Charles Salzberg

I was only a month past my 17th birthday when I found myself a freshman at Syracuse University. College life was a complete shock to the system. All I knew was they had a great football team, (Jim Brown and Ernie Davis, who died from leukemia at 23), and that the writer, Delmore Schwartz, taught there.

That first week in college is a whirlwind, but I remember being issued tiny orange beanies we were required to wear at all times—and no, this was not in the ‘40s or ‘50s, but the mid-‘60s, free-love, the Beatles and the Vietnam War.

One of our responsibilities was to attend every home football game, wearing our beanies while seated in the “placard cheering” section, on the 50-yard line. We’d assemble outside Archbold Stadium, which, with its long concrete benches looked more like the Roman coliseum than a football stadium. We’d file in, and once seated, we clipped what looked like a laundry list to the collar of whoever was sitting in front of, then sit there with a stack of square, colored pieces of cardboard until given the word to raise them.

I’d never attended a college game before, and I was excited, especially since I lived in the same dorm as Floyd Little (he once paid me to type a paper for him) and Larry Csonka. Back then, freshmen couldn’t play on the varsity team, so I wouldn’t see them play until sophomore year.  The team was coached by Ben Schwartzwalder, a firm believer in Woody Hayes’s credo: “Three things happen when you throw a forward pass, and two of them are bad.” Like Hayes, Schwartzwalder was a  “three yards and a cloud of dust” guy.               

And so, for five fall Saturday afternoons, I’d sit there, bundled up, as it got colder and colder (try sitting on icy concrete for three hours) praying it didn’t snow. I don’t remember learning much that first year, other than to love college football and learn the definition of “lake effect snow.”