John U. Bacon

On Veterans Day, we generally honor our Veterans. It’s a good idea, for lots of reasons: they served our country, often in unpleasant places, and in great danger, to keep the worst of the world away from our homeland.

My grandfather was a New York dentist who volunteered at age 39 to hop on a ship in the Pacific during World War II. My dad graduated from medical school, then enlisted in the U.S. Army, which sent him and his new bride to Fulda, Germany, to guard the border. It was an unconventional decision, but he’s always said it was one of his best.

“I earned more money than I ever had,” he often jokes, though that wasn’t hard to do for a recent medical school graduate. “People had to do what I said. And I never got shot at.” My parents also made lifelong friends, and still travel every year to see them at reunions.

I grew up hearing Dad say things like, “Smart to be seen in Army green!” And “Three meals a day, and –” well, I’m stopping there. (If you know that one, you know why.)

On Veterans Day, I’ve gotten into the habit of calling my old man to thank him for his service. But this year, the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Hockey League spent Veterans Day telling its 183 member high school teams to stop performing the national anthem before their games.

The league commissioner, Ed Sam, was quick to explain, “It’s not that we’re not patriotic. That’s the furthest from the truth.”

I actually believe him. They’re not unpatriotic. They’re amazingly stupid.

The reason behind the decision was money. Most teams have to pay for their ice time, which Sam said costs up to $300 an hour.

I’ve coached high school hockey,  and that seems high to me. But even at that rate, unless they’re playing Whitney Houston’s version, the national anthem takes about two minutes – or ten bucks of ice time.

What do they get for that ten bucks? They get to join some of their best friends and complete strangers, singing a song that ends with the ringing words, “O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.”

That’s not a bad deal, it seems to me.

“The Star-Spangled Banner” didn’t become our national anthem until 1931 – when we needed it most. It spread through baseball, then other sports.

We Americans don’t do much together anymore. We watch different news programs, live in different neighborhoods, and go to different schools. But we do this together, every week, without taking sides, or trying to determine whose flag pin is bigger – as if some of us are real Americans, and others aren’t. My dad and I don’t always agree on politics, but we’ve always agreed on this.

When I coached the Ann Arbor Huron High hockey team, we decided to make a quiet statement during the national anthem by standing ram-rod straight on the blue line, and not moving a muscle until one beat after the song ended. This made such an impression on the players’ parents, they took hundreds pictures of their sons in perfect formation. The opponents’ parents would send me letters, praising us for the respect we showed the flag. It became such a central part of our identity that our seniors took it upon themselves to make sure the freshmen did it right.

We rely on the national anthem during our toughest times. I’ll never forget the national anthems that followed 9/11 – from Yankee Stadium, to our rink. That fall, it was our seniors who asked me to add an American flag to our uniforms.

Seeing them standing on our blue line, in a perfect row, I was immensely proud of them. If those 17-year-olds are the future, I thought, we’re going to be fine. Well, those 17-year-olds are 27 now – and I was right. We’re in good hands.

So if the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Hockey League can’t afford the ten bucks a game it costs to sing our national anthem together – which is more important than the game that follows – they could shorten their warm-ups or player introductions, or just pass the hat. I’m pretty confident that at any rink in America, you’d have no problem collecting ten bucks for that.

I’d be happy to kick in the first Hamilton.

And my dad will kick in the second.

About the author: John U. Bacon, an Ann Arbor resident, is the author of the New York Times bestseller “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” He also co-authored “A Legacy of Champions,” and provided commentary for “Black and Blue: The Story of Gerald Ford, Willis Ward, and the 1934 Michigan-Georgia Tech Football Game.”

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

Ann Arbor’s Parthenon Restaurant closed last week after almost 40 years at the corner of Main and Liberty. For me and my friends, it marked more than the passing of a favorite spot, but the end of a time-honored ritual.

On our last visit, we filed in, and walked to our favorite table in the back. A little warmer, and we’d sit outside, but it was still March, so whatya gonna do? The owners and waiters nodded. They’ve seen us more than a hundred times. When I needed to sell ads for the Huron Hockey program to help fund the team, the Parthenon signed up every time – something the chain coffee shop across the street would never consider.

BW and I started coming here in the fall of our sophomore year in high school. We both ran cross-country – a near-death experience – but that meant we could eat anything, and not gain a pound. For us, that meant a jumbo coke, a basket of fries, and two gyros – each.

