Road Work: Among Tyrants, Heroes, Rogues, and Beasts

by Mark Bowden

  The Pioneers took it hard. Big Joe Mopkins, a junior lineman, was angry. “Websters are all cowards,” he said. “How much would it take out of them to play one half, or one quarter? Then they could put in their subs.” What made it harder for this suddenly sidelined varsity was that Turkey Day week was proceeding with all its usual gusto, but without them. They had become ghosts at their own party. The hallways of Kirkwood’s sprawling orange-brick campus were alive with excitement, the profusely decorated hallways and classrooms filled with students, many with color-coordinated faces and hair in addition to their red-and-white clothes, buttons, ribbons, and hats. The Kirkwood pep rally on Tuesday shook the school as the cheerleaders unveiled elaborate new routines and students performed skits poking fun at their teachers and, of course, at Webster Groves. Meanwhile, Kirkwood’s football coaches were scrambling to match helmets and pads with freshmen and sophomores who had finished their seasons three weeks earlier. They collared recruits in the halls.

  One of them was John Lothman, a six-five sophomore who was already into his basketball season. He got permission from his coaches to take a week off and resume football practice. “I always pictured myself playing in this game someday,” he said with the grin of someone who has been given a great unexpected gift. “Looks like it’s going to be the day after tomorrow.”

  John would be the fourth generation of his family to play in the Turkey Day game. His father, Carl, played for Kirkwood in 1971. His grandfather William played for Webster Groves in the 1930s, and his great-grandfather Richard Kremer played for Webster two decades before that.

  Coach Wade rallied his startled new team for its first practice on Monday afternoon in the gym. “We’re going to go with about five passing plays and five running plays,” he told a reporter. “Ordinarily we’d go into a game with a book of about eighty-five plays, but a lot of these kids haven’t ever played with each other. But you know what? We’re going to win this game. I don’t think it’s as important to Webster as it is to us. They’re going to be focused on the state championship game.”

  Behind Wade, his demoralized seniors were draped over chairs and sprawled on mats, watching the underclassmen do calisthenics. A few varsity players led their proxies in exercises, but most just looked stunned and angry. “It’s horrible,” said Principal Holley. “I feel so bad for these varsity guys. Something important has been taken from them. But I think we made the best of a bad situation.”

  Two days later Webster’s coach, Ice, was less compassionate. At a Lions Club lunch for his players and cheerleaders he said the sympathy for Kirkwood’s varsity was excessive. “They started their season with the same opportunity you guys had,” he told the players. “Bottom line? They didn’t take care of business. You guys did.”

  Driving west on Interstate 44, away from the muddy Mississippi River and the giant silver GatewayArch, you encounter the exits for Webster Groves about ten minutes from downtown St. Louis. Webster Groves is a leafy, stately suburb centered on a quaint train station and a thriving business district. The same description pretty much applies to Kirkwood, about five miles farther west. It was named after a railroad engineer, and its historic train station is still used by Amtrak. Both towns were founded in the late nineteenth century as stops along the Pacific Railroad, and in their older, tonier sections they resemble the gilded suburbs on Philadelphia’s Main Line, shaded by towering elms, oaks, and maples, with grand houses that feature wraparound porches and the kind of rooflines and eaves that were dismissed as frilly by the more practical architects of postwar suburbia. Kirkwood, being slightly farther out, was hit harder by 1950s and ’60s architecture, but it boasts three hundred acres of open space and a spectacular Frank Lloyd Wright house. Webster Groves has three hundred houses in the National Register of Historic Places.

  What may be most remarkable about these two communities is their continuity. In the U.S. young people grow up and leave. Parents tend to move out of the old homestead when their children are gone, and every twenty years or so whole neighborhoods turn over. The very idea of the modern suburb is of something temporary. Most people today, returning to the blocks where they grew up, find familiar streets and houses with strangers in residence. Not in Webster Groves and Kirkwood. To a great extent, these two Missouri towns either keep or recapture their young, who raise their own children just down the street from their parents and send them off to their old schools to be taught, in many cases, by their old teachers.

