This year, Homecoming Week at La Farge High School was
celebrated during the third week of September.
During the week students at LHS decorated the walls of the hallways to
show school spirit and had dress-up days.
There was a volleyball game on Tuesday night followed by a Homecoming
Pep Rally & Bonfire. On Friday
afternoon students competed as classes in a variety of games and activities to
be crowned the Homecoming Week champ.
That night the Kickapoo-La Farge football team trounced Wauzeka at
Calhoon Park. A dance followed the game,
where the Homecoming court was introduced and a king and queen were
crowned. As I watched the football game
on that cool Friday night, memories of past Homecomings at La Farge came back
to me.
My
recollections of Homecomings at La Farge returned to me both from my time at
LHS as a student and years later from when I was a teacher and coach there. Those were different times and the activities
of Homecoming Week were different than today.
Perhaps the biggest event of those Homecomings from the past was the
Homecoming Parade, which was held on Friday afternoon.
Each class and several school
organizations and clubs had floats in the parade. Various sites around the village were secured
to build and store the floats.
Homecoming floats were built in the sheds at Nuzum’s and the Town of
Stark as well as Muller’s, Clarks’ and the C&S Motors garages. At the beginning of the big week, flatbed hay
wagons were brought in from the country and pulled into the float preparation
sheds and garages by tractors, often driven by students in the respective class
or club. After the wagons were deposited
for float preparation, the tractors would be driven back to the farm for use
during the week, only to return on Friday, all washed and shiny, to pull the
completed float in the parade. Work was
done by students and faculty advisors on the parade floats each evening during
the week. The better-organized classes usually
had their float near completion by the end of Wednesday evening because
Thursday night was for the bonfire, pep rally and snake dance.
For students, working on floats
each night of Homecoming Week was a grand time of socializing with friends and
classmates. Building the float often
became secondary to the social aspects of the experience. There was merriment to be had and sometimes
mischief to be made. For teachers,
supervising and securing the float building sites and controlling the swirling
mass of students intent on a certain amount of mayhem was less fun.
From my memories as a student, the
class that had Mary Steinmetz as their teacher advisor usually won the Homecoming
float-building competition. Mary was a
master at organizing, building and decorating floats. Her classes, usually the 8th
Graders when I was a student at LHS, always had the best floats by far and were
awarded the first prize. When I was in
Mary’s 8th grade class, our float won the top spot. The next year, reality set in for the Class
of ’65 aspirations of float building success.
In our first year in high school,
our Homecoming Game football opponent was Arena High School – yes, the Wildcats
played football in that season of 1961 in the “Little 5 Conference”, which was
comprised of La Farge, Viola, Gays Mills, Arena and Black Earth. Our class came up with a great float theme –
“Tonight Arena Collapses”, but the execution of that theme into the final
product fell a little short. We built
our float in the C & S Motor’s garage (I may have helped secure the
location since I was a part-time floor sweeper at the business and my Dad was
involved in ownership).
We built an arena or stadium out of
shoeboxes wrapped in construction paper and colored to look like bricks. I seem to remember that we may have used
tobacco lathe to support the structure.
In the end we had constructed the oval shoebox stadium to a height of
about four feet, covered the floor of the wagon with green crepe paper to look
like a football field and put up banners along the side to announce our
theme. One member of the class was to
dress up in a Wildcat football uniform and bash down the arena with a big stick
as it progressed through the parade. One
problem we had with our grand theme was we had to construct the arena in a
manner so that it could rather easily be destroyed during the parade. We could not build it too soundly or it would
be too hard to destroy. Unfortunately,
we erred on the side of flimsiness in our arena construction.
On Thursday evening when we
finished the float, the Freshman Class entry didn’t look too bad. It wasn’t up to the standards of our float
from the year before, but then we didn’t have Mrs. Steinmetz as a class advisor
either. The real trouble began with
getting the float out of the garage on Friday afternoon. I was in the group of classmates given the
responsibility of getting the float to the parade. One of my classmates drove his family’s
tractor in from the farm. Another
classmate, who would be on the float, dressed up in a football suit and found a
big stick for arena bashing. We were
ready to release our wondrous float creation to the public when tragedy
struck. As we were pulling the wagon out
of the garage, the driver hit the dip in the street in front of C & S and
part of the arena came tumbling down. We
tried to stick it back together with no luck, but since we only had to drive it
across the street to the feed mill where the parade started, we might still
pull our grand theme off. As the float went
around the block, the wind blew down the rest of our shoebox arena. Some of the lettering on the sides was also
blown off. By the time the assembled
crowd along Main Street, including the float judges, saw our float a few blocks
later, the destruction of our grand theme was complete.
What the crowd saw was a rather
pathetic sight. There stood a small
Wildcat football player with a stick pounding on a pile of shoeboxes that
looked nothing like a stadium. Looking
at our float, the crowd wondered what this entry was all about. No clue to our grand theme could be read from
our side signs either, as the wind blown missing letters left our theme
proclaiming:
“Ar a Col
ses Toni t”.
It was a disaster. Ironically, the sign on the rear of the wagon
announcing that this strange looking parade float was a creation of the
Freshman Class stayed intact.
The football game that night was
another disaster. An Arena player
returned the opening kickoff back for a touchdown and it was all down hill from
there. The final score was Arena 46, La
Farge 7. It also rained and the field
became muddy. I was a student manager
for the team, so it was my job to carry all the wet and muddy equipment back
into school after the game. It seemed to
take me an hour and my “goin’-to-the-dance” clothes were soiled and dirty from
the job and I was soaked through from the rain.
Discouraged and down from the parade debacle and the football loss, I
decided to skip the dance and walked glumly the four blocks home.
In skipping out on the dance I left
a beautiful classmate alone on the dance floor.
She had hoped to dance with me (after all, I was voted the “Best Boy
Dancer” in my class) and earlier I left her thinking she had a date for the
Homecoming Dance. I apparently wasn’t
firm on the “date” part of our going to the dance, so instead trotted home to
soak in a hot bathtub at my grandmother’s house. Forty years later, the beautiful girl would
finally but reluctantly forgive me for my Homecoming Dance indiscretion.
And so it is that those LHS Homecoming Memories
still linger for this aged alum.
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