Presidential
Perspective Glenn B Rawlinson
I am influenced by many people from my past. Obviously
our parents and kin folk were there day in and day out and they get the “lion’s
share” of the credit, but I give a lot of appreciation for me staying out of
prison to a long list of teachers and professors as I was getting my real
education.
“The Boss” and I spent a lot of conversations regarding the
raising of out three girls and I suppose I have to include them also when presenting
my argument that the public school system (teachers) has saved our youngsters
from those similar penal institutions. I can see that you are looking around
trying to figure out how this can be connected to writing. Directly, it
doesn’t. Certain basic principles apply to any endeavor whether it is writing,
football and including cooking, at least for me. One of these basics, maybe not
in the order of importance, is confidence. One of the members mentioned this at
our last board meeting and, as a group, we decided that would be a great topic
of discussion at our Nutz & Boltz meeting next week Kay Sellers has an
article about the Nutz & Boltz in this issue of The Next Chapter.
I immediately thought about one of my coaches that coached
me in junior high as well as high school. This was long ago in a land far away.
Not really, it was right here in East Texas but it was a few spent moon cycles
in the past. It was long enough back that a teacher, and especially a coach,
could give you swift and just assurance of which direction you wanted to take.
These nudges in the better direction were always with an element for my benefit
in the formula. By knowing the guidelines and direction of the instruction, I
realized that there were fewer variables that I had to worry about and I could
concentrate more intently on the objective.
You fellows and ladies that read this will probably remember
the term “skull session” or “chalk session”. These are meetings where you
review the football or basketball play book in order that everyone would know
what everyone else was supposed to do when the play started. This was the
basics for building confidence so that you could perform to the highest
expectation. I don’t know about everyone else but we always “got it” at least
by the second time the coach went through the play. Well, maybe not every time.
The first thing that came to mind, as mentioned earlier, was
an inspiration that came to our coach during the many, many times that we
didn’t get it. He made this sign and it stayed in the locker room until many
years after I graduated from high school. It may still be there. I am going to
pre-tend that it is. It simply said:
“A VICIOUS block on the WRONG man, is much, much better than a
TIMID block on the RIGHT
man”.
Thanks Coach, I needed ,or rather, I need that.
