Seasons in the Sun: Small College Football, Music and Growing up in the '70'S

By Bill Hauser

Seasons in the Sun is the memoir of a college student/athlete in the mid-1970's. Bill Hauser played quarterback at Ohio's Wittenberg University, one of the top small-college football teams in America, and for one of the most successful coaches in the game. This book takes the reader through the ups and downs of competition and the life-lessons learned from that experience.

But it is not all about football. The author's enjoyment of music of the period is woven throughout the book with popular songs of the time serving as chapter titles.

If you remember the 1970's the music, the events of the time and the college experience you should enjoy this book. If you are a fan of college football, particularly small-college football, you likely will enjoy the intimate look at what the game was like in the 70s.

Younger readers might also find the contrast in student life today and back in the 70s interesting and amusing. And the lessons learned and training received on the gridiron are as relevant in the present as they were back then.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499009965

Bill Hauser

A Joe Kubert School of Cartoon and Graphic Art graduate, Bill Hauser's artwork has graced the record covers, t-shirts, and posters of numerous punk, hardcore, and heavy metal bands from around the world. Inspired by '80s rock and roll artists like Pushead and Richard Corben, Hauser's attention to detail, jagged line work and bright color schemes reflect the chaotic urgency of punk rock gigs. Bill Hauser is well known in the realm of underground music, having worked with bands like: Ghoul, Bad Religion, ANTiSEEN, Hirax, In Defence, Skit System, BANE, Hellnation and Ozzy Osbourne. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Book preview

Summer 1974

Go All the Way

Raspberries

I turned on the AM radio in my parents’ sky blue 1969 Volkswagen Beetle. I tuned to WSAI or maybe it was WKRC in Cincinnati. Regardless, for the umpteenth time in the last few days, I heard Paul Anka singing You’re Having My Baby, and my heart sank again. I wondered why I was even driving to the high school to run and throw the football.

Lindsey, a girl I had been seeing for the last few months, phoned me a week earlier and told me she was pregnant. If she were, my dream of playing college football would be seriously in doubt. I saw an exciting future being reduced to a life of hardship. I was way too young to be a father.

We were not in a serious relationship—at least I didn’t see it that way—but when we got together, we fooled around and one night went all the way.

I didn’t think she was pregnant. I didn’t have much experience in the way of sex, but I thought for sure I had withdrawn in time. But then again, can you really be sure of something like that?

Since receiving that phone call, I was a mess. I was trying to act as normally as possible so my parents wouldn’t suspect that something was bothering me, but the thought of her being pregnant never left my mind for more than a few minutes.

I couldn’t sleep at night. It hung over me like a dark cloud. Whenever I got engulfed in something else, the fear was always there.

I would go to my bedroom, turn on some music, and put my headphones on. I avoided the stations that played Paul Anka, but that was no help. I heard another song, Ready or Not, by Jackson Browne. Was it my imagination, or were there more damn songs out about pregnancy than ever before? That wasn’t a good sign and surely meant she was pregnant.

At least I liked the Jackson Browne song, but You’re Having My Baby? I cringed every time I heard the lyrics about love and how wonderful it was.

I thought about all the possibilities. She might actually be pregnant. If she were, what could we do? Would we have to get married? How could I tell my parents? Could I still proceed with my big plans or were they going to be ruined? Was abortion an option?

Or she might not be pregnant. Maybe she thinks she is, but it also occurred to me that she was making this up in an attempt to keep a grip on me for as long as she could. If she really thinks she is, then she’s probably as scared as I am.

I didn’t want a long-term relationship and tried to make that clear to her. I think Lindsey wanted something more. She knew my plans, but she didn’t want to let go.

She had no choice. It was time to move on to the next stage of my life, and there was no room for her. It was late June, and I was starting college in September and had to report for summer football camp in August and had to focus on football because it was going to be a huge challenge.

I was a good high school quarterback, but I didn’t have the kind of ability to succeed without an all-out effort and focus. But with this situation always in my head, I found it difficult to put my full energy into training.

