The homecoming queen of 1976
My daughter has already talked me into taking her to a couple of high school football games. We’ll be at one again tonight, as her Rock Hill High Bearcats host York Comprehensive.
Elizabeth started 10th grade in August, but she’s already met a few football players. Plus, her history teacher is the quarterbacks coach.
She loves the sounds and the pageantry and all the excitement of football. And she’s hungry to know more about the game. She asks me all sorts of questions, turning every every play of every game into a teaching opportunity for her long-winded blowhard of a dad.
To the amusement of everyone sitting nearby, unfortunately.
It makes me wish I had learned more about the finer points of football. I covered football for years as a sports reporter and I played in high school, but I was a “dumb lineman.” I left the strategy to the smart guys in the backfield.
My 10th grade football portrait, 1977.
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I block a kick against Whitmire in 1977. I was called for
roughing the kicker, but I was pretