Here We Go Now.

The title of the first track off my friend Tim Krekel’s posthumous album Sings up the Sun released ten years ago this past June.  Imagine how I felt listening to tunes from a guy I made music with three years after his death.  The first time I listened to this album, I was on the back porch alone.  I listened and I cried like a baby.

Tim’s track on this album called Perfect Flaw changed my life.  And I didn’t get to tell him.

Carrie and I saw Tim two weeks before he died in 2009.  We told him we loved him.  Ten years later, I needed to rediscover this album, that sits on my shelf, on Amazon Music.  I had never looked for it on a streaming service.  It was too personal. My own tunes are on Amazon and other streaming services.  I don’t look for those either.  They are too personal.

My 2022-2023 classroom is ready.  I am so looking forward to meeting my new students and the opportunity to help them make progress.   

I am so ready.  I am so excited to begin the school year.

I am blessed.

Speaking the rights.

Danny Johnson

Gads.  I get put off with myself on occasion when I think about my home state of Indiana.  I should know more about it.  I don’t know enough.  I admit it.  Geography has something to do with that.  Living in a county that runs into the Ohio River can do that.  You can’t get more Southern Indiana than that.  We get our television news from Louisville, Kentucky.  I can name more Kentucky polticians than I can Indiana.

I have seen more miles of North Carolina than I have Indiana.  I know Asheville to Wilmington like the back of my hand.  Outer Banks?  Know it.  Research Triangle?  Been there and done that.  Mt. Airy aka Mayberry?  Pilot Mountain aka Mt. Pilot?  Been there many times.  Boone, the home of App State?  How they found 120 flat yards for a football field is a miracle.

The past couple of days,  my dear wife,Carrie, and I spent time at Fort Harrison State Park not far from the I-465 “runaround” that circles Indianapolis.  Ft. Harrison was an Army Post from 1906 to 1991.  In 1996 it gained State Park staus.  I am glad it did.

Fort Harrison State Park is not your regular in the wilderness out of the way place.  The State Park Inn faces a busy street where businesses seem to bustle and living quarters for troops are now home to civilans of all walks of life.

She needs a coat of paint.  Otherwise, the place is a treasure. Once the post hospital, the inn is a peaceful place to land for a couple days.  12 foot ceilings and 12 inch concrete walls see to that.  When you walk in the place, history just whispers to you.

Carrie and I drove through the park and found the visitors center in a remote location.  I must say Carrie and I have stayed at Ft. Harrison in either the inn or the Harrison House, now off limits to single room occupancy for nearly twenty years.  This was the first time we ventured into the “park” side of the place.  There were open spaces and a lake that was more a pond.  But it was quite nice.

Inside the vistors center, we were the only ones in the building.  No one acknowlegded us.  That was fine.  Just quaint.

History and more history there on display.  It was humbling to see all that went on in a space we were now enjoying.

There we were.  All this preserved history and Carrie and me in one room together.  It felt lonely.  Oh I am sure there are times when school groups come in, at least I hope so.  But I wonder.  It took Carrie and me twenty years to get here.  Yes, we had been to the inn for winter getaways.  Stayed there more than once when we went to Indy for Moody Blues concerts.  That we had not made it back to see this visitors center, albeit we did not know what was there, made me a bit sad.  So much history.  So much great service to learn from.  So much sacrifice.

As a child, I listened to my great-grandmother in Brownstown tell me stories about how my grandfather, Herbert Daniel Johnson was in the THREE Cs.  As an eight-year-old, I thought grandma was talking about three seas!  I imagined my grandfather hanging on to the side of a great ship that was taking on water and in peril.

The Civil Conservation Corps  was about putting guys to work in tough times and had nothing to do with the ocean.  I learned that many years ago.  But only now have I seen tangible CCC proof and I enjoyed looking at it.

Seeing this interactive room made me feel better.  Perhaps the word is getting out after all.

