Our Thanksgiving colors were red and black

My greatest Thanksgiving memory was the big football rivalry between the two Flint, Mich. high schools, Central and Northern. They were perennial state powerhouses and they played the last game of the season against each other on Thanksgiving Day before some 20,000 people in Atwood Stadium.

My mother, aunt, uncle and myself all graduated from Central, so there was rarely a Thanksgiving when one of us wasn’t a student there. The big game was so important that it literally determined whether we would be joyously thankful or merely somberly appreciative on Thanksgiving.

Our Thanksgiving décor wasn’t comprised of shades of orange and brown and yellow. It was red and black, the colors of the Flint Central Indians.

Sometimes we all went to the game, sometimes not. A lot depended on the Michigan weather. But we always listened on the radio and got a firsthand report from whoever was attending Central at the time.

I remember one Thanksgiving when Aunt Elaine, then a student at Central, came home after the big game sobbing. All through dinner, she was absolutely inconsolable.

Aunt Elaine is in her 70s now and in the process of moving to Surprise, Ariz. to retire. We met in Phoenix for breakfast recently. She told me that Flint Central had finally closed, and she had attended a farewell event at the beautiful old school where thousands of former students came to raise their collective voices to sing the alma mater one last time.

Music was important at Central. I went there in the late 50s, the dawn of rock and roll, when the Platters, Little Anthony and the Imperials, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and other early black groups were just bringing doo wop to prominence.

Flint has a high black population and there were a host of wannabe doo wop vocal groups that had formed among Central students. It was common for them to perform in various nooks and crannies of the hallways between classes. Some of them were very good.

Being a honky, I ended up playing the trumpet in the 120-member marching band, a band that was one of the best in the state thanks to director Bruce Robart – one of those teachers who demanded nothing less than perfection. Performing at the big Thanksgiving game was obviously the highlight of my musical career.

In my junior year, 1959, Central was en route to becoming the state champion. That Thanksgiving, we beat a good Northern team 51-0.

It was a happy Thanksgiving indeed, marred only by the fact that the Flint Journal was on strike so there would be no story about the game the next day. Also looming just ahead was the fact that a third high school was being built and those of us in its geographical area would be forced to transfer for our senior year.

I doubt that they’d get away with that dictate today.  We'd be given the choice of finishing our senior year at the old school.  But that was 50 years ago, before kids had “rights,” back when we were told what to do and we did it.  A time, by the way, when we never complained about being bored or having nothing to do.

Anyway, the new school, Flint Southwestern, just wasn’t the same. No tradition. No wonderful old brick building. And most important, no Thanksgiving Day football game.

So when The Consort and I went back to Michigan last month, I had to take her to downtown Flint to see if Central High was still there.

It was, and she insisted I pose in front of it.  Of course it was raining, but what a rush of memories. I am standing just feet from where I got my first two traffic tickets – at the same time.

And there was the tower atop the third floor. They would never tell us what was up there, so we, of course, let our imaginations run wild. We were pretty sure it housed a torture chamber lined with skeletons of recalcitrant and intractable students. Or, more likely, just the skulls. You could only fit so many skeletons in there. And that would certainly explain that mystery meat they served in the cafeteria.

Then there was the graffiti. It was such an old school, even when I attended, that every desk (they were made of real wood in those days) was carved with romantic messages, slogans, insults and profanities.

The most frequent message on the desks, I recall, was, “Vera Shrigley is a bitch.” Vera Shrigley was an English teacher who was long gone by the time I got there, but her legacy obviously lived on.

I didn’t know at the time that I would become a high school English teacher, but I never forgot how unforgiving high school kids can be. You have to wonder if someone carved that infamous message into Vera Shrigley’s tombstone.

I vowed to pattern myself as a teacher after Bruce Robart, not Vera Shrigley. I never checked the carvings on the desks at Wayne Memorial High School to see if I succeeded.

But this is about Thanksgiving, a time to count blessings, not skulls. Hopefully, your turkey will not resemble mystery meat in any way, shape or form.

The good news at our house: Flint Central cannot lose the big game this Thanksgiving Day.