I was looking for a poetry book in the office and came across a high school yearbook. It was mine. 1970. Opened the cover and it scared me. The teachers look young.
Don’t remember it being that way back in high school.
Should have just put it back on the shelf, but I opened the cover and thumbed through it. Yikes! (When YOU look back at YOUR yearbook, the hair styles and fashions will look dated too. I promise.)
The first image shows Coach North from the 1970 Dancing Rabbit yearbook alongside his staff photo from 2000 at the University of Alabama. He looks happy and healthy, and pretty much unchanged given the passage of thirty years. The second image shows the coach in between those years, while at OU. Out of fairness to Coach, I’ve included my own class picture and will willingly admit that I’ve made up for whatever physical changes Mr. North was spared.
I cringed after turning to my class picture, just like I knew I would. It was the annual photograph that would have to stand the test of time. Oops. It hasn’t. Borderline masochistic that I made myself look at it, I suppose.
There was a lengthy note inside the front cover from Mike, who sat in the front row with me in history class. We were so jammed up in that class that both his desktop and mine actually touched the teacher’s desk. Behind Mike sat Jane – a pretty senior cheerleader and one of my first real crushes. Of course, as a sophomore, I wore an invisibility cloak all year.
Mike’s yearbook inscription starts with a reference to our antagonizing of Charlie North, our teacher. I didn’t remember it exactly that way. Coach North had things on his mind that weren’t necessarily historical. He’d cruise in and lower his big frame into the chair and push a passel of papers in front of him. Football stuff.
Coach North: All right class. We were working on chapter eight. (Turning to Mike) Right, Mike?
Mike: Right, Coach.
The next day when the routine was repeated, he’d put the question to me instead. I wasn’t as confident as Mike, an upper-classman. I would just nod in confirmation. Coach would set us up with a new assignment and we’d get after it. I’d look up occasionally and watch him go over the football plays he’d have spread in front of him.
It could be argued that – without an engaging teacher – the history class was wasted on the students. Never looked at it that way, myself. We were treated like adults (which of course, we weren’t) and were allowed by Coach North to progress at our own rate. I think that was part of Mike’s reference. I recall that he had Coach back us up a chapter or assignment. Coach would check his notebook and shrug. It gave me time to read ahead. In school, I read history books like novels.
Here’s what I remember from all those years ago. There weren’t any problems in the classroom: discipline, grades, assignments – nothing that I recall. The football team had won the state title a couple years earlier, as I recall. Hook Eales was the head coach, but Coach Charlie North was the one who made his presence known statewide.
Mr. North spent a lot of years at the University of Oklahoma as a special teams coach for Barry Switzer. From OU he went on to lend his skills to the Arkansas Razorbacks, and later the universities of Alabama, Texas Christian, and Texas A&M. After some forty years in coaching, he semi-retired to work as a volunteer assistant at Norman, to coach his grandson, who made the football team.
The former McAlester High School ball coach was inducted into the Oklahoma Coach’s Association Hall of Fame in August of this year.
Finding the old yearbook and the note from Mike made me curious, and I was happy to learn that Coach North had such an impressive career. Particularly, since I have good memories of his class. Could be because I like history, and did – even back then.
Or it could have been from sitting next to Jane.
We’ve got history and poetry, in stock. Come visit!
McHuston
Booksellers & Irish Bistro
Rose District
122 South Main St, Broken Arrow OK!