At a restroom near the “lake”, I found this:

I had to investigate.  I had not seen a pay phone in a while.

urt

It was still wired.  But there was no dial tone.  Just a low hum.  And no change to be found.

Thankful we got here once again to learn a little more about the Hoosier State.

Speaking the rights.

Danny Johnson

I watched The Open Championship from St. Andrews today.  Like most of the folks watching, I was rooting for Rory McIlroy.  He didn’t putt well.  There is an old adage out there about putting for dough.  That rang true today.  Hard to root against Cameron Smith.  He is the Aussie who won it.  He did putt well.  Did he ever.

I have said it many times.  When the light is right you can get a fine picture.  I took this one recently as I was walking around the North Harrison campus.  Did not plan it.  Just looked to my right and stopped in my tracks.  Glad I did.

Along my regular walking trail around home, I took these pictures recently.

Nothing like an Indiana hay field.

This steak was on the grill the day the Ole Miss Rebels won the College Baseball World Series last month.  I think it tasted better than it looks.  It was a good one. So was the College World Series.  Hotty Toddy!

Upstairs in Crestview Hall on the campus of Indiana University Southeast.  I took this photo not long ago.   It was in one of these rooms where I had class with old friend Millard Dunn leading the charge.  I was late for class (and I was NEVER late) and he rode me like a old mule.  The whole class sat up and opened their eyes wide.  They couldn’t believe it either.  After Millard had humilitated me, and class was back to order as he needed, the door to the room opened again.  A lady named Constance was later than I was.  I looked back and yelled, “It’s about damn time!”  And the class erupted in laughter.  In earnest, I never saw Millard laugh and smile like he did that day.  Priceless.  I love this place.

My room location changed.  I have moved to Room 127 at North Harrison.  This is my little corner of it.  I am so looking forward to getting the school year started.  Teaching English full time again this year.  Good times.

Recently I brought this photo out of moth balls.  I told #19, Jim Titus standing next to my Dad on the left, that while the peons were celebrating he and my Dad were concentrating on what to do next.  It was a nice night for the Cougars.

In 1993, The Moody Blues embarked on a tour pairing them with orchestras all over the world.  They were apprehensive at first.  Did it work?  Yes.  I heard more orchestras play with The Moody Blues from 1993 to 1999 than I ever expected to hear in my life.

The photo above was taken during the Days of Future Passed 50th Anniversary Tour in 2017.   This show was at The Fraze Pavilion near Dayton on July 1.  I finally got my sister to a Moodies show before it was too late.  She does have one hard head.  Most of us do.

Have a great week and speak the rights!

Danny Johnson

I know I wrote about the news about USC and UCLA  joining the Big Ten in the coming years.

Truth is, I can’t wait that long!  I am ready for college football now!

Yes, I did enjoy the USFL.  And I was delighted that Skip Holtz’ Birmingham Stallions took the Championship.   The last time I saw Skip he was coaching Louisiana Tech at Marshall in 2019.  The Herd won that won handily.

Though the speaktherights.com College Football Preview is a month away, I hope my students are paying attention!  I am so ready for college football to begin.  I am excited about seeing another FBS school in Idaho.  They will be coming to Bloomington to take on the Indiana Hoosiers in September.  Having seen more than 70 FBS schools play football in person, I have never seen Idaho.  Yes, I know about the Vandals.  I watched them many times on crazy satellite feeds over the years.  Yes, I know the name John Friesz.  Some of you may have to look that one up.  Seeing the Vandals in Bloomington, I could not make the game last year, will be a treat.

I am ready to make this walk into Memorial Stadium again.

Memorial Stadium is a great place to be on college football Saturdays.

Look, I know what I am talking about.

I was in Iowa City last year for the Hoosiers’ season opening debacle.  This was a portent of doom.

Yes, I was the guy who made hotel reservations in Pasadena for The Rose Bowl for a team who finished 2-10.  Thankfully, my dear wife, Carrie, and I were at the last Indiana Hoosiers Football victory last September in Bowling Green against Western Kentucky.

