And then I wrote...

by Dick Schilling, "Editor Emeritus"

... that Saturday, September 22 loomed as a dream day for Iowa fans of major college football and the Chicago Cubs.

All were going to be on television and at different times.

Iowa State was first with an 11 a.m. start for the football game with Akron. The University of Northern Iowa’s game started at 4 p.m. The Cubs followed at 6 .p.m. with the Iowa-Wisconsin football game bringing up the rear at 7:30 p.m.

Thus alerted, I settled in to watch the ISU game. At half-time I took a brief look at news and went to get some lunch. When 1 came back, 1 grabbed the TV remote and pushed the buttons to get the football game back.

Nothing.

TV set broke?

Nope. I used the manual buttons of the set to confirm that was not the problem.

So, it had to be the remote, which had been sluggish of late.

Probably needed batteries.

I abandoned Boy Scouts before second class advancement, so unlike Scouts, I was not prepared.

No cache of AA batteries.

I have a wall clock which takes three of those batteries. I could find the time in at least four other places around the house, or simply look at my solar powered wrist watch.

Which doesn’t require a battery! Smart!

So I robbed the clock of two batteries and inserted them into the remote.

Success. And it worked fine the rest of the day.

And it was worth it. Everybody won, except for the Hawks.

With less than a minute of the Iowa game left and Iowa deep in its own territory and behind by four points, I considered the game over, and turned it off.

And went to sleep thinking Iowa had lost 21-17.

Because the game was so late, there were none of the usual details and stats in the Sunday paper, so I went until Monday before I learned Wisconsin had actually scored again. Bring back day games!

I saw two examples of the wisdom of retiring while in one’s prime.

There were clips on TV shows of Tony Bennett and Roy Clark. Bennett was live. Clark on tape from a few years back.

Both sang. And not very well. Nothing like when they were in their prime.

There’s a moral in there.