  Time hasn’t left Webster Groves and Kirkwood untouched, but more than most modern suburbs they cling to an ideal of enduring community. An event such as Turkey Day symbolizes what has been lost by a society that so unquestioningly embraces motion and change: a sense of history and place, a sense of belonging, a communal memory, the idea of lasting values and accomplishment.

  “Every year it is a reunion, not just of your old class, but of every class, of the whole town,” says Andre Nelson, who quarterbacked the 1979 Webster Groves team to victory on Turkey Day and in the state championship game two days later. “When we won the semifinal game the Saturday before Thanksgiving, our coach started talking about skipping Turkey Day in order to get ready for the championship game. We all said, ‘Skip Turkey Day? No way!’ So we played both. We were young, and we didn’t think anything of playing twice in three days. We ran up the score in the first half of the Turkey Day game and then put in the subs.”

  Nelson is a stockbroker in his early forties. He grew up in Webster Groves’s sizable African-American community and says he never felt anything but included in the town. Today he lives in Ballwin, a nearby suburb, but he attends the Turkey Day game every year and says he may move back to Webster Groves. “I’d like to send my kids to Webster Groves High School,” he says.

  Similar sentiments abound in Kirkwood. “If we took you to Kirkwood High, then to Webster High, you wouldn’t know the difference,” says Jones, the old Webster Groves football coach, who now does substitute teaching at Kirkwood. “You couldn’t tell the kids apart, or their parents. Turkey Day is just your basic bragging-rights game. Around here, the words ‘Turkey Day’ are a synonym for a big game or a big deal. If you say, ‘This is my Turkey Day,’ people know exactly what you mean.”

  The fact that the event revolves around football doesn’t trouble Webster principal Pat Voss, who brags about her school’s female teams and rattles off all the rallies, contests, awards presentations, and other activities the school organizes to involve students whose interests don’t lean toward sports. “I’ve always had a great interest in student activities of all kinds, but the key at any school is to establish a positive culture,” Voss says. “An event like this gives students a sense of ownership of the school. The event gives the students a spark of connection with each other and with the larger community, whether they are cheerleaders, band members, committee members, or just fans.”

  The Turkey Day game was already a tradition of twenty-eight years’ standing when Harry Kaufman played in his first one, for Kirkwood, back in 1935. He played again the next year. He’s now eighty-five and lives in University City, just a few miles away.

  “We wore leather helmets, shoulder pads, canvas pants, and wool jerseys,” Kaufman says. “I wore these big clodhopper cleats that must have been a half to three quarters of an inch long. I was a running back. We used a T formation, and the coach had me call the plays even though Fred Shans was our quarterback. Thousands of people came to the game even then.”

  Kirkwood lost both Turkey Day games in which Kaufman played; in fact the team failed in both games to score a point. Kirkwood was terrorized by a Webster player named Gale Keane, who was recently inducted into his school’s Hall of Fame.

  “We beat Kirkwood three times while I was playing,” says Keane, who is also eighty-five. “We didn’t have a quarterback. I was more of a running back, and the center just snapped me the ball. Sometimes I threw it. We had this one play where I would get the snap, turn around like I was going to hand it to someone else, a
nd then just run backward through the hole up the middle. Worked like a charm. I also remember intercepting a lot of passes. I don’t know how I did it, because I was half blind even then, and I couldn’t play with my glasses on, and sometimes it would be almost dark by the time the game ended. But I was bigger than most of the other fellows, so it was pretty hard for them to stop me.” Keane settled in Kirkwood, where he raised two sons and a daughter who attended Kirkwood High. Given the closeness of the communities, many people have switched loyalties over the years.

  Elaine Jenkins remembers her husband throwing the dramatic winning touchdown pass to Kay Felker that won the 1939 game for Kirkwood. Harold Jenkins was also Kirkwood’s quarterback in ’38 and ’40. He died thirteen years ago. He rarely missed a Turkey Day game once he returned from World War II, and his family treasures its scrapbooks of news clippings about his high school heroics. “Even back then, everybody went to Turkey Day,” Elaine says. “You wouldn’t even think about not going. It cost fifty cents to get in, and there would be thousands of people. I was dating Harold, but I think he was dating every other girl in the high school.”