My last football season at Loveland High School in 1973 was a blast. Our record was six wins and four losses, but we probably overachieved. We only had seven seniors on the team after losing to graduation many good football players from our 1972, 10 and 0 squad. Two of our better seniors, who had played football all their lives, decided in the summer to focus on other sports, one on basketball and one on baseball, and were not going to play football. With them on the team, we would have had much more experience. In our second game, we lost another senior for the season because of an injury. Our best junior, a two-way player, was lost for the season in the fourth game; and we lost our tight end, one of our team captains (I was the other), for three games in the middle of the year.

At a school the size of Loveland and with a squad as small as ours, we couldn’t afford to lose good players.

Our entire interior offensive line was made up of juniors who hadn’t played varsity football before. They were scrappy but young and undersized. We had a sophomore wide receiver and a sophomore fullback. I give our coach, Jerry Peters, a lot of credit because with the young team we had, he decided our best chance would be to open up the offense and take advantage of our two best players, the captains, our quarterback and tight end.

Consequently, we threw the football more than any prior team in my high school’s history. That year, I threw more passes (211), and completed more (114), than any quarterback in the greater Cincinnati area (consisting of about forty high schools at the time). I ranked second in the city in touchdown passes (16) and third in yards passing (1,285). I set several school passing records.

These stats, along with my decent size (6'2"), arm strength, and graduating in the top 10 percent of my class, brought me considerable attention from college coaches, mostly small colleges; but I did get some looks from bigger schools and received two full scholarship offers.

I received letters from more than two-dozen college football coaches. Out of those, I chose to visit four schools, Ashland College, Marietta College, and Wittenberg University in Ohio and DePauw University in Indiana.

During these visits, I would meet the head coach and other offensive coaches, take a tour of the campus and athletic facilities, meet some current players, and eat a meal at a dining hall on campus. I would also be shown game film so the coach could explain the style of offense employed by the team.

On my visit to DePauw, in Greencastle, Indiana, Head Coach Tom Mont took my dad and me to the film room to watch some tape from the previous season. The tape began just prior to the game and showed the DePauw cheerleaders running off the field. Coach Mont slowed the tape down and, using the clicker, ran the tape backward and forward several times, focusing on the cheerleaders in their short skirts and bouncing sweaters. I enjoyed the scene but was puzzled. I knew coaches liked to use the clicker and run the tape back and forth, but that was usually after you screwed up, and they wanted to chew you out and make a point. Why was he showing me the cheerleaders? Finally, Coach Mont said, Bill… these are girls. My dad chuckled, and I thought I knew what he was getting at. College would provide opportunities to better get to know the fairer sex. Later, I realized that he was also taking a shot at DePauw’s biggest rival, the all-male Wabash College, another school that was recruiting me.

I took an overnight visit to only one school, Marietta College. My brother, Bob, had graduated from Marietta in 1971. He was their starting quarterback for four years and team captain as a senior. He led them to their best record, 8-1, in over sixty seasons during his junior year.

His coach, Joe McDaniel, was still Marietta’s head coach; and he wanted me very badly. He persuaded me to make an overnight visit and told me to bring a friend if I wanted to. My good friend, Moose, was a Loveland teammate and was also interested in playing college football. Even though he wasn’t being heavily recruited, I thought he might benefit from taking a recruiting trip and that we could have some fun while we were at it.

Another Marietta recruit, a local player from Reading High School, was also making an overnight visit that day; and it was arranged for the three of us to drive to Marietta together. Tom Grippa, who would later become a successful high school football coach in Cincinnati, was very quiet; and while Moose and I wanted to try and have some fun on our visit, he seemed to be all business. As soon as we got to Marietta, we separated and didn’t meet up again until the next morning for our trip home.

Meanwhile, after meetings with the coaches, a film session, campus tour, and dinner, a couple of current players were assigned to make sure Moose and I had a good time. After taking us to a Marietta basketball game, our assigned escorts, apparently with better things to do, gave us some options on where to go to have fun and left us. One suggestion was a party at a dormitory.

