Erie, PA
Sunday, July 22nd

Another relaxing and fun day in the home town. I got up and met G-Ma and Uncle Billy for 9am mass at St. Jude. I typically like to hit the home Parish, Blessed Sacrament, but G-Ma Steph likes St. Jude, so when you are 90 years old you get to basically do whatever you want. It was a solid sermon, increasingly rare these days. After mass we joined Matt, Aunt Sue, and Uncle Dave, for breakfast at Perkins. There was great conversation while we all happily stuffed ourselves.

The Bixby Bowl or as locals call it “the house that Steph built”

Don’t all grade schools have their own football field with a field house?

After breakfast we all took our separate ways. I headed to the Jack and Judy Bestwick’s to visit. They are the parents of Amy whose family I stayed with in Virginia a week earlier. As I mentioned in an earlier post our families go way back. What I did not mention is that during his coaching days Jack was widely considered the best football coach in the area. He is in every local and state Hall of Fame possible. His teams at Fairview High School were some of the best in area history. What is noteworthy is that Fairview was not some blue collar school district that was featured in the movie, All the Right Moves. It was an affluent school district. Mr. Bestwick was the ultimate motivator; he got everything he could out of a demographic of athletes who stereotypically are not the most motivated.

I had wonderful and legendary coaches growing up, who I learned a lot from. But I learned how to coach from watching Mr. Bestwick when I tagged along with my dad to their practices. Coaching skills from practice organization to breaking down game film were gleaned from those early years. All that being said, Jack and his wife Judy are even better people and are great friends to my family. At their house we hung out and caught up as we watched Sergio Garcia give up the British Open championship to Padraig Harrington of Ireland. My guess is that a few pints of Guinness were consumed in pubs of Ireland in celebration, not as the Irish really need another excuse to enjoy their most famous export.

Auditorium Entrance
Main entrance

I spent the rest of the day floating around Erie. I took a lot of pictures. Most were of my old grade school, Blessed Sacrament, and of course Erie Cathedral Prep. I also went down to dock located on the Bay of Erie. I enjoyed a couple of pints of Mad Anthony Ale, a local Erie brew named after US Army General Anthony Wayne who was stationed at Fort Presque Isle, which later became Erie, during the Northwest Indian War. It was one of the fantastic Erie summer days. The summer weather in Erie as good the winter weather is bad.

Sailing on the bay

One of the random pictures I took was looked like a small wooded lot. What you did not see was this place was “Harvard Lot”. I grew on Harvard Road and this lot was no longer than a hundred feet from my house. On that hallowed field epic athletic battles took place. We played some waffle ball there but the field was mostly used for football and in my neighborhood there was only tackle football not this silly touch variety. What made the battles there particularly legendary was the fact that to score a touchdown you did simply go one length of the field. One field length was simply a first down. We usually played three to four lengths of the field for a touchdown. What does that mean? No breakaway touchdowns. If you got away from someone they could rest a second and have a chance to get you on the way back. We played in all weather. The best games were after the first snowfall. It was fun because you could see blood stained snow.

There is no telling how many games were played here in the years of my youth. You learned to defend yourself by giving and taking hits. I guess the difference between youth then and now is that we regulated ourselves. There was no league that our mommies and daddies would run. You played because you wanted to play. This made a better athletes and better people. Off the top of my head there were at least seven kids from our five block radius who played some sport in college in the years I lived there. Although degrees don’t necessarily make the man but more impressively my friends in the neighborhood tallied; One PhD, two JDs, and four Masters Degrees. I could not imagine growing up in another neighborhood and being anywhere close to the same person I am today. Incidentally, the wooded part of Harvard Lot became an excellent area for harmless make out sessions with girlfriends as that equally perilous game stole some of our attention in later years.