The Cement Bowl

An All-American Story

Thanksgiving brings back memories for all of us. Speaking for myself, though, I’d generally prefer to have selective amnesia than trip and fall down memory lane… However—I do have one particular memory that I don’t mind cuing up and replaying—if only to prove that I am a real American…

Long ago and far away, I once played in a college football Bowl Game. Yes, it’s true— I played for Hofstra College (now Hofstra University)—at The Cement Bowl in West Chester Pennsylvania.
You probably won’t believe me—an armchair cynic such as myself—that I ever put on cleats, pads and helmet, and risked my life and limbs, all for the glory of my Alma mater. And you would be RIGHT not to believe it; I didn’t play on the football team, I played in the Hofstra College marching band. …Second trombone was my position and I played it for four years, from the early to the mid-Sixties.

I joined the band because I liked playing the trombone and because it was the only way to get out of ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Program), which was compulsory for all males attending Hofstra. …Why was it compulsory, you ask? And I respond: Because the land on which Hofstra was built was leased from the United States government, and the only stipulation—aside from whatever the lease amount was—was that all males were required to join the Reserve Officer’s Training Program.

So, boys and girls, over four years (while The Sixties were being born)—wearing a blue blazer with a gold Hofstra coat of arms, white pants and white buck shoes, I marched up and down many small-town fields of battle, part of a flying “H” for Hofstra, and playing the old(e) Hofstra fight song. Each Thanksgiving the band marched down (or up) the field in the form of a turkey (I think I was in the beak—or maybe I was part of the stuffing). …When we weren’t marching, we sat in the stands at field level and played all sorts of rousing songs to urge the team on. Most of us were also in the concert band (an extremely good concert band) and the whole marching band thing was a more or less a joke to us, BUT—it did get us out of the ROTC program. And that was ever more important as The War in Vietnam metastasized into the ultimate psychotic football game…

…On Thanksgiving day, nineteen-sixty-two, the band boarded a bus in Hempstead, Long Island, headed for West Chester Pennsylvania to play in The Cement Bowl.
(I’m gonna take a wild guess and say it was called The Cement Bowl because the biggest—maybe the only employer in West Chester was the cement business. I know from personal experience that it wasn’t surfing or orange groves)…

The sky that day was a heavy cement gray, and it was freezing—couldn’t have more than twenty degrees. Some band members hadn’t bothered to show up and most of the rest of us complained bitterly as soon as we got off the bus and discovered we had to play the entire game sitting on ass-numbing, bare metal benches… Since it was so incredibly cold and there was snow coming down in that nasty, inexorable way that snow has sometimes, there was hardly a local soul in the stands. Maybe football wasn’t such a big deal in this town, or, more likely, the West Chesterans were home watching another college game on TV…

The worst part of this fiasco was trying to squeeze music out of anything made of metal. The keys on trumpets started to freeze and the slides on the trombones barely moved. Usually, we wiped the slide with oil and sprayed water on it from time to time to keep it sliding, but on that day the water instantly froze so none of this worked. The whole brass section wound up playing within a range of about two notes…

The band director, who was also the leader of the concert band, took great pride in his bands and his response to our complaints about the cold—including our lips having a tendency to stick to the frozen mouthpieces of the brass instruments—was that we were a bunch of “lily-livered pansies.” (I think at least part of his description was prescient—at least for me; I have turned out to be more lily-livered than lion-hearted in my life. As for being a pansy—well, I see myself more as a daffodil or a tulip)…

…Eventually, the ordeal (as most ordeals will) came to an end—and we boarded the bus back to Hofstra. …The inside of the bus was warm and several of the older band members had brought along various kinds of alcoholic beverage… Soon, warmth and good-feeling prevailed. …The band director, who had forbidden alcohol consumption when we were sitting in the stands freezing our asses off, sat apart, in the front of bus, disgusted by this display of undignified, unprofessional behavior. We ignored him…

What is the moral of this story?
Despite the frantic efforts of the current Administration, and the general practice of the American educational system, you can’t actually erase history… For better and for worse, the facts endure; and at least one very important fact remains, I did once play in a bowl game, and—both as a man and an American—I’m damn proud to say I did!