by Mark Tabb
“Sure.”
Ed climbed in, and Chris put the Explorer into gear. “Uh, you know, speaking of the high school, that’s why I came over to see you.”
“How’s that?”
“A state police officer called me from over at the school. He told me that if you come into the school building one more time, he’s going to arrest you.”
“What?” Ed seemed genuinely taken aback. “So what did you tell him?”
“I told them to do what they have to do, but that I would deal with you.”
“So are you here to deal with me?” Ed said.
“I guess. So listen. I’m the incident co-commander of this mess, which means I’m pretty much in charge. If you need to get back in your classroom, don’t just go waltzing over there and try to sneak in through a hole in the wall or something. You find me, and I’ll take you inside. OK?”
“Well,” Ed said, “now that you mention it …”
“Sure, Coach. Whatever you need. I have time.”
Forty-five minutes and a carload of items from Ed’s classroom later, Chris drove him back home. “Thanks, Chris, for everything,” Ed said as he grabbed the car door handle.
“Coach, I meant what I said. We can rebuild this town. We can spend ten million dollars here and put everything back as good as new, but that won’t be enough for this town to recover. After every loss, what did you say to us? You said adversity shapes character.”
“That’s not fair, using my own words against me,” Ed said.
“They were never just words. My whole life I’ve watched you live them. I know you will now too. I mean, who knows? This storm may be why God brought you here in the first place. You told me the school was your church, your mission field. Well, there are a lot of people in this town who went through your church and are looking to you to see what you’re going to do now.”
Ed sat silently for a moment, taking it all in. Finally, he turned to Chris, slapped him on the thigh, and said, “Thanks. And thanks for not arresting me.” With that, he laughed, climbed out of the car, and went back to picking through the rubble of his house with his family.
That afternoon, Chris dropped by the incident command center at the fire station for a cup of coffee and a sandwich. He took a few bites of his sandwich and flopped down on the ground to rest. On the nearby radio he heard a familiar voice. He listened more closely and heard Coach Thomas tell a reporter from a Cedar Falls station, “The principal and the superintendent and I got together earlier, and the three of us decided that, God willing, we will play our first home game right here on our field right on schedule.”
A smile broke out across Chris’s face. We’re going to come through this, he thought to himself. We’re going to be all right. He reached for his cup and took a sip of his coffee. Then another thought hit him. Holy crap, how long until the first home game? Three months? How on earth are we going to pull that off?
If there was one thing Chris Luhring loved about Ed Thomas, it was that Coach never dreamed small. When he set a goal, it was always profound. Chris had never met anyone who could get a group of people to dream so big and so wide and so crazy. But he had also never met anyone so gifted at showing you how to reach your goals and then leading you to do it.
“Coach is back. We’re going to be all right,” he said with a smile. “Yep, Coach is back!”
CHAPTER 4
“WE WILL REBUILD”
The greatest gift God has given any of us is the power to choose.
ED THOMAS
ED’S FATHER WAS AN ALCOHOLIC; HIS MOTHER WAS A DEVOUT Christian. Arthurine Whyle didn’t realize she had married an alcoholic when she said “I do.” During their courtship, Roy Thomas went to church every single Sunday with her. One Sunday, he went forward during the altar call and said he gave his life to Jesus Christ.
Everything changed after their wedding day. Once they were married, Roy spent less and less time at church and more and more time with his old buddies down at the local tavern. He never drank at home because Arthurine did not allow liquor inside the walls of her house. That didn’t stop Roy from drinking, and his drinking did not stop Arthurine from pursuing her relationship with Christ. Every time the church doors were open, she was there. What Cheer, Iowa, was a small town where everyone knows everyone else’s business, but that never seemed to bother Arthurine. She did not hide in embarrassment over her husband’s drinking, nor did she ever make excuses for him. In her eyes, life was what it was. She married a man who turned out to be something other than what she had believed. Rather than moan over her lot in life or break off her marriage, she chose to go forward. At home she loved her husband.
