Excerpt: Where Dreams Die Hard: A Small American Town and Its Six Man Football Team

(Da Capo Press, 2005)

By Carlton Stowers

Chapter One

THEY WERE VISIBLE ON THE FLATLAND HORIZON FROM MILES away, rural beacons signaling that the fall ritual of Texas high school football was again under way. Down Farm Road 308, past the sprawling cotton fields and sun-browned pastureland that dot the region, the stadium lights lured fans to the beginning of a new season filled with the eternal tradition of high hope and grand anticipation.

On this short-sleeve September evening in the tiny pickup-truck-and-baseball-cap hamlet of Penelope, where they play a strange and fast-paced game called six-man football, it was the social event of the week. Long before the kickoff, local farmers had begun to gather around the chain-link fence bordering the playing field to compare progress of their summer grain harvest and the well-being of their livestock, and to report recent readings from their rain gauges. Moms tended the already busy concession stand while energetic grade school children chose sides for pass-touch games to be played behind the stands.

On the field, the fourteen members of the Penelope High School Wolverines, proud in their bright red uniforms and white helmets, were earnestly going through pregame drills. And even though too many passes were dropped, too many punts failed to spiral, team speed was noticeable only by its absence, and they had already opened the season with back-to-back road defeats, the enthusiasm of those filing into the tiny stadium was palpable. It was the first home game of the year, an opportunity for most of the townspeople to personally judge the talent of the 2004 squad.

Earlier, the mesquite smoke aroma of burgers being grilled by players’ dads in the parking lot had greeted those paying their three-dollar admission. There had been the traditional pregame “Meet the Wolverines” dinner in the nearby school cafeteria, accompanied by an announcement that student members of the Future Farmers of America would be raffling off chances for a variety of homemade cakes and pies.

The scene made it difficult to imagine that just four years earlier, the Penelope Independent School District, the sixteenth poorest in the state, had had neither a football team nor an inclination to field one. Forty years ago it had briefly given football a try for a few winless seasons before abandoning the sport, satisfied to limit its extracurricular activities to basketball, volleyball, a few spring sports, and one-act play competitions.

As in so many back road communities forgotten in the desperate rush to big-city promise and prosperity, the woeful signals that Penelope was dying a slow, quiet death were obvious.

Penelope was named after the daughter of a Great Northern Railroad official who founded the town in 1902 as a watering stop for passing steam engines. Longtime postmistress Mary Dvorak remembers her mother telling stories of a thriving little community that once included three grocery stores, a couple of hotels, several churches, a lumberyard, a pharmacy with a doctor’s office upstairs, a feed and hardware store, an ice house, three active cotton gins, and a railroad depot.

In a tattered folder she keeps on hand as proof of better days is a collection of faded photographs of Penelope as it once was. Now, however, the local granary and her tiny post office are the only businesses left. “Unless,” she smiles, “you count the soft drink machine over there in front of the Volunteer Fire Department.” Flanking the one-room building from where she dispatches the mail is a sad row of weathered and boarded-up buildings that run the one-block length of what was once called “downtown.”

Until a city limits sign suddenly appears on a rise, there is no warning to passing travelers that they’re about to arrive in Penelope. No skyline, except for the granary’s storage silo and the ghostly remains of a long-abandoned cotton gin. Were it not for a state historical society–sponsored marker that recalls more prosperous times, one would not know that one of its half dozen paintless, crumbling buildings had once been a thriving grocery. Or that just across the highway from a pen of frolicking goats a gas station once offered full service and soda pop for locals and passersby. Most who might remember the town’s better days now reside in the well-kept cemetery located on a nearby hillside.

The residential part of town, meanwhile, is a random mixture that pleads a strong case for zoning regulations. A scattering of modern brick homes with neatly kept yards are neighbors to doublewide trailers or ancient frame houses in varying states of aging and disrepair. Rusted and retired farming equipment silently sits in weedy vacant lots. An occasional “Hay for Sale” sign is the only visible hint of local commerce.