We decided to check out the dorm party, but no sooner had Moose and I entered than we were asked to leave. We began walking away, wondering what we did wrong, when someone grabbed my arm and asked, Are you guys recruits? We said we were, and he said, Well, come on in and have a beer. We thought you were townies. Apparently, the high school jackets we were wearing were the same colors as Marietta High School. When they saw our school name on the back, we were welcome. After a long night and at least one of us getting sick, we met Tom the next morning for the drive home.

The two scholarship offers I received were from Virginia Military Institute (VMI), where two of my former high school teammates were already playing, and Xavier University in Cincinnati. VMI had a quarterback shortage because of graduation and expulsion and offered me based on game film and testimony from my former teammates.

Xavier thought I was the best quarterback in greater Cincinnati that year and came forth. Ironically, Xavier dropped football a few weeks after making the offer, but it didn’t matter. By that time, I pretty much knew where I was going to school and play football, at Division III, Wittenberg University.

Some of my friends couldn’t understand how I could turn down a full scholarship to play at a school that offered no athletic aid. DIII schools, by rule, offer financial aid based only on need, with some consideration given for academic achievements. No athletic scholarships of any size can be offered. I felt that some guys accepted athletic scholarships out of ego. Other schools might have been a better fit for them, but they could puff out their chests saying they were getting an athletic scholarship.

For me, this was not a factor. I didn’t need to boost my ego in that way. Also, I didn’t want the military lifestyle at VMI so I didn’t consider that option at all. And by the time Xavier offered, I was already leaning heavily toward Wittenberg. Besides, I thought Wittenberg played better football than either at the time, and I wanted to play for a winner.

I was also lucky to have parents who let me make the decision on where I wanted to go, regardless of how much it was going to cost them. And my dad loved the school and had admired their athletic teams from afar for many years as they took on and competed well with larger programs. He especially enjoyed it when Wittenberg beat the University of Akron in their final football meeting, after Akron announced it was going big time and wouldn’t be playing the small school anymore.

Wittenberg University has a long storied football history built by legendary Hall of Fame coaches Ernie Godfrey, Bill Edwards, and others. They had won three small college national championships in the 1960s. In the fall of 1973, they had won their fourth, the first NCAA Division III football championship, won via playoffs. Thus the huge challenge for me. Playing college football was going to be tough enough, but I was going to play at a school that had one of the best small college football programs in the country and for one of the most successful coaches in the game.

At the time, Dave Maurer had one of the highest-winning percentages among all college football coaches. He was also the coach of the quarterbacks, and he was one demanding SOB. I had better be totally prepared or I wouldn’t be able to compete. And I wanted badly to succeed.

The summer of 1974 should have been carefree and fun as I had few responsibilities. They included my job (pumping gas at a filling station), working out, playing softball, and continually searching for a good time. At eighteen, I could stay out late and still get up early and be ready for a full day. But Paul Anka was still on the radio, and he reminded me that my dreams could be dashed. With this possible pregnancy always in my head, it was difficult to have fun.

My softball team was called Barney’s Bombers. It was mostly made up of former Loveland athletes, some who were now playing in college. We had a current University of Cincinnati basketball player on the squad along with two Xavier cagers and a few college football players. The rest of the group included former high school teammates, friends, and partiers.

Barney was our pitcher, sponsor, and a great guy. He was in his late twenties and weighed well over 300 pounds. We won almost all our games, even though we didn’t take it too seriously and following games would find a place to celebrate our victories.

The Bombers played in a Wednesday night league at a field behind the hometown junior high school. All of the teams in the league were local, so on Wednesday nights, the softball field was the place to be.

The usual big crowd was forming one particular Wednesday as I warmed up prior to the game, swinging a couple of softball bats. We were the visiting team, batting first, and I was hitting third in the order so I wanted to be loose when I came to the plate. A teammate of mine was doing the same thing about 20 feet away. I finished my warm-up, and just as I turned to walk back to the bench, a flying aluminum bat slammed into the middle of my forehead. Somehow my teammate had let one of the bats he was swinging slip from his hands. I stood there, palms up, with blood streaming down my face, looking at him in disbelief. He apologized profusely, the same way I was bleeding.