In church she prayed for the day God would turn Roy’s heart back to himself.
By the time Ed, their first child, came along, Roy ended up at the tavern almost every evening after work. Most nights he came home drunk. Roy worked hard and tried to provide for his family, but his drinking made things tighter than they should have been. On the weekends, Roy brought Ed into town with him to pick up seed at the local mill and to buy supplies for the farm on which they lived. Ed adored his dad. Even so, most trips ultimately ended up at the tavern. However, before Roy headed off to the bar with his buddies, he dropped Ed off at Arthurine’s parents’ house.
Ed loved his grandparents. As a little boy, he rode along with his grandfather as he delivered bread from the family bakery to all the houses in What Cheer. After his grandfather died, Ed spent nearly as much time with his grandmother as he did at his own home. From the time he was a young boy, she had him memorize Bible verses. Before she let him run outside to play, she pulled him over to her side and said, “Edward, did you learn your verse today?” He shook his head yes, which always led to her saying, “OK, let’s hear it.” With that, Ed quickly recited John 3:16 or Romans 3:23 — or whatever verse she had assigned him that day. “Very good. That’s perfect,” she said as he rattled off every line exactly as it was written in the King James Version. That put a smile on his face, and he ran out the door to play ball.
When he was in the sixth grade, his grandmother asked him, “Edward, how would you like to read through the Bible together, you and me?”
“The whole thing?”
“Yes, the whole thing. A little every day until we get to the end.”
“OK,” he replied. “That sounds like a good idea.”
The family had moved into town by then, and so Ed started walking over to his grandmother’s house every day for Bible reading. The two of them sat down on the couch, opened the Bible, and alternated reading it out loud, verse by verse, one or two chapters at a time. They did this every day until they worked their way from Genesis to Revelation. There were days when Ed forgot and headed off to the ball field. Before long, a little green Plymouth pulled up next to the sandlot and honked its horn. “Hey, guys, it’s my grandmother. I gotta go,” he called out to his buddies. “I’ll be back in a little while.” Then it was off to Grandma’s house.
Some twelve-year-old boys might have thought of this as a cruel form of punishment. Not Ed. All his life he talked about how much he learned from reading through the Bible with his grandmother. He thought everyone who is serious about being a Christian should read through the Bible. And he was more serious about being a Christian than he was about anything else in his life.
Ed got that from his mother. For her, life wasn’t very complicated. Arthurine Teresa Whyle Thomas had a black-and-white way of looking at the world, a trait her oldest child inherited. When you know the right thing to do, you do it. If you know something is wrong, you don’t do it. When she found candy in one of her daughter’s pockets—candy Arthurine knew she hadn’t given to her—she confronted her. “Where did you get this candy, Connie?” she asked her three-year-old daughter.
“The store.”
“Did someone buy the candy for you?” Connie shook her head no. “Did you take the candy?”
Connie nodded her head yes. Next thing they knew, Arthurine had
all the kids in the car and headed back to the local drugstore to make things right. She didn’t think anything of what she did, although her daughter never forgot it. Returning stolen pieces of penny candy is what you do if you claim to be a Christian. Arthurine taught her children that every day you face a choice. Either you choose to do what is right, or you choose to do what is wrong. When you choose to do the right thing, you set yourself up for good things to happen. But when you choose to do the wrong thing, consequences follow. And if you suffer the consequences of your own poor choices, you cannot moan and complain. Instead you must learn from your mistakes and move forward.
Arthurine was the spiritual leader of her home, and she led by example. She took the children to church, read the Bible to them, and corrected them when they got in trouble. As the oldest child, Ed assumed more and more of that role as he matured. In high school, he became a junior deacon and helped with Communion at their local church. Sunday afternoons, he dragged his two sisters with him to the young people’s service, although only one or two other kids went. That didn’t matter to Ed. He was like his mother in that he figured if the pastor went to the trouble of having a special event for teenagers on a Sunday afternoon, he needed to be there, and so did his sisters.
