Okay, if you can't wait another week for Ivan's report and must know whether or not Smith Center's football team won the state final, you can read this report. Ivan had to send out the most recent Echo before he left for Hays, Kansas, to watch that play-off game get played. So if he reports on it, it will be next week, and I will repeat it right here.
"I am going to pull out and dust off some of the things that people used to yell at referees and use them myself come basketball season," Ivan reported. He used to referee, so he was on the receiving end of them back then. "On rebounds I'm gonna yell - 'The Smith Center player is not Trigger and the P-burg player is not Roy Rogers - so GET HIM OFF HIS BACK.' I'll think up a lot more before basketball season starts."
And he added: "I don't want the public address announcer reminding me to show good sportsmanship. Good sportsmanship is winning the game."
"I'll be 80 on November 30th," Ivan said. "I'm gonna give myself two birthday presents. One - I'm gonna quit taking all medicine; and two - I'm gonna start yelling at referees."
Ivan still wasn't done talking about what he's gonna yell at the basketball refs: "If the other team has a player with a beard and he is in the three-second lane, I'm gonna yell 'three seconds - when he went in there he was clean shaven.'"
"Yelling at referees has therapeutic value," he noted. "So does sleeping in church. I'm 80. I'm gonna do both."
"You know," Ivan observed, "you meet the nicest people in the doctor's waiting room and at the pharmacy. Old, slightly used, out of warranty, but really nice people."
"I was tellin' the guys at the As the Bladder Fills Club about an observation I have made over a period of years," Ivan said. "People who yell at basketball officials are hen-pecked husbands. The only place those guys can act tough and mean is at a basketball game. So when you see some guy yelling at a basketball official, chalk it up. His wife wears the pants in that family."
"Saw a sure sign of winter last Tuesday," Ivan said. "Arven Lyon has taken his stationary bike inside."
"Al Frieling says his new English Bulldog is a hunting dog," Ivan said. "Says he is always hunting for something to chew on and a place to pee."
"Last Tuesday morning early, Ludene the Dancing Machine, the waitress at Paul's Cafe, was up to her armpits in hunters," Ivan said. "The local boys understood and were very patient with Ludene and she got everybody waited on quickly, orderly, and in good grace and good humor."
"Oh, and I'm declaring my independence from the yell that says 'all for Smith Center stand up and holler.' I've stood up and hollered for over seventy years. I'm changing that yell to "Two bits, four bits, six bits, a peso, all for Smith Center sit down and say so.'"
"It's great to be eighty," he added. "You can do what you damn well please."
"It has been my experience that the State Bank is chock full of friendly folks," Ivan noted, "but so far they have limited me to one sack of popcorn. Wait till Linton Lull gets back and I'll tell him about the popcorn caper and there may be some repercussions. He qualifies for two bags. I don't know where he gets his clout." (We know where - Linton used to be president of the bank, and now his son, Murray, is. I think Ivan is teasing us.)
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