A friend of mine who was in the stands sped me to the nearest emergency room while I held a handkerchief tight to my head. I received six stitches about two inches above my nose. I had a knot on my forehead and wore the stitches for about a week. It was swollen and tender for some time after that, and I worried if it would be totally healed by the time I had to squeeze into a tight football helmet in August, assuming college football was still going to be an option.

Man, I thought, this summer is not going well. First, I have a girl who says she’s pregnant with my baby, and now I take a Louisville Slugger to the head. What else can go wrong?

I got the answer to that question a few days later.

I didn’t like work in general, but the job at the gas station sucked. I worked at the cheapest station in town. In the summer of ’74, gas was around $0.55 a gallon. It had been about $0.39 until the 1973 Arab oil embargo caused a gas shortage in the United States. Because $0.55 was high compared with the previous year, consumers were looking for the cheapest gas they could find. Consequently, we were always busy. The station consisted of a little shack next to two gas pumps, and it was not self-serve as it is today. I dispensed the gas.

When I wasn’t running between the two pumps, I was in the shack, making change where the temperature was 100-plus degrees. I had a perpetual headache from the heat and gas fumes, and the gash in my head didn’t help. Because I hated the job, I developed an attitude. I think the customers sensed it, and it got back to my boss.

My attitude didn’t improve when the boss falsely accused me of stealing. He wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, or so I thought. He was from south of border, the Ohio border; and I was eighteen years old, so of course, I knew more than him. When he accused me of stealing $100, I said, Duh! You must have carried a one when you shouldn’t have! Well, I was right in this instance, but that was the end of my service station career. I was fired.

I dreaded having to tell my dad that I got canned. He was a hardworking World War II veteran who grew up during the Great Depression. He got up at five thirty every morning and went to work operating a printing press for a Cincinnati greeting card company. He did this for thirty-some years so he couldn’t understand how I could be fired from my job. However, he let me slide because he saw how hard I was working out and preparing for football. Because he wanted me to succeed, and because I wasn’t simply sitting on my ass, getting fat, just the opposite in fact, he got over it.

Without a job, I had more of a reason to stay out late. When I didn’t stay out, I stayed up and watched Midnight Special or the Tomorrow Show. My parents didn’t like it, but they had been through it with my brother while he was in college a few years earlier and decided fighting about it wasn’t worth it. They trusted that when I was out I would use good judgment and not get into trouble (yeah right). I thanked my brother for blazing that trail for me.

On one of these late nights, a Friday, three classmates of mine, Mark, Kevin, Greg, and I hooked up with Barney and Terry, the manager of the Bombers. Like Barney, Terry was in his late twenties and had his own place. In addition to beer, Barney had bought a bottle of tequila. We went to Terry’s house, took shots of tequila between swills of beer, and had a great time listening to music, none of which was by Paul Anka, and talking about sports and women. It was one of the few times that summer I could get my mind off my troubles.

Mark, who was going to Xavier University in the fall to play basketball, didn’t handle the tequila/beer mixture too well and got shit-faced. In fact, we literally had to carry him out of the house and into the car. We couldn’t take him home in that condition so we decided to let him sleep it off at Kevin’s house.

As Greg and I left Kevin’s place, we noticed Mark’s jacket was still in the car. We doubled back to return the jacket, and as we entered Kevin’s room, we found him prying Mark’s eye open and digging in with his finger. We asked what he was doing, and he said he had already gotten one contact lens out and was working on the other one. Mark, still in a drunken coma, was oblivious to the probing of his eyes.

We didn’t know it at the time, but Mark was supposed to have a meeting the following morning with Tay Baker, his basketball coach at Xavier. Needless to say, he missed that meeting. It was probably not the best way to start his college basketball career. Mark’s dad, a whisky drinker and also a member of our softball team, wasn’t happy but took it in stride. He groused, Next time, if you’re going to get hammered, at least do it with a man’s drink.

In 1974, there were two kinds of beer, 3.2 percent alcohol by volume, and 6 percent. At eighteen years old in Ohio, one could legally drink the 3.2 percent variety. You had to be twenty-one years of age to buy 6 percent beer. Personally, I couldn’t tell much difference. I got a buzz whether drinking three-two or the good stuff. However, some of my friends swore that 6 percent was the only way to go.

