Tag: The Charlotte News

Just Brown And Serve

The summer Donna and I got married, in 1963,  we lived off the $65 a week I made as an intern in the Sports Department at The Charlotte News and banked the $80-some a week she made as stenographer for the FBI.

I was going back to school in the fall, I was a rising sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,  and we tried to save on everything.  That summer we lived in an attic apartment of a house on Shenandoah Avenue, with no phone and no air conditioning.   Not that we cared all that much — we were 21.

Donna, who was still learning to cook, tried to save on food, too.  One night she cooked stew beef and we both chewed and chewed and chewed.   

It was stew beef, but not like this.
It was stew beef, but not like this.

That was about the toughest meat I’d ever tried to eat and finally I said, “Donna, I think we can afford to pay a little bit more next time and get some meat that’s not quite so tough.”

But, turned out, the meat wasn’t the problem.  My bride had boiled the stew beef for 10 or 15 minutes, until it turned brown, and then served it.

NOTE: Donna should have boiled that meat, her Momma told her later, for two hours.

Coming Monday: The Bean Counter

The Psychology Of Winning

Football coaches today don’t have anything on my high school coach, Joe Tomanchek — he was playing mind games 60 years ago.

When I was a senior at Garinger High School in Charlotte, in 1959, we won the North Carolina AAAA football championship, Tomanchek’s first year as head coach.

Charlotte was the biggest city in North Carolina but in the late 1950’s there weren’t enough high schools there to make up a league, so we played teams from all over the state — Salisbury, Gastonia, Asheville, High Point, and Winston-Salem, plus Rocky Mount and Greensboro in the payoffs.

Our game with High Point was cancelled due to a storm; we were beaten 7-6 by Winston-Salem, and  finished with a record of 9-1-2.

Joseph Tomanchek
Jolting Joe Tomanchek: “My grandmother could run through a hole in the line.”

Garinger had a heck of a team and we crushed most of our opponents.  Eight players earned scholarships to play football in college, including our quarterback, Gary Black, who went on to start for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

I was not one of the eight.  I was a halfback on offense, a linebacker on defense, and mostly I got to play when the score was lopsided, which, happily, was a lot of the time.

We outscored our opponents 236 to 70 but it seemed like every week Bob Myers, a sports writer for The Charlotte News, quoted Coach Tomanchek singing the blues about

And who is that cheerleader? Why, it's Donna Joy Hyland, my wife.
And who is that cheerleader? Why, it’s Donna Joy Hyland, my wife.

how tough the next opponent would be, how we’d be lucky if they didn’t run us off the field.   One afternoon after practice I asked Coach about that. Is that guy making this stuff up or is that what you’re telling him?

Tomanchek replied, “You lull ’em to sleep and then you kick the crap out of ’em.” 

Coming Monday: My Husband Is Crazy