Penelope is an antique badly in need of care and polish.

“There’s no mystery to what happened here,” Dvorak explains. “In 1960, the railroad shut down and cotton was no longer king.” That devastating one-two punch sent shoppers and job seekers to nearby Hillsboro, Waco, and Dallas. Today, with the exception of a small residential area inside the city limits, most of those whose mail she handles live in the countryside, earning meager profits while farming land that has been in the family for generations, sending their children off to school by bus every morning.

In town, the only paved streets are the intersecting farm roads that run through it. Yet, as for many others, Penelope is Mary Dvorak’s heartland. “It’s a wonderful place to live,” she says. “After I graduated from high school I moved up to Dallas for a couple of years. But I got enough of the big city real quick. I came home and I’ve never been sorry for a minute that I did. Like I’ve told my kids, I’m going to be here until they put me in that cemetery on the hill outside of town.”

And, she adds, she’ll continue to be a regular at the Wolverine football games. “We’re proud of those young men. They may not be winning much, but they’re giving their best, building something for the little ones down in junior high and elementary school.”

Which is how school superintendent Harley Johnson views things. “Football was discontinued here in 1963,” he explains, “and the idea of our ever playing again really never entered anyone’s mind.” Until in the spring of ’99, when a junior student named Marvin Hill entered Johnson’s office to say he’d been sent by several other underclassmen to ask if the school might again have a football team. “I told him to bring me a list of those who wanted to play. He brought me the names of fourteen students—juniors, sophomores, and freshmen—so I took the request to the school board.”

The decision to add the sport came easily; putting the idea in motion didn’t. “I don’t think we even had a football, much less any uniforms and helmets,” Johnson recalls. Nor did the school have a stadium in which to practice and play. Or anyone to coach the team.

The superintendent, a make-do kind of administrator used to stretching tight budgets and maximizing limited manpower, set about methodically resolving each problem: He persuaded members of the community to donate money needed for equipment and talked an old friend, retired from teaching and living in nearby Hubbard, into coaching the team. The difficulty posed by the absence of a football field was solved by holding practices on the school playground and a parking area adjacent to the nearby Catholic church. All of the games would be scheduled for the opposing teams’ stadiums.

“Honestly,” Johnson says, “my thinking was to wait and see if the kids would stick with it before we went to the expense and effort of building our own stadium.” In fact, two Penelope seasons would pass before the school board voted to seek grant money and take out a sizable bank loan to purchase a two-acre pasture adjacent to the campus. With a great deal of volunteer help, they were soon building stands and fences, erecting lights and a scoreboard. A local farmer volunteered water from his stock tank to care for the newly planted grass. When Covington, a neighboring school south of Fort Worth, announced that it was advancing from the six-man ranks to play eleven-man ball, thus requiring the installation of regulation goalposts for its field, Johnson contacted the superintendent about the goalposts they were replacing. “Send somebody over here with a flatbed truck and some tie-down rope,” the generous Covington school official had said, “and they’re yours.”

And, while the team had been winless in that first season, scoring only twenty points in its ten games, it was not without at least one moment of poetic irony. The first Penelope touchdown of the new era was scored by Hill, the youngster who had urged Johnson to reinstate the sport. In the second season came the school’s first win.

And now, as the kickoff of the new year’s first home game neared, it remained the school’s only victory in four years. The two road losses that had launched this season had brought the modern-day Wolverines’ won-lost record to an anemic 1 and 31.

Not that many in the football-crazed state had noticed. Six-man football is Texas’s athletic stepchild, far beneath the radar that religiously monitors the Dallas Cowboys and Houston Texans, colleges major and minor, and eleven-man high school football wars. There are Saturday mornings when not so much as the score of the previous evening’s Penelope game can be found in the major daily sports sections.