Even as he assumed more and more of the role of setting an example for his two sisters, and later for a sister and his only brother who were born right around the time he finished high school, Ed still leaned on his mother. Each night when he went to bed, he called down to her from his room in a voice so loud that everyone could hear him. “Hey, Mom,” he said, “would you say a short prayer?”
“Of course, Edward,” she said. She then proceeded to pray out loud for each and every member of the family by name. When she finished, Ed called out, “Thanks, Mom,” and then he went to sleep. He did this up until the day he left for college.
Ed grew up between two worlds. On the one hand, he had the world of his mother. Sundays and Wednesdays they went to church. The rest of the week she hauled all her children around to Ed’s ball games, even though she didn’t have a clue as to what was taking place on the field.
On the other hand, there was his father. Ed could count on one hand the number of times his dad showed up at church or at one of Ed’s games. On the nights Roy came home drunk, the entire family cringed, especially Ed. He avoided having friends over on the nights his father went out drinking. His dad usually came in, cursing and carrying on, two things Ed found unconscionable. Ed’s mother did her best to coax Roy upstairs and out of sight as quickly as possible, but for Ed and his sisters, the damage was done.
While it would have been easy for him to resent his father, Ed didn’t. He felt embarrassed for him, not by him. All his life, Ed chose to see the best in people. He refused to believe anyone was a victim of their past or their circumstances. That is why Ed saw more in his father than his father saw in himself. Ed knew that Roy was capable of so much more, if only he would choose to walk away from the alcohol that controlled his life.
When Ed was eighteen, that choice was made for his father. One Sunday afternoon, Roy went over to a cousin’s house, and the two of them did their best to get as drunk as possible as quickly as possible. That in and of itself was nothing unusual. They drank together on a regular basis. However, that afternoon did not turn out like all the rest. After a few rounds, the two of them starting talking about the old days, back when they were kids. “You know, I could always take you,” Roy said.
His cousin took the bait. “Roy, you must be drunk, because you know you couldn’t take me on my worst day and your best.” The two of them went back and forth verbally for a while, all in fun, until one of them made the first move. They began wrestling around the yard. Ed’s father got the worst of it. He fell awkwardly on his head and screamed out in pain. His arms and legs would not move.
The phone rang at the Thomases’ house. Ed’s mother answered, listened closely to the voice on the other end, and then informed the family, “We have to get to the hospital. Your father has been in an accident.” After they arrived at the hospital, the family was told Roy might not survive. “His neck is broken, Mrs. Thomas,” the doctor said. “He is paralyzed from the neck down. It may or may not be permanent. We just don’t know yet.”
Roy Thomas eventually regained full use of his arms and legs, yet the experience left him changed. During his four months in the hospital, he went through deep withdrawal from alcohol. Once he went home, he never drank again. Although Roy didn’t become a churchgoing man, he became engaged in his two youngest children’s lives in a way he never had been for Ed or for Roy’s two oldest daughters. Roy rarely made it to one of Ed’s games, but he never missed one of Ed’s little brother Greg’s games. Ed never resented the father Greg and Teresa enjoyed. If anything, he felt a great deal of pride over the man Roy had become. Ed always knew he had it in him. The changes in Roy’s life made a huge difference in Ed’s relationship with his dad. Roy may not have attended the games Ed played, but he made sure he watched his oldest son coach his first game, and as many games as he could after that.
Living between these two worlds, and watching what happened when they collided, left Ed with two lifelong convictions that shaped everything he did. First, his mother showed him how the greatest power God gives any of us is the power to choose. Ed watched his mother choose to love his father, even as he was doing so much to make himself hard to love. She chose to stick with him and love him, and good things happened as a result. Granted, it took a broken neck for her husband to change, but that experience is what left Ed with his second conviction: Adversity not only reveals character; it shapes it if we let it. Ed’s father showed that when something bad happens, you choose how you will respond to it. When you make the right choice, adversity becomes a tremendous opportunity rather than a problem to be solved. His father seized that opportunity, gave up drinking, and became a new man. Ed admired his father for what he did, and he never forgot the lesson he learned through the experience.