  She lost track of him when he joined the Navy as a pilot after graduation. But after the war they met again at a Kirkwood swimming club, married, and had two daughters, one of whose sons now marches for the enemy. “My grandson Michael Barry marches in the Webster Groves High School band!” Elaine says. “I look at those colors, black and orange, and I can’t get used to it. I never thought I’d live to see the day!”

  In 1951 Robert Stone, vice president of the Frisco Railroad Company, contacted Kirkwood principal Murl Moore and offered to give the school the four-hundred-pound bell from an old steam locomotive that was being retired. They decided to make the bell a symbol of Turkey Day victory. Stone presented it to both schools at that year’s game. The Pioneers trounced Webster, rang the Bell (as it came to be known), and then displayed it in the Kirkwood High foyer until the next Turkey Day. The Bell stayed put the next year, when the Turkey Day game ended 0–0. Webster first claimed the prize in ’53 after walloping Kirkwood 33–13. During the game the Bell is rung repeatedly on the holder’s side of the field. When it changes hands—which has happened thirty-three times—the winning team and its fans typically sweep across the field after the game to lay claim to it.

  There is a loser’s prize as well, the banged-up Little Brown Jug, which is supposed to be displayed by the defeated school until the next Turkey Day. This tradition actually predates that of the Bell by more than a decade. Both schools have a tendency, however, to misplace the Jug. “I think somebody spotted it in a closet earlier this year,” said Mike Havener, one of the Kirkwood coaches, earlier this season. “I’m sure we’ll find it in time to return it to Webster after this year’s game.”

  Great pains are taken by both communities to stress the friendliness of this local feud. The first Turkey Day game was arranged in 1907, it is said, by school administrators looking for a constructive alternative to gang fights in the cornfields among teenagers from the two towns. The tradition used to include pranks. Webster students, the proud orange and black, would scatter the hallways of Kirkwood High with rotting oranges and pumpkins. Kirkwood students countered with tomatoes.

  For many years in the 1970s, Carl’s Drive Inn, a popular eatery on Manchester Road about halfway between the two schools, was divided right down the middle. Kirkwood students had one half of the restaurant and Webster students the other, and neither group would cross the invisible line, even if the other side was empty. Each group even had its own door. Sometimes food fights would erupt between the rival groups, and sometimes fistfights. In recent years, however, both schools have worked hard to eliminate the more unseemly aspects of their rivalry.

  In keeping with the game’s original intent, the schools have developed a calendar of cooperative events leading up to the game. They sponsor a Friendship Dance at the school that is not hosting the game. (This year it was Kirkwood.) There is an annual dinner, the Ray Moss Banquet, for the football teams and the cheerleading squads. There are interfaith church services for both teams, and on the morning of Turkey Day the cheerleaders from the schools gather for a communal breakfast.

  This year the breakfast was held at the home of Leslie Marecek, a seventeen-year-old Webster senior whose younger sister, Jennifer, is also a cheerleader. “We’ve been preparing like crazy,” Leslie said as the big day approached. “We’ve been spending two hours every day after school practicing, in addition to the hour we usually spend. We put on an original seven-minute building routine to music that we pick out and edit, and we do a four-minute original stomp.”

  The stomp is unveiled every year at the Ray Moss dinner. Kirkwood, being the funkier of the two communities, tends to dominate the stomp competition. Webster is a building-routine powerhouse. Each team performs both its routines before its school’s bonfire on the eve of the game and then, of course, during the game itself.

  “We also are assigned to decorate the lockers of several of the players,” said Leslie, “and we make the big banner the team will run through at the beginning of the game.” Leslie is a dancer, and she knows some of the Kirkwood cheerleaders from dance classes. “We tease each other about who’s going to win the game all through the year,” she said. “I was never a football fan before I started cheerleading. Now I love to watch the games. I go with my dad to the Rams game almost every weekend.”

