Carnival of Soul

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For six months, it’s felt like the civilized world has found itself in a reversal of a typical TV series “Mission Impossible” (1966-73) ploy.

No, not the common ingredient featuring Barney Collier (Greg Morris) drilling holes through reinforced concrete walls, but the ruse in which the “MI” outfit locked up an unconscious perp, fast-forwarded his/her watch’s date function as well as calendars typically found in isolation cells.

Then, following a tight script, the team convinced the culprit time had elapsed and his cohorts in crime had met their fate.

Now because of COVID-19, it seems like the House of Adams is still slogging through March instead of standing on the cusp of what the Alabama High School Athletic Association calls “Week 0” of the 2020 football season.

August 21 was to have featured a game between a Miami team visiting the Enterprise High School Wildcats, but that game won’t be played.

One sport’s thought some coaches have used to motivate athletes for centuries is now proven truth: “Play each game as if it was your last.”

The game Atlanta’s Charlie Culberson got hit in the face with a pitched ball last year luckily wasn’t his last, didn’t produce the same results as the Aug. 16, 1920 pitch that saw Ray Chapman of Cleveland’s Indians hit in the head by Yankees pitcher Carl Mays.

Chapman died the next day in, knock on wood, the only major league fatality of its sort.

That event came on a date full of memories, like Aug. 16:

* 1936 when the XI Summer Olympic Games closed in Berlin after the equestrian competition concluded with Germany winning all six gold medals in an unprecedented team achievement

* 1948 – Arabs blew up Latrun pumping station in Jerusalem

* 1954 – “Sports Illustrated” was first published

* 1961 – Martin Luther King Jr. protested for black voting rights in Miami

* 1962 – Ringo Starr replaced Pete Best as Beatles’ drummer

* 1969 – Woodstock (NY) Music and Art Festival’s second day

* 1988 – IBM introduced software for artificial intelligence

* 2008 – American swimmer Michael Phelps won the seventh of his eight Beijing Olympics gold medals

* 2012 – Wikileaks founder Julian Assange granted political asylum by Ecuador

Now then, since we won’t be watching or listening to the EHS Wildcats Friday, Aug. 21, what is there to do?

Wish Greg Walls a belated 70th birthday, celebrate Hawaii becoming the 50th state in 1959, opening day of the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Grace Slick getting maced after calling police “pigs” in 1972, and the 1987 U.S. debut of the movie, “Dirty Dancing,” featuring one favorite song of Jimmy Carroll and the late Charles Henry DeJarnette, “Cry to Me,” by the incomparable Solomon Burke?

There were other fine tunes in “Dirty Dancing,” i.e. “Be My Baby,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Do You Love Me,” “Stay,” “These Arms of Mine,” “Hey Baby,” etc.

“Hey Baby” first reached your scribe’s ears via a juke box in the old catfish camp on the banks of the Chattahoochee River in 1962.

A few years later, in the New Brockton home of 1968 EHS classmate Hamp Hogg, he and two more of our classmates, Burns Whittaker and Joe Bynum, and Joe’s younger brother, Dan, then-dba “The Swingin’ Souls” played the tune … very well!

Some sweet soul music.

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