One of the more interesting characters I’ve ever been around was a man named Fred Nobs. Fred was a photographer; a good one. By the time I met him in the 60’s, he was a world traveler and he had the pictures to prove it. One of the more interesting times in his life, according to him, was when he spent quite a bit of time with Ernest Hemmingway. The great author lived in Key West, Florida and he loved yachting on the ocean. One of the guys who sailed with him was, you guessed it, Fred Nobs, and he also had those pictures to prove it.
Fred and I met because he filmed Brownwood Lion football games and as the broadcaster, we travelled together a lot. Usually it was Ken Schulze, Fred Nobs, and me. We left for Graham one day and Graham’s football stadium was located, and still is, in a residential area. You travelled small streets, and some were rough. We had eaten supper in town and we take off to go to the football stadium. Ken’s driving and he hits a low spot in the road and I mean I thought we were going to exit the vehicle. We were thrown around, but eventually got a big laugh out of it and thought nothing of it – until the following Monday night came around.
In this day, you play a football game on Friday night and by the time a coach can get back to his office you can already see your game, plus you have access to your opponent’s game that they just played. So, it’s kind of “state of the art” now, but back then it wasn’t. If you played a game like in Graham, then you brought the film back with you, and you went to the high school and you gave it to a coach. The coach would immediately go to the bus stop in Brownwood and send the roll of film to get processed. I think they processed it in Fort Worth. So the bus, late on Friday night, would pick up the film and take it to wherever, get it processed, then it would be put back on the bus the next morning to come back to Brownwood. One of the coaches would be waiting at the bus station to pick up the film and bring it back to the high school where all of the coaches would meet and look at it.
Then, on Monday nights, they had the Quarter Back Club meeting – 7:00 every Monday night. They always had a big crowd and Coach Wood, Coach Southall, and Coach West would turn the projector on, and this crowd of people in the auditorium would look at the game film and the coaches would comment on it, take questions, or whatever. Well, on this particular Monday night after the Graham ballgame, we all show up to watch the film.
Coach Wood says, “This is kind of an unusual film to watch. I’m not sure you are going to have a lot of questions”. Then he turned on the projector and we sat there for the better part of thirty or forty-five minutes and looked at the tower lights at the Graham football stadium. The camera would go left to right, right to left, but all you saw were the lights of the stadium. You see, Fred had his camera and all of his equipment in the trunk of the car. When we hit that dip, we didn’t think it had done any damage, but it had knocked the camera out of sorts. Never got to see one single play of the entire ballgame. It wasn’t really Fred’s fault. Ken said it wasn’t his either. So, I just told them to blame me.
Until next time, so long everybody.
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‘Out of the Box’ with Dallas Huston is published each Monday morning at BrownwoodNews.com. Dallas was the radio voice of the Brownwood Lions and Howard Payne Yellow Jackets for more than 55 years. He currently is Pastor of Center City Baptist Church and hosts a Men’s Bible Study in Brownwood on Monday evenings. Your comments are welcome at [email protected].