By rule, six-man football is reserved for the state’s 112 public high schools with an enrollment of ninety-nine or fewer students. In hidden-away towns that test the geographical knowledge of even longtime Texans, they often play on fields poorly lighted and bare of grass, circled by trucks and cars filled with fans who view their weekly games through windows freshly cleaned down at Gus’s Grocery and Gulf Station. A running back too small to earn even a second notice by coaches at larger schools scores a touchdown, and his heroic efforts are greeted by a mixture of cheers and honking horns. And it is not unusual, during the first weeks of each new season, for the sounds of shotgun blasts to echo from the nearby countryside during the games as local hunters busy themselves with the annual rites of dove season.

In the back road hamlets, where bleachers might accommodate one hundred to two hundred spectators, where there are rarely enough students to field a marching band to entertain at halftime, and where the team rosters rarely boast more than a dozen or so players, there is a strong argument to be made that rural America offers up the last outpost of organized sport played on shoestring budgets and simply for the joy of competition and camaraderie. No college scouts, in search of their next Heisman Trophy candidate, stop by. Among the youngsters who play the game, there are few unrealistic dreams of ever advancing to collegiate or professional stardom.

Yet the game goes on, Friday night after Friday night, year after year. Whereas school board members in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, questioned the worth of athletics in Philadelphia’s thirty-eight public schools a few years back and Los Angeles school officials were talking of discontinuing junior high football in the name of economics, Penelope fields a high school and junior high team on a bake sale budget that wouldn’t even keep many of the state’s large-enrollment athletic programs in jock straps and adhesive tape.

The sport they play began in the mid-1930s as the brainchild of a Chester, Nebraska, educator and coach named Stephen Epler, who recognized a void in the fall programs of small rural schools. Searching for a solution, he went to the drawing board and designed a game that would not require the customary eleven players. Football, he theorized, could be played with three linemen instead of seven, three backs instead of four.

In Epler’s vision, the rules of the game would differ slightly. It would be played on an 80-yard field instead of the traditional 100; the offense would need to make 15 yards for a first down instead of the standard 10. Each quarter would last ten minutes instead of twelve, and all players, including the center, would be eligible to receive passes. And since it was unlikely that kicking specialists abounded in the Nebraska corn belt, he put a premium on such ability, ruling that following a touchdown, a kicked conversion would be worth two points and field goals four.

And aware that the talent levels of teams would vary greatly, he suggested a unique “mercy rule.” If, at any point following halftime, one team was leading by forty-five points, the game would be ended.

As word of his new concept spread, so did interest. States throughout the Midwest adopted the hybrid sport, and in 1938, Rodney Kidd, then athletic director of the governing body of Texas high school athletics, wrote Epler for information.

Kidd then contacted coaches at two small Texas schools, Prairie Lea and Martindale, and asked that they study the rules, have their kids practice for a while, and then put on a spring exhibition game for him and other University Interscholastic League (UIL) officials.

They liked what they saw, and the following fall formerly non-football-playing schools in Dripping Springs, Harrold, and Oklaunion, as well as Prairie Lea and Martindale, were celebrating their first district championships.

The sport’s popularity reached a national peak in 1953, when thirty-thousand rural schools across the country fielded teams. And while closings and consolidation of many small-town schools would ultimately turn six-man football into nothing more than scrapbook memories in many states, it has continued to thrive in Texas. Add a few schools still playing in Nebraska and isolated areas of New Mexico, Montana, Colorado, and Kansas, and the nationwide total of six-man-playing schools annually ranges between 225 and 250. And in Texas, it is no longer the sole property of country communities. The sudden growth of limited-enrollment urban private schools and the desire to provide the students with athletic opportunities has given rise to 75 new six-man teams in Texas alone.

I had searched without success to find more about the sport’s origin and advancement. Epler had passed away years ago and I couldn’t locate any additional information in libraries or on the Internet that offered any satisfactory historical enlightenment.

I resigned myself to knowing little about those pioneer days during which the foundation had been laid for the game I would spend a season following. Until, that is, during a West Texas visit to my ill father, it was suggested that I talk with eighty-six-year-old Robert Cramer, a retired geologist living in the tiny community of May.

