Football season is back

Last Saturday was football time.

For so many of us it was time to slump down in the old recliner and focus on the television set.

My days of covering football for a newspaper are over, but the season causes me to relive some peculiar football times.

While at the paper in Boise, I had the opportunity to travel a bit.

One trip was to Utah State University in Logan, Utah to cover the Idaho-USU afternoon game.

I had a former colleague who was on staff at the Salt Lake Tribune. He asked me to travel with his paper's photographer from Logan to Salt Lake City and to stay the night with him before returning to Boise. I was on the paper staff with Dick Martin for a couple of years in Nampa before he took the job in Salt Lake City.

I had traveled with Dick on a couple of occasions while he was doing a story for National Geographic, so we were quite close.

The plan was for me to cover a pro game being played that night in Salt Lake and depend on the photographer for any transportation.

I supposedly had credentials waiting for me at "will call" for the pro game.

Upon checking at will call, I found that there had been a screw up. I explained the matter to the ticket booth guy and he said the press box is out but he could give me a field pass and I could sit on the end of the 49er bench.

That was a memorable experience, and I got to hear a lot of football chatter, some of it directed at me.

Since I made the game assignments, I nearly always took the Vale, Oregon games. Vale repeatedly dominated their division at the state level.

Vale was 75 miles from Boise.

I had at the time a small British car and had to floorboard it to get back to Boise in time to write my story.

I sometimes took the home games at the College of Idaho campus at nearby Caldwell.

It had been a surprisingly cold early winter and at gametime it was below zero.

Some thoughtful person had put 55-gallon barrels at every 10-yard marker and built fires in them.

Those were the days that you were allowed on the field and you could move with the teams.

It was so cold that they would delay the game from time to time and players would flock to the fires to warm themselves.

It was a miserable football game.

I was sent by my boss to cover the UW-Wisconsin Rose Bowl game.

When I asked for my credentials I asked for two spaces in the press box, for me and my wife.

When I arrived in Pasadena, I checked on my credentials and was told that I couldn't get my wife into the press box because she wasn't a working journalist. Instead, there were two tickets for the two of us near the goal line - still pretty good seats for a game attracting 102,000 fans.

Sometimes mix-ups happen, but officials usually did their best to accommodate requests.

I will go through this season again missing the privilege of close encounters with coaches and players.