We’ve since added a few friends from our high school days: Scotty, a hockey teammate of mine; TP, the tennis captain; Sevvie, a soccer star; and Barney, whom I was nice enough to drive to practice every day, so he could take my job. I was cool like that.

We have no need for menus, but no need for two gyros each anymore, either. The lightweights get salads, and we all get gyros. TP once made the double mistake of looking at the menu and ordering a shish-ka-bob – who knew they even made those? – for which he is still roundly chastised. Mainly by me.

The highlight, always, is the saganaki. The waiters know we tip in direct proportion to the height of the flame they create, so they douse the cheese in brandy. Then the poor guy lights it, it goes “whooof!” and creates a mini mushroom cloud. I know a few waiters who no longer have eyebrows.

Ostensibly, we meet to celebrate someone’s birthday, but being guys, we’re lucky if we get together within a month of the actual day. I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who knows even half the birthdays, anyway.

We still recognize the division between the four former high school seniors at our table, and the two lowly juniors. We’ve been doing this for well over a decade, but it only occurred to us about five years ago that the juniors might also have birthdays. And, as it turned out, they did – but we usually fail to remember them. Because they’re juniors.

Think that’s ridiculous? It gets worse. We often debate the merits of Tappan Junior High versus Clague, which is – and I say this with complete journalistic objectivity – the greatest junior high school of all time. The Tappan guys do have an ace: they played with quarterback Jim Harbaugh, who went on to become Michigan’s Big Ten MVP, an NFL star, and the San Francisco 49ers’ head coach. BW and TP were his tailbacks at Tappan, ultimately replaced by NFL Hall of Famers Walter Payton and Marshall Faulk.

We can still recount football, baseball and basketball games we played against each other years ago – the most pointless conversation anyone is having anywhere in town.

Well, almost. We also repeat stories so many times, everybody at the table can finish them, like an ancient tribe passing on its oral traditions.

Take the homecoming queen who rejected both Scotty and BW in the same month. Scotty was kissing her on her front step when – pardon me in advance – he farted.

“Could she hear it?” we asked.

“I could,” he said. “And my ears were just four inches from hers.”

A few weeks later, BW dropped her off, and didn’t make any moves. But when he tried to drive away, his car got stuck in the snow. He had to ring her doorbell and ask her to come help dig him out – thereby erasing any question whatsoever that it was, indeed, their last date.

The stories go on and on, and in this way, we share our innermost feelings.

Women never join us, but it’s not because they’re not welcome. Our girlfriends and fiancés and wives all wonder about these lunches, and what we talk about, until they come see for themselves, and discover that we’re morons. None of them have ever asked to return.

The baskets get removed, the bill comes, and it’s time for us to say goodbye – not just to each other, but to this old friend, the Parthenon, forever.

We could go somewhere else, and I suppose we’ll have to soon enough, but it won’t be the same. Where are we going to find a place that plays lyre music and ignites dairy products? There are fancier restaurants just down the street, but none will be more comfortable for us.

So, no. Wives and girlfriends, you’re not missing out on anything.

But we will.

About the author: John U. Bacon is the author of the New York Times bestseller “Three and Out: Rich Rodriguez and the Michigan Wolverines in the Crucible of College Football.” He also co-authored “A Legacy of Champions,” and provided commentary for “Black and Blue: The Story of Gerald Ford, Willis Ward, and the 1934 Michigan-Georgia Tech Football Game,” which has been airing on various stations in Michigan and nationally.

The Chronicle relies in part on regular voluntary subscriptions to support our publication of columnists like John U. Bacon. Click this link for details: Subscribe to The Chronicle. And if you’re already supporting us, please encourage your friends, neighbors and colleagues to help support The Chronicle, too!

John U. Bacon

If it seems like the Detroit Lions have played on Thanksgiving since it became a national holiday, it’s because they actually started seven years earlier.

True, the Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving in October of 1621, but the custom faded, resurfacing only when George Washington, Abe Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt promoted the idea as a national tonic in troubled times. FDR tried to move the unofficial holiday back a week to expand the shopping season, but Congress put an end to all the feast-fiddling in 1941, when it fixed Thanksgiving’s date forever and declared it a national holiday.

