A VENT WINDOW VIEW – STEEL COACHES
2011 B.K. Showalter March
Coaches play a major role in a boy’s life--that at least was the case in the small
town “Fifties” high school I attended, although there were two totally different types of
coaches that affected my four year regime of post-elementary learning.
One was the 50 seat bright yellow bus that I rode to school each day. The howling
roar from its six-cylinder International truck engine combined with the rattles emanating
from the all-metal bus body made lip reading a necessity for conversation when the bus
was traveling unpaved country roads. Nonetheless, to paraphrase Ms. Doolittle, “it got me
to the school on time.”
My athletics coach, Mr. Steel, was in charge of all team sports during my
freshman and sophomore years. A heavy-handed, red-faced and profane bullish block of
larded muscle topped by a balding, cone-shaped head, Coach Steel was scarier than the
aliens that Hollywood dreamed up for those Sci-Fi movies so often featured by drive-in
theaters on Saturday nights.
On the football field and in the gym, he utilized techniques similar to those made
infamous by those Army and Marine Corps drill sergeants who took callow lads from the
hinterlands and converted them into defenders of the red, white, and blue. “Coach,” like
those military instructors, could scream louder than Janet Leigh did in the Bates Motel
shower stall scene. Nonetheless, Coach Steel managed to teach us the rudiments of
football, basketball, and softball even though those lessons came late in the school day,
long after we had been bored to tears in the other classes he taught which included
“health and hygiene” for freshmen and “shop” for all grades.
The school’s shop area was the only place that out-noised the coach--and the
school bus, for that matter. Amid the din rising from table saws and lathes, most of his
instructions went unheard, which led to some disastrous results on a number of projects.
With student “machine operators” basically flying by the seat of their pants there were a
number accidents, some of which spilled more blood than any football scrimmages. Still
those shop classes provided some training that may have been useful to several of my
classmates who, after graduation, chose military careers.
Shop classes were wasted on me. My glaring lack of ability to build anything that
required the use of a saw, sander, or ruler was equaled only by my lack of skill in team
sports. This might explain my interest in the four-wheeled type of coach.
“Mack,” the regular driver of my bus was a retiree from Continental Trailways, a
major bus company that once competed with Greyhound. In Mack’s opinion, the utile
monster that he now captained would never rival the red, cream, and chrome beauties that
he had once sailed across the concrete byways between Kansas City and Denver. Still he
showered that school bus with more attention than most men give their womenfolk.
Even so, his affection for that yellow behemoth faded a bit in late May, just prior
to the end of the school year. That’s when I discovered his interest in the upcoming
Indianapolis 500. That Memorial Day classic appealed to most men in that era, but
Mack’s enthusiastic raving led me to suspect that he harbored an insane hope of someday
driving a Novi or Offenhauser Special in the 500. Still, his travel stories caused me to
forget my dreams of on-field glory, especially when Coach Steele served me up as
cannon fodder for the “A” squad. That’s when I began to dream about a trip to some
faraway land, one where a lovely lass might coach the games I really wanted to play.