There was a pony keg, or carryout, in our town that was owned by my cousin, Stan’s, uncle. Stan and I were good friends in addition to being cousins. He was a year older than me, also played for the Bombers, and was the other Xavier basketball player I referred to earlier. His Uncle Beef, so nicknamed because of his barrel-shaped build, owned the pony keg.

Beef was a friendly guy, and everyone liked him. And if you were in his circle of trust, he would sell you 6 percent beer when you should have been buying three-two. I remember walking into the pony keg and Beef would be standing behind the counter with beads of sweat on his forehead, a cigarette hanging off his lips, in his polo shirt that was about to split open, and telling me, Billy, make sure you get the good stuff, meaning go to the far walk-in cooler that contained the 6 percent beer.

One rainy night that summer, all the young guys that liked Beef came to his rescue. The pony keg was located less than a football field’s length from the Little Miami River. The store had been flooded many times in the past, and it appeared that it was going to happen again. The distress call went out. We had to move all the beer out of the store and to higher ground.

It was determined that the beer would be moved to a friend’s garage. Beef said he didn’t care how much we drank just as long as we got all the beer out before the store was flooded. As the rain poured and the river inched toward the store, we formed a line and passed cases one by one down the line from the coolers to pickup trucks, like a fire brigade, taking a drink between passes. If you were too slow, you paid a price. One kid had a case of beer bounce off his face. Bloodied, he had to drop out. But we did it. We saved the beer and had a great time doing it. Beef was very grateful.

As the time passed after my firing, I felt bad that I wasn’t working, like I had let my dad down. To make it up to him, I offered to paint our house, which was in need of another coat. I talked to my buddy and former teammate, Moose, about helping me and then sold my dad on letting the two of us paint the house. I told him he could pay Moose, but he didn’t have to pay me. He agreed to buy the paint and decided to pay us both to do the job.

Since Moose was also intending to play college football (he had chosen Georgetown College in Kentucky) he was also working out. We would start our day with a workout in the morning, eat lunch, and then start painting. Even though he was a defensive lineman and weighed about 220 pounds, Moose enjoyed playing receiver while I practiced throwing the football. I also punted for our high school team so I practiced punting, and Moose would chase down my kicks. Between the two, he was doing a lot of running.

In order to make the house painting more enjoyable, we would set up my stereo outside where we were working and listen to loud music. Grand Funk Railroad’s We’re an American Band, Machine Head by Deep Purple, Bachman Turner Overdrive, and The Best of the Guess Who albums were a few of our favorites; but we also liked Alice Cooper and a little known band we got turned on to when we visited Marietta, called Babe Ruth. Throw in some Rare Earth and a little Led for the head and we were rockin’ and paintin’.

The job was finished in a little over a week. We received a few complaints from our neighbors because of the loud music, but the house looked good, and my dad was happy.

Finally, one evening, I got the call I was desperately hoping for. I’m not pregnant, she said. Whew! The weight of the world was lifted from my shoulders. I resisted the urge to lash out at her. I had been going through hell thinking about this every day. But I considered the possibility that she really believed it and that she too was having a tough time. I didn’t accuse her of making it up, even though deep down I thought that was a strong possibility. I politely told her that I was going to move on.

Now I could concentrate entirely on working out and trying to enjoy what was left of the summer, although I didn’t have much time. In a few weeks, I would be sweating through three-a-day football practices in the August heat.

Summer 1974

Ride the Tiger

Jefferson Starship

Wittenberg University, home of the Tigers, is located in Springfield, Ohio, about 45 miles west of Columbus and 25 miles northeast of Dayton. The school was founded in 1845 by Lutheran pastors and has a German heritage. Its athletic teams were known as the Fighting Lutherans, and the first reference to Tigers occurred in 1921 when a newspaper article referred to the football team as Tigers of the West.

In 1974, the private liberal arts institution had an enrollment of 2,300 students of diverse races and religions. It was about an hour and a half drive from my Loveland home, mostly on two-lane highways that wound through some nice small towns in southwest Ohio such as Waynesville, Xenia, and Yellow Springs.

In