It was a long season.

Guess what?  The pressure is off.  Coach Allen has a multi-year contract that no one will touch in Bloomington, Indiana.  The staff and the players have had time to look around.  And my guess is they like what they see.

The 2020 season was an anomaly.  Yes, the Hoosiers did well.  Heck, maybe they had an advantage by playing in front of small to no crowds.

Here’s what I do know.  Last year when the Cincinnati Bearcats came calling to Bloomington, and the Hoosiers got hosed with a phantom targeting call against McFadden, my dear wife, Carrie, met a lady from Cincinnati who was glad to talk to her.  She Bearat lady found refuge in my Hoosier wife.  The Bearcat lady told Carrie of how nasty the Indiana fans were to her.  That is too bad.  We are not Wisconsin or Ohio State!  I was so disappointed when Carrie told me of this.

Act like you have been there before.  That is what we were always taught, in case we scored a touchdown in high school. Me, I kicked points and field goals and played center.  Indiana Football fans had not been there in their lifetimes.  I know I hadn’t.  Two bowl games in a row and expectations beyond belief. Walking on the moon seems more practical.

Here is what I do know.  I believe in Tom Allen and his ability to bring the boys back.  He knows what he is doing.  Yes, I know, Washington and South Alabama have good head coaches.  Indiana does too.

Me, I am looking forward to the 2022 College Football Season.

This is going to be fun.  We can talk about how it all pans out in about a month!

Speaking the rights.

Danny Johnson

On these pages I have made mention of some English teachers I know were very important to me during my formative years.

In high school there was Mrs. Kain and Mrs. Englehardt.  And we could not forget Mrs. Miller.  They all played a part in my English teaching life long before it got here.

Millard Dunn has been the subject of multiple pages here along the way.  He was my English mentor in college and in life.  Many a day I go back to words that I caught in his classroom and never let go of.  I was better for doing so.  Hopefully some of that will rub off on students I teach today.

Referencing these venerable folks from the past is the natural order of things I suppose.  That is the way it goes right?  You look back and you look far enough behind you where things are safe and mostly in monthballs now.

Today we are going to get a little closer to home and talk about a couple of English teachers that have made a great impression on me as fellow educators. Now there is some territory you rarely read about.  Many reasons dictate this I think.  You are afraid you might offend someone else.  Or you just don’t take the time to introspectively peel back layers that are not about the next lesson.  Maybe they really are.

On June 10th I finished an ambitious piece of narrative nonfiction that is my Long and Winding Road.   Two people I gave treatment to when I wrote this tome were Cathy Clouse and Bart Bigham.  If my tome never sees the light of day, let me tell you a little about these two now.

I worked with Cathy Clouse at Medora Schools longer than I can remember.  Well, not really; it all started in March of 1998.  That was when I began a 15-plus year stint at Medora that came in two parts.  March 1998 to May 2000 and August 2002 to June 2015.  Yes, I left them and they called me back.

Cathy and I worked well together.  We sat around more school improvement meeting tables together than I want to remember.  But I am sure I want to remember Cathy being there.  We never had a cross word.  She vented to me when she needed to and I’m sure I bent her ear a few times too.

Cathy gave me my greatest triumph in teaching.  I never told her that.  I was hoping she would one day read about it when my tome gets published.  Little did we know, that less than two weeks after I placed the last piece of punctuation on my chunky writing, Cathy passed away.  She died on June 23rd. I was taken aback.

Once upon a time Cathy was working with some students on what we called End of Course Assessment practice.  The ECA was one of many Indiana testing snafus over the years.  What happened was that Cathy was getting frustrated with a group of nine juniors and seniors who had yet to “pass” their English ECA.  I’m sure this was yet another task she was heaped on.  Small schools are quaint to those in bigger schools whose work load is lesser than the case load of the teacher at the small school.  I taught four levels of English at Medora once upon a time in the same school year.  Cathy understood this too well.  She had been there.