He was working in his front yard on the late summer afternoon I met him, a man still agile and outgoing, eager to welcome the company of a stranger.

“I understand you grew up in Nebraska,” I said as soon as handshake introductions were done.

“That’s right. Lived in the little town of Hardy, population 320, until I went into the service.”

“And you played six-man football in high school . . . ”

“Yes sir. In fact, I played in the first six-man game ever played. So did my brother.” For the next half hour, as we sat on his front porch enjoying an early evening breeze, he told me of a time and place not recorded on any electronic database.

He’d been a 156-pound high school senior in the fall of 1936, looking forward to another year of playing basketball and running the quarter mile on the track team, when he learned that Hardy High School was looking for volunteers to participate in a football game.

“It all started with the coach over at Chester, you know,” he said. “He’d come up with the idea of playing football with only six men. He took the idea around to some other schools and got them to buy into his brainstorm.”

It began, he remembers, as a combined effort of four schools in the rural south of Nebraska: Hardy, Chester, Alexandria, and Ruskin. “There was one team made up of kids from Chester and Hardy, another of students at Alexandria and Ruskin. We used hand-me-down equipment the coaches had gotten from some bigger schools and played the game on a field near a little college in Dechler. Best I can remember, there weren’t even any goal posts—which was just as well since none of us had any idea how to kick an extra point or field goal.”

His coach, Milo Cameron, a tennis letterman from the University of Nebraska, had precious little knowledge of any kind of football, much less this newly invented game. “He just told us to run hard with the ball while we were on offense and tackle the other guy when we were on defense. I do remember that we did quite a bit of passing. And I turned an ankle pretty badly late in the game.”

The final score? “I have no idea,” he admits.

Clear memories of the farming community in which he spent his boyhood, however, sound as if it could have been a distant cousin to Penelope in its heyday. “Hardy had two grocery stores, two gas stations, a bank, a drugstore, a feed store, and a doctor’s office,” he says. “The business district was one block long.” His father ran the local tavern–pool hall.

“There were eighteen students in my graduating class; twelve girls and six boys. Hardy doesn’t even have a school today,” says the lone living member of the Class of ’36.

As the day faded toward dusk, my impromptu history lesson moved from the origin of six-man football to Cramer’s World War II experiences, his migration to Texas during the oil boom days, and those times when he and his wife would be in the stands every fall Friday night to watch their son play six-man ball for the May High Bulldogs. “I haven’t been to a game in several years,” he said as he glanced up the street toward the high school. “Maybe this season I ought to get out to one.”

With that he pulled a billfold from his hip pocket and began thumbing through small scraps of paper. “This is my brother’s number,” he says. “He played football in Hardy for a couple of years after I graduated. His memory might be better than mine.”

The following day I phoned Bill Cramer, a retired teacher, at his home near Spokane, Washington. It had not taken long, he told me, for Hardy High School to develop into a six-man powerhouse, quickly eclipsing the efforts of Epler’s Chester teams. “The year after that first game,” he remembered, “they formed an eight-team league called the Little Blue River Conference. By my senior year (1938), six-man ball was being played all over Nebraska, and we won the state championship.” A national magazine called The American Boy selected two Hardy players to its six-man all-America team.

One of them was Raymond Czirr, now eighty-three and a retired plant manager for Armor Foods. Living in Superior, Nebraska, just a half hour’s drive from his hometown, Czirr remembers the games he and his teammates played as a diversion from the grinding agonies brought on by the Great Depression. “Times were pretty tough back then,” he says, “but everybody in town got behind our team. We were the roaring pride of Hardy. By my senior year we even had a little football field behind one of the filling stations. People paid a dime to come watch our games.

“Football was important to the town. Hell, it kept the folks in Hardy going,” he says.

A thousand miles away and three-quarters of a century later, many of those gathered to watch the Penelope Wolverines open their home season say much the same.

Used with the permission of Da Capo Press.