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Yes - I decided to skip winter this year! I heard it was going to be a bad one with lots of snow and cold weather - so I went straight to spring. I'm speaking of the cover page for this past week's "Spring" no really I mean Fall Sports Preview! I did the old "cut 'n paste" trick a week or so before starting on the "real thing" and of course the last sports preview we published was a "Spring" one. I was looking at that page and going to change it when I received a phone call about advertising. I had to figure out several prices (sizes) both with and without full color and by the time I got back to that page, I had forgotten what I was doing - that's getting old! Even though I missed changing the header page to Fall, I did change the other nine pages inside to read "Fall Sports Preview". Now in almost every sport there is 9x10 is not bad - passing in football, 90% shooting in basketball, .900 batting average in baseball (unheard of)!
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I have recently received a few notes from "good friend" Ron Dentinger, former Dodgeville Chamber of Commerce Director, professional master of ceremonies/comedian, all around pretty good guy! Here's one thing he had to say: "I'm not just a pretty face. Here's an idea that just occurred to me. They should move Groundhog Day from February to September. We need four more weeks of summer." He also said on September 4th: "I just saw the daily "Born on this date..." reminder. Today it was Paul Harvey. I'm proud to say that Paul Harvey quoted from my "Down Time" column in the Dodgeville Chronicle for 20 years. And on what would turn out to be his last broadcast, he quoted me once more, and then after 70+ years of broadcasting, he said, "Paul Harvey, good day" for the last time."
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I have to tell about this "crossing the street" story. It happened a few weeks back when Bob Kratochwill, Terry Carroll, Dewey Christoph and myself were in Green Bay. The four of us, along with Kramer "Butch" Rock were crossing a pretty busy street to go from the museum to the eating place right across the street. The "walk" light went pretty fast and we weren't even halfway across when it changed. There was a semi tanker/trailer at the stop light getting ready to turn left and right into us. He waived us on to finish crossing. I looked a the license plate and saw it was IOWA licensed. I told the other four guys that if we would've been in Dodgeville, we would've been "dead meat"!
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I emailed a good friend, Don Rielly, (no relation) to see if he was going to the Southwestern-Mineral Point football game and if so if he would take a few shots and send them to us to use in our papers. He covers a lot of Southwestern events, takes photos and gives them to the kids. He said surely he would do that. Sunday I received three photos with a note saying that his time at the game was cut a little short as he was taken by ambulance to the emergency room in Dubuque for a possible broken leg. It turned out that it wasn't broken, but he would probably be pretty sore for awhile. He didn't say so, but I assume he was hit on a play near the sidelines. I told him that I had two close calls Friday night at the Dodgeville-River Valley game, but they were just close ones!
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This Sunday is the Dodgeville Area Scholarship Foundation (DASFI) 11th annual golf tournament. This is the foundation's main fund raiser of the year (see above photo) and it allows them to give out the $20,000+ in scholarships at graduation time. It's held at Dodge Point Country Club with a shotgun start at 1:30 a.m., preceded by registration and lunch. It's a good time to stop out and see some old faces as there will be some 144 golfers, most from different classes who graduated from DHS. You don't have to play to stop by - there's also raffles that you can get in - and you can bid to buy one of Kathryn McGraw's "famous"pies!