Cathy had the guts to come to me and ask me if I would work with these juniors and seniors to see if I could help them pass their English End of Course Assessment, again, this was one of Indiana’s educational farts.  I told Cathy I would help them and in the process I was helping her.

Cathy Clouse did not let her ego get in the way.  She knew of my proclivity for writing and thought she could tune into it and let me help these nine upperclassmen.

“Do you think you can help us?”

That was Cathy’s question to me.  I told her to send them my way.  She did.  This was in early October.  The next retest was in early December.  I looked at every one of those kids and told them how Mrs. Clouse had their best interest at heart.  Cathy could probably diagram sentences that would give me a headache.  But she knew I could help kids be better writers.  And that is all we did.  We met once or twice a week for an hour at a time and talked about writing.  When we were not talking about writing, we were writing.   And writing.  And writing.  Those kids were delighted to see December roll around.

Those nine took the ECA over again, as was required by the mighty tower to the North in Indianapolis.  Six of the nine passed both the reading and the writing sections.  Eight of the nine passed the writing sections.  We didn’t have time to reinvent reading comprehension and writing.  But what writing does is open a door to the mind that was not there seven minutes ago.  Thankfully, these kids were like Mrs. Clouse.  They had open minds.

A few hours ago I was in Mr. Bart Bigham’s classroom at North Harrison High School.  Room 134.  The room just feels good to me walking inside it.  Bart Bigham did that.

When I left Medora School as a counselor and English teacher, I came home to North Harrison in August of 2015 as a full time counselor.  Some things I never learn.  Just as I left Medora for a couple of years before I came back, I left North in March of 2020 for a year and change.  In the fall of 2021, I was on the NH campus again.  This time teaching English full time. Thank you, Mr. Kellems.

As soon as I landed in Cougarville the first time in 2015, I gravitated to Mr. Bigham.  His class room walls were filled with literary and musical references I understood.  I knew.  We just hit it off.  As a counselor with English teaching experience, Bart let me come in and guest lecture on subjects that lent to the significance of utilizing the English language.  I talked to his students about the importance of influences in our lives and how we can influence others.  Another year I talked to his students about songwriting and how ubiquitous songs are in our lives in every season and every holiday.  We wrote our own songs.  In the fall of 2018, I pondered what to share with his students in the coming spring.  I decided on the power of the written word.  This prompted me to write a letter to folks at The Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California.  I told them my dear wife, Carrie, and I were coming out for a game.  This led me to kicking field goals in an empty Rose Bowl and I did not miss.  Talk about a thrill.  Talk about a tangible truth to share.  Thank you, Mr. Bigham and your 11th graders.  I would never have gotten there without you.

Bart Bigham is moving on.  He too is heading home.  He has accepted a job in Oakland City, Indiana at Wood Memorial Jr-Sr High School.  Bart would NEVER tell you he was a member of the Greater Evansville Basketball Hall of Fame Induction Class of 2017.  He never told me.  I did what writers do.  I looked it up!

Last school year Bart and I were English teachers together.  But, we always were.

Bart Bigham was tireless in his endeavors to support and lead students and athletes at North Harrison.  A man for all seasons, Bart coached boys tennis in the fall, girls tennis in the spring, and was an assistant basketball coach for a sport that knows no down time in Indiana.

That I was able to talk to Bart today in his room one last time will stay with me as long as I have a memory in good working order.  And when I think about it I will smile and know thanksgiving and camaraderie and respect.  I’m sad.  But I am so happy for Bart.  Thomas Wolfe had it wrong, Bart.  You can go home again.

Speaking the rights.

Danny Johnson

When I heard the news of the impending 2024 jump of the University of Southern California and the University of California-Los Angeles to The Big Ten, I was turning my head sideways.

