A Love Letter-- In the beginning.

A Love Letter

It was the best.

It was the worst.

It is still the best and the worst. It's always that way. The very best, nothing better, always has some of the worst in it.

It all began when Janet and I took the train to Chicago just before Thanksgiving in 1964.

It was our senior year, our football team had just lost our last game of the season, if we'd won, which we should have, I'd be staying to play in the playoffs for the state championship. 

The entire TJ (Denver Thomas Jefferson High School) yearbook staff was being chaparoned by Mrs. Shapiro (Sandy's, the editor's, mom) and Mr. Art Mason, an English teacher and the yearbook sponsor for the 4th time; he and dozens of students had been documenting the school since the Fall of 1960 when it was written up in Life Magazine, it opened as part of the space race spawned by the Russians launch of Sputnic.

All this comes to mind right now, as it has every year at this time, today is the 55th Sunday before Thanksgiving, because my annual memories of getting to know Janet on the trip to Chicago, the best, also marks the worst, the aniversary of my going to war with 8 of my team mates and their defenders, a fight that went public and eventually involved the Denver school board, who eventually made a decision with my future father-in-law protesting their meeting (captured in the Denver Post) and the superintendent of Denver Public Schools.

For years I'd read through the letters that were sent to me by friends and strangers encouraging me to keep fighting. I eventually kept them in a gold box that got thrown away when Janet and I divorced.

This year, I'm going to write this. For better or worse.