31 YEARS AGO
Today’s flashback date is September 22, 1984 – a Saturday some 31 years ago.
As I mentioned yesterday, I was living and working in Center City at that time, and I was hanging out at Dirty Frank’s bar.
Some of the people who frequented the bar are essential to this recollection. So risking redundancy from yesterday, I’m going to copy and paste yesterday’s description of Dirty Frank’s bar.
“My hangout was Dirty Frank’s on the corner of 13th & Pine. If you never had occasion to frequent Dirty Frank’s during that era, you missed something special. Frank’s – which is what the regulars called the place – was an eclectic bar, to say the least. Just a block from the art school, the interior walls were covered with original oil paintings by art students – art students who were the most-outlandish-looking individuals I’d ever seen up until that point in my life.
Mix in some Philadelphia lawyers, politicians, celebrities, newspaper reporters, street people, and people just like you and me, and you had a special place to hang out.
Randall “Tex” Cobb was part of our group. Former Eagles running back Tom Woodeshick was the regular night bartender. Ben Krass – with hot chicks from his TV commercials hanging on his arm – was a regular. We used to say that on any given night, you might run into anyone from Frank Sinatra to an axe-murderer.”
MY FAVORITE DAUGHTER
This is where my favorite daughter enters the scene.
Her name is Stevie and she was an incoming freshman at Temple. She was both good-looking and a smooth talker, and I’m sure she used both attributes to land a DJ gig at RTI. It was the over-night shift.
Which meant I was setting the alarm and waking up in the middle of the night to listen to her. And listening meant listening to jazz – which was probably my least-favorite form of music. Either jazz or opera.
But thanks to her, I was introduced to the music of both Andreas Vollenweider and Pat Metheny. The latter would come in handy when I met a Pat Metheny groupie a year or so later. It gave us a conversational starting point and I even let her drag me off to a Pat Metheny concert – where we went backstage and partied.
At that time, the art students I observed at Dirty Frank’s on a regular basis were my only exposure to the college crowd. Many of them – both male and female – had rooster-spiked haircuts – haircuts dyed yellow, pink, purple, and/or chartreuse. Their manner of dress could best be described as exotic, and there was an abundance of visible tattoos and facial piercings. And I could only imagine what was pierced underneath their clothing.
To my narrow-minded thought processes at the time, they were freaks – and I somehow believed that all college students looked like that. Now, since my favorite daughter was suddenly a college student, I was afraid she’d become one of those freaks as well.
BEACH BOYS
I didn’t know it at the time, but a man named Mike Fetchko was the associate athletic director at Temple. His job was to concentrate on promotions and marketing in an attempt to launch the football program into national prominence.
This was a good Temple football team that featured Paul Palmer and Lee Saltz – and they were coached by Bruce Arians.
They’d opened the season by shutting out East Carolina 17-0, but then lost a 10-9 heartbreaker to Rutgers the next week. Florida State and Boston College loomed ahead on the schedule. But in this third week of the season, they were playing Pitt, at home, at Vet Stadium – and Pitt wasn’t especially good that year.
Dan Marino was gone and in the NFL and Craig “Ironhead” Heyward was the lone star. Pitt was 0-2 – having lost to BYU and Oklahoma – and they would finish a disappointing 3-7-1. But they couldn’t be taken lightly – not by Temple. And a victory would be an important bargaining chip since Temple and Pitt recruited many of the same high school football players.
Three years earlier, in 1981, this Mike Fetchko worked in the front office of the Cleveland Indians. At that time, the Indians were an awful baseball team that went 25-29 at home in a strike-shortened season. Home attendance was 661,395 – which was an average of 12,248 per game.
However, Mike Fetchko put together a promotion that drew a crowd of 47,000 to one game. That promotion was an Indians baseball game followed by a Beach Boys concert.
Now three years later, and at Temple instead of with the Cleveland Indians, Mike Fetchko was bringing the Beach Boys to Vet Stadium to perform a concert after the Pitt football game. Fetchko put it this way:
”We’re in the fourth-largest sports market in the country, so we have to give something extra to attract fans. The Beach Boys and football go together as well as steak and lobster. So we’re calling it ‘Turf and Surf.’”
Tickets for “Turf and Surf” cost $14.
To me, it was a good deal no matter what the price. It gave me an opportunity to attend the event with my favorite daughter, observe her peer group, and try to dissuade her from getting rooster haircuts, tattoos, and facial piercings.
TEMPLE 13 – PITT 12
The promotion was a success.
Vet Stadium sold out.
We watched Temple beat Pitt 13-12 – although I don’t remember much about the game – and we watched and listened to the Beach Boys. Which was music I’d grown up with. It was a grand afternoon.
And best of all, the Temple students in attendance looked normal. Not a freak in the bunch. I’d made an assumption that the art students I observed at Dirty Frank’s were the norm for the college population. Man, was I off-base – way off-base.
Thanks to Mike Fetchko – a man I’ve never met – for putting that promotion together. That afternoon – September 22, 1984 – my faith in the college crowd was restored and I no longer fretted about my favorite daughter getting rooster haircuts, tattoos, or facial piercings.
By the way, Stevie got her first paying DJ job a few years later at a classic-rock station in Palm Springs. She worked there for two years, but didn’t like it and left the radio industry.
This is the third-part of three about my personal recollections of Temple football. If you’re interested, here are the links to the first two:
I hope to hell that Temple beats Notre Dame tomorrow night.
In addition to being the official Eagles Outsider for BlameMyFather.com, Barry Bowe is also the author of:
- Born to Be Wild
- 1964 – The Year the Phillies Blew the Pennant
- 12 Best Eagles QBs
- Birth of the Birds
- Soon-to-be-published sexy, police procedural Caribbean Queen
- Soon-to-be-published novel Stosh Wadzinski
- Soon-to-be-published novel Polish Widow
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