USC and UCLA in The Big Ten?  Ummmm…aren’t those the guys we hoped to play AGAINST in The Rose Bowl one day?  At first, I didn’t like it.  My ancient Big Ten running roots felt a twinge.  Then suddenly I thought about Rutgers and Maryland.  Uh, last I checked these teams were in The Big Ten too.  USC and UCLA!  Welcome aboard!  I don’t give a rat’s bladder (my apologies to Frank Furillio) if you are in California or not!  Glad to have you!

Look, I have been attending Big Ten football games all my life.  Unfortunately, though I love the place and always will as my season tickets indicate, my allegiance has been to the Indiana Hoosiers Football (I have seen more than 70 FBS schools in person and have yet to see a college basketball game).  Being born in Columbus, Indiana some thirty-six miles to the East of Bloomington via Indiana Highway 46, I ‘m not sure I have had a grand choice.  Some things we are just born into.

I was born into a love of college football when I pushed my way into the world in 1968.  My Dad was a high school coach for a very long time.  That meant when we weren’t going to see The Hoosiers play, we watched college football on televison.  That meant I knew of USC greats Anthony Davis. Ricky Bell, Charles White, Marcus Allen, Anthony Munoz, Lynn Swann, Pat Haden, John Robinson, and so many more.  That meant I knew of UCLA greats Freeman McNeil, Randy Cross, Jerry Robinson, Kenny Easley, Dick Vermeil, Troy Aikman, Ken Norton, Jr, and Carnell Lake.

If asked of my ten all time favorite college football traditions, I would tell you Notre Dame vs. USC and the cross-town rivalry USC vs. UCLA.  If I don’t see both of these games on televison, my football season is not complete.  So, with that said, USC and UCLA can’t make it to the Big Ten fast enough for me.  That is so easy for me to say.  The logistical nightmare that is college football scheduling probably made more than one athletic director throw up their hands.  But guess what? They, like you and I, know that there are probably more to be invited to the Big Ten party eventually.  Why not?

When USC and UCLA do get here in Big Ten country in 2024, I will be able to say I knew you when.

My dear wife, Carrie, and I saw UCLA beat USC 34-27 the last time there was a crowd for this game at The Rose Bowl.  What a game it was.

A couple days before these two kicked off that Saturday, Carrie and I were on the field.

Who knew we were scoping out Big Ten country so long ago?

I can tell you the goal posts in The Rose Bowl are true!

I was 2 for 2 at age 50.  I knew when to quit.

In 2016, I took my Dad to see USC-UCLA at The Rose Bowl.  I think this may be my favorite picture of them all.  Sitting on a floor of carpet in the home of my childhood in Brownstown, Indiana or the family room of the same house where my parents’ reside to this day in Ramsey, Indiana, watching games in this stadium were so important to us.  To see my Dad walk toward to the light of this field was, well, special.  Dreams don’t usually come true.

I still have this game on my DVR.  Sam Darnell was too much for the Bruins.

I suppose I had some affection to the Iowa Hawkeyes that has led me to referring to them as my second favorite team in the Big Ten over the years.  After all, the Hoosiers win over Iowa in 1988 when Chuck Hartlieb completed 44 passes for 558 yards for the losing Hawkeyes is still my favorite Memorial Stadium memory;  Austin Starr hitting that field goal against Purdue to send them bowling in 2007 is in the neighborhood.

I would be remiss if I did not mention Anthony Thompson’s 168 yards rushing on 47 carries in that Iowa game in 1988.  I caught up with AT thirty years later before a game at IU.  The Hoosiers were playing Ohio State.  I asked him if he had any eligibility left.  He told me he didn’t want any.  Smart man, as always.

I took this picture on a new turf that was still being painted (you don’t see any hashmarks).  That this will one day be the BIG 10 logo is something I am still processing.  But it sure is fun.

When the Bruins come calling to Bloomington for the first time or the Trojans come calling for the first time since 1981 when they defeated IU 21-3, I will be able to say, “Welcome.  I knew you when.”

And the Bruins, not the Hawkeyes, will be my second favorite Big Ten team.

Danny Johnson