviable reputation by doing very little, and a young lady could be ruined for life for doing a whole lot less. While growing up in southern Kansas, Dave witnessed fi rst-hand the Great Depression that wiped out fortunes across the United States, and the Dust Bowl that devastated hundreds of thousands of once fertile farms, both in the 1930s. He remembers the hardships and sacrifi ces of World War II, celebrating the birth of Rock n Roll, and muddling through the fi rst spasms of the Sexual Revolution. Along the way, Dave completed 12 years of strict parochial school education on the low-rent side of Wichita where only one in ten families owned a car, and very few teenagers went to college. Family motivated, Dave left home for college on a football scholarship to earn his teaching degrees in English and science. Intrigued by semantics classes, he studied the regional dialects commonly spoken by many young student-athletes in the early 1950s. His goal: to backtrack the language evolution that produced the vivid if somewhat nave imagery, life styles and culture of that far less complex time and place. Now Dave revisits the fall of 1951 with affectionate splashes of literary license. Numerous stories are blended together in this book, which is roughly 90 percent non-fiction and 10 percent creative memoir. To protect his once-imprudent friends who are now role models for families and others, Dave changed the names, locations, some descriptions and several time lines. Thats the least that he could do to disguise such good friends and supporters from back in 1951.