Forty years later, Ed stood with Ron Westerman at the top of the stairs on the hill that led down to the football field. It was the day after the tornado ripped through Parkersburg. Ron worked as the head custodian at the middle school. A couple of years earlier, Ed roped Ron into helping lay sod on part of the high school football field, and Ron was hooked. Soon Ed dragged Ron along with him to turf conventions all over the state. In the past year, Ron started turning the middle school field into his own version of the Sacred Acre.
The two of them stood looking over the high school field, silently, for a few moments, staring at the twisted goalposts and the two-by-fours sticking up from the turf like porcupine spines. Finally Ron said, “Coach, what an opportunity we have.”
Ed smiled. “We sure do.” He pointed out toward the far side of the field. “You know, we’ve complained for a long time about pulling weeds along that fence line. I don’t see a fence now. Problem solved,” he said.
“So what’s next?”
“Rebuild and play our first home game right here, right on schedule.”
“This season?”
“Has to be this season,” Ed said.” Has to be. Getting it done in time won’t be easy. But you know, there’s a huge gap between really hard and impossible. I figure this job lies right in there, so we’ll get it done.”
As the two talked, school superintendent Jon Thompson and high school principal Dave Meyers walked over to them. The two had just completed a walking tour of the school. “Hey, Ed,” Jon said.
“Hey, Jon. So how does it look to you?” Ed asked.
“I’d say it’s a total loss. The insurance guy said something about maybe being able to salvage the south wing, but I don’t see how. To me, the only thing we can do is tear down what’s left standing, clear the deck, and rebuild from the ground up.”
“I think that’s a good choice. It would be harder to make what’s left usable than it would be to start over from scratch,” Ed said. “You know, the school was maybe five
years old when I came here in 1975. Makes me sick to think about tearing it down, but it’s the right choice.”
Dave added, “Everyone is so afraid that the kids are all going to get shipped out to Dike or Grundy Center or one of the other nearby districts. We want to get the word out that none of us are going anywhere. The school is going to be rebuilt right where it was, and we’re going to do our level best to get it done in time for the start of school one year from now.”
Ed smiled. “That sounds great to me. And while you’re getting the word out, you might as well tell everybody that we’re going to play our first home football game on our own field as scheduled this season.”
Jon did a double take. “What? Wait a minute. You mean next season, don’t you, Ed, when the new school is up?”
“No. I mean this season. Our first home game is 104 days from today. We open the week before on the road against Dike-New Hartford, and then we will be here for our home opener against West Marshall the next week. We will play that game right here on our own field, right on schedule.”
Jon looked down at the football field. “Come on, Ed, be serious.”
Ed looked the superintendent in the eye. “I am serious. Think about what that’s going to do for the entire community. We need this. The people of this town — they need some normalcy while they try to put their lives back together.” Ed began to tear up as he spoke. “Parkersburg needs something that lets them know that this storm did not beat us and will not define who we are.”
Dave smiled. Jon shook his head, but he didn’t argue the point with Ed. He knew better than to try to talk him out of it, and he also knew better than to doubt the fact that the Aplington-Parkersburg Falcons would indeed play their first home game in a newly rebuilt Ed Thomas Field, right on schedule. A year earlier, the superintendent and his wife attended the mandatory preseason football parents’ meeting. Their son played quarterback for Ed. In the meeting, Ed laid out his plans for the season to all the moms and dads. After thirty minutes of listening to Ed speak, Jon’s wife turned to him and said, “I wanna go tackle somebody!” The way Jon saw it, if Ed Thomas could move a middle-aged woman to want to put on a set of shoulder pads and a helmet in less than thirty minutes, he could certainly get a new football field built and ready to go in 104 days.