George Richards was way ahead of them. In 1934 Richards bought the Portsmouth, Ohio, Spartans, for $7,952.08, moved them to Detroit, and renamed them the Lions. Incredibly, they won their first 10 contests to tie the Chicago Bears for first place with three games left. The bad news: only about 12,000 people seemed to care. If the Lions couldn’t catch on at 10-0, Richards knew, their days in Detroit were numbered.

Richards needed a hook – and fast – so he invited the Bears to play on FDR’s unofficial Thanksgiving Day, and drew an overflow crowd of 26,000. The Bears may have won the game, 19-16, but the Lions won the war.

They had started a tradition that’s now older than 22 of the NFL’s 32 current teams. They rewarded their fans the next season by beating the Bears 14-2, on Thanksgiving, en route to their first league championship, the same year the Tigers, Red Wings and Detroit native Joe Louis all won titles, earning Detroit the nickname, “City of Champions.” (If this sounds unbelievable, we understand.)

The Dallas Cowboys started the second half of this holiday biathlon in 1966, when they stuck the powerful Cleveland Browns with a 26-14 Thanksgiving turkey. The Cowboys have played every year since, having successfully fought to keep their tradition protected by the NFL, too.

The annual tradition invariably inspires the Lions’ best effort. “I don’t know what it is about the Thanksgiving game,” says former All-Pro lineman Keith Dorney. “Maybe it’s the holiday or the national television, but there’s magic in the air for the Lions.”

Call it magic, motivation, or Full-Moon Football, on Thanksgiving the Lions have traditionally been over-achievers, and never more so than in 1962, against Vince Lombardi’s undefeated Green Bay Packers. The Lions jumped out to a shocking 26-0 lead, to give the Packers their only loss that year – one “so distasteful in Green Bay,” writes Lombardi biographer David Maraniss, “that not even the championship win over the [New York] Giants completely erased it.”

There hasn’t been much magic for the Lions the last six seasons, when they’ve lost every Thanksgiving Day game. But these days, they’re usually on national TV just once a year – and that’s something the whole country can be thankful for.

About the author: John U. Bacon lives in Ann Arbor and has written for Time, the New York Times, and ESPN Magazine, among others. His most recent book is “Bo’s Lasting Lessons,” a New York Times and Wall Street Journal business bestseller. Bacon teaches at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio; Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism; and the University of Michigan, where the students awarded him the Golden Apple Award for 2009. This commentary originally aired on Michigan Radio.

The Audubon Book as it appeared on Nov. 17, 2010. It will stay turned to the turkey page through Sunday, November 28. (Photo by the writer.)

It’s not the same page as last year. But it really is the same book, which is on display in the Audubon Room at the Hatcher Library. Yes, the room is named after the book, which was the first one ever acquired by the UM library system.

Last year, a turkey page for Thanksgiving was just a coincidence. This year it was not – I asked for it to be turned to that page. It’s actually not a trivial request. There are eight volumes the library is displaying with a page-a-week approach. And right now the turkey page is out of sequence, page-wise. Next year, it will be out of sequence volume-wise. So this could very likely wind up being just a two-year turkey tradition.

That’s all the more reason for Ann Arborites to make a pilgrimage over to the UM campus and visit the Audubon Room in the Hatcher Library. The Hatcher Library is the large academic building with its front steps facing north on the UM Diag. To get to the Audubon Room, head right through the front door, past the checkout desk on your right, all the way to the rear, then turn left. You’ll go up a ramp. At the top of the ramp, there’s a giant image of John F. Kennedy that’s part of a Peace Corps display. Turn left at Kennedy and you’ll see signs for the Audubon Room.

Hours of the Audubon Room:
Monday – Friday  8:30 a.m. – 7 p.m.
Saturday 10:00 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Sunday 1 – 7 p.m.

Thanksgiving Week:
Closed Thursday and Friday
Saturday 1 – 5 p.m.
Sunday  1 – 7 p.m.

Even though I’ve already had a slice of the Audubon turkey this year, I’m planning to make another visit before the page gets turned after Nov. 28. [The library is, of course, all set up for keeping leftovers – it's sort of like their whole mission.]

Thank you, Peggy, for indulging my taste for turkey pictures this year. And thanks also to Mary Morris, who handles community engagement for the UM Library.

Dave Askins is editor and co-founder of The Ann Arbor Chronicle.