Pete Kendall: Half a $20 bill, luck produces near miracle

It was surely a dark and stormy night — I always come up with my most brilliant ideas on dark and stormy nights — that I decided the Times-Review should go all out in its coverage of a Cleburne football playoff game against Lubbock Dunbar in 1982.

The game was to be at Shotwell Stadium in Abilene, a town with which I was highly familiar. As we used to say in the sportswriting community during playoff season, “I spent a week in Abilene last night.”

Critically, the game was to be played on a Saturday night.

My brilliant idea was to have game-action photographs to go with the game story in the Sunday Times-Review.

I was to write the story. Jimmy West was to provide the photographs. I was pretty sure we were both equal to the task, assuming all went as planned.

If you know anything about the community newspaper business, you know that very little actually goes as planned.

It’s always recommended that you have alternate options, like a detour through De Leon to get from here to Comanche, though I can’t at the moment imagine why anyone would want to do that.

At any rate, I recall pitching the Saturday night idea to our editor at the time, Danny Bodine, and meeting with stunned silence — followed by gales of laughter mixed with cigar smoke. Danny favored stubby El Productos that smelled of feet.

He recalled in an e-mail the other day: “Can remember this particular occasion mostly from the initial worry I felt when you first told me of the plan. I thought, ‘What?’ But you two had pulled off miracles before, so why not another one? So I shoved aside the worries as best possible and went back to herding cats in the newsroom. Then just as the big deadline hammer was about to hit, in Jimmy walks with photos. Wow! Photos of that night’s game!! Immense satisfaction, That’s what I remember. The product.”

I guess you had to be there.

I remember the evening a little differently.

Jimmy and I flew to Abilene in a four-seat puddle jumper piloted by a young gent with a mustache and military bearing.

He did not laugh at our jokes. I don’t know that he even spoke to us.

If he was embarrassed to be in our company, I can appreciate his position.

From the airport, we took a cab to scintillating Shotwell.

I pulled out a $20 bill — a lot of money for a Cleburne newspaperman in those days — and tore it in half.

I gave half to the cabbie and said, “If you’re back here at 8:45 to pick up this photographer to take him to the airport, you get the other half of the $20 bill.”

I gave my half to Jimmy.

I immediately had second thoughts, imagining Jimmy and the cabbie combining on some wild scheme that concluded in El Paso. I breathed a sigh and said a prayer.

The first half of the game went fairly quickly, though not altogether pleasantly.

The Shotwell press box was unheated, and the 38-degree night air wafted up through the floorboards. I already had the sniffles and a hacking cough. Yes, I was sick a lot when I was young, too.

I remember seeing Jimmy leave the field at halftime.

That’s the last I heard of him until after the game ended, when I called the newspaper about 11:30 p.m. to dictate a less than masterful story fashioned from notes jotted on a beverage-stained legal pad.

My first question for Bodine naturally was, “Have you seen Jimmy?”

I recall Danny replying, “We already have pictures, so besides your story, we need some cutlines.”

I could almost smell the cigar smoke.

I probably acted a little nonchalant about the whole thing on the phone, but I’m sure I was quietly amazed that we had actually gotten pictures from Abilene to Cleburne in a matter of a couple of hours, just like the big newspapers.

Of course, if we hadn’t, I probably would have been fired.

I’m not certain how I would have explained such termination circumstances to a future employer.

By the way, getting the story in print that Saturday night was no snap, either.

I figured I was probably going to be dictating to Bodine, who would then hand the sheets of copy paper to a typist in our award-winning composing room. Not quite so.

Bodine arranged (demanded?) that I dictate directly to the typesetter, Susie Allison, who had no way of seeing what she was typing.

Thank goodness she was good. And fast.

All she had at the end of our 30-minute session was a thick spool of perforator tape, which she then inserted into a magical machine that converted the mess into 28 inches of paragraphed type.

I asked Bodine to read it back to me on the phone so I could edit any mistakes. His reply: “You’ve got to be kidding.”

And he added, “Have a nice trip back. I’ll leave a paper on your desk.” And hung up.

Well, Twig and Fred and the boys did a bang-up job on the press that night. What a slick-looking production I glimpsed when my driver, Frank Hyde, dropped me off at the Times-Review at about 2:30 a.m.

Would I do it all again? I’m tempted to say, “Only on my deathbed.”

But strange things happen to me when I go to Abilene.

I remember the Saturday afternoon at Hardin-Simmons that I covered a soccer game ...

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