The New England Patriots and the Sundays Before Handheld Games

As each calendar page of my life falls slowly to the floor, I spend ample time reminiscing about my childhood. Blessed with a file cabinet of a memory, coupled with my Dad's gift of storytelling, I seem to have an ever-present audience, eager to hear about my days growing up in Spencer.

Be it my first kiss with Roberta Welch or the time the bird pooped in my ear at Pleasant Street School, playing baseball in the middle of High Street with my brother, Keith, or the time my Dad and I built the last-place car in the Pinewood Derby, I always seem to have a tale to tell.

The time of my life where I fell in love with football and the New England Patriots is perhaps the most warm and wonderful days of my life.

I see many kids today who never leave the couch and I fear that with handheld games and widescreen TVs comes a loss of physical fitness and imagination. Playing with John Madden's game while sitting on the living room floor is, oh so different than being Madden's Oakland Raiders in our backyard on High Street.

Mom and Dad worked at the apple orchard on weekends in the fall, so Keith and I had the entire day to play. Mom started working seven days a week in the fall at Brookfield Orchards. She started working there in 1966 when I was five and Keith was three. She's now held the position for 42 years.

Dad sold fresh apple cider on Saturday and ran "Pick Your Own" on Sunday in between long weeks traveling on the road. It amazes me that the two of them still have the energy they do at nearly eighty years young. Both still work at the orchard today and are as much a part of the orchard experience as apple dumplings and ice cream.

While Mom and Dad were off to work each week, Keith and I would wake at about seven o'clock. We'd get ourselves ready for a Sunday filled with football.

We had just discovered the sport the year before. I'm not really sure where it was all of those years, but somehow it remained buried behind baseball and All-Star Wrestling on our list of sport favorites. Once we discovered it, however we became full-fledged football junkies.  

We'd start preparing for our game on Saturday mornings by watching "This Week in Pro Football" with the familiar voices of Pat Summarall and Charlie Jones. Each game from the week before was recapped in five-minute vignettes.

Archie Manning and the Saints against Roman Gabriel and the Rams. Roger Staubach's Cowboys against Sonny Jorgenson's Redskins. Fran Tarkenton's Vikings taking on the Frozen Tundra and Bart Starr's Packers.

Keith and I would watch the long bombs of Johnny Unitas and Joe Namath and the bone jarring hits of Carl Eller and the Purple People Eaters.

We'd wait patiently for nearly the full hour of the show hoping to catch the recap of the Patriots, even though the highlights of the game usually involved the opposition. Each week we'd watch wide-eyed as Bob Griese chewed up the inept Patriot defense or Joe Capp got picked off by a swarm of Baltimore Colt defenders. 

I think it was about the third week of watching that we figured out that the team we decided to love was the "Bad News Bears" of the NFL, but we loved them just the same.After all, they were from Boston and so were we.

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