  Any long and storied tradition like Turkey Day produces local heroes, such as Harold Jenkins, Gale Keane, Andre Nelson, and Dan Sprick, who is a salesman for a roofing company in Brentwood, Missouri, and whose pass to the diving receiver Kurt Kinderfather in the final seconds of the 1975 game set up the winning touchdown in Webster’s 15–14 victory. But just as there are heroes, there are goats. It is rare in football for the blame for a loss to fall on a single player, but that’s what happened in ’87, when Webster went down by the score of 2–0.

  John Dames Jr. knows he will never live it down. He is a big, cheerful, frank man of thirty-two who is a partner in a design business in St. Louis. His father played in the 1953 game for Webster, and his older brother Brian starred for Webster’s ’79 state champs. Johnny Jr. grew up attending Turkey Day games. As a high school junior he played in the ’86 game, a Webster loss that he shared painfully with his teammates. But the ’87 loss would be, in a sense, all his.

  Dames played tackle on offense and end on defense, and he had a good 1987 season. He knew he wasn’t enough of an athlete to play college ball, as his older brother had, but he was happy with his high school career. The ’87 Turkey Day showdown was to be his swan song.

  The game was a grinder. “Neither of us had a very good team that year,” Dames recalls. “We just went back and forth, up and down the field the whole game without anyone getting close enough even to kick a field goal.”

  There was no score with just a few minutes to play when Webster’s offense stalled at its own thirty-five-yard line. Coach Jones decided to punt, and Dames—who, in addition to playing on both sides of the line, was the Statesmen’s long snapper—lined up over the ball. Counting middle school, Dames had played football for six years, and during all that time he had been his team’s long snapper. He had never made a mistake. His job, once he snapped the ball, was to hustle straight downfield to take a shot at the punt returner. Earlier in the game Kirkwood’s returner had failed to raise his hand for a fair catch, and Dames had nailed him. He ran downfield hoping to make another hit like that, maybe knock the ball loose.

  But the punt returner just stood there. He wasn’t looking up for the ball. Suddenly Dames was aware of cheering behind him. He wheeled around to see red-jerseyed Kirkwood players running jubilantly toward the opposite end zone. Dames had snapped the ball over the punter’s head. The punter had chased it, retrieved it, and been tackled in the Webster end zone for a safety. “There was this weird pause,” Dames recalls. “Safeties don’t happen all that often, and it took a few seconds for people to reali
ze what had occurred, and what it meant.” The Kirkwood team and fans were dancing for joy. Dames walked back toward his own bench, beginning to digest the awful truth. As close to single-handedly as one can in football, he had lost the game.

  Just about everyone on the Webster team tried to console Dames—everyone except Coach Jones. The Kirkwood coach, Dale Collier, sought Dames out and patted him on the back. “Don’t feel bad,” he said. “You played a helluva ball game, and you are a helluva player.” It was small consolation. When Dames got home, his father handed him two cold beers. “Take a hot bath, relax,” his dad said. He had never given Johnny a beer before.

  Sitting in the steaming tub, sipping the beer, Dames made a decision. He wasn’t going to hang his head. He was going to school the next Monday with a sense of humor and without missing his stride. And he did. He was immediately slapped with the nickname Snap, and it stuck. He discussed the incident and what he’d learned from it in a speech to the senior class, which voted him to give his class’s commencement speech.

  “We were so proud of him,” says his father. “It was horrible. Johnny was devastated, but he made something positive out of the experience. If you ask him about it today, he’ll say, ‘Yeah, it was tough, but after a lot of psychotherapy and drugs, I’ve gotten over it.’”

  Dames still attends Turkey Day games. People call out to him, “Hey, Snap!” Enough time has gone by to make it a joke, and the nickname prompts a lot of laughter and reminiscence. But the wound hasn’t completely healed. Dames hasn’t spoken to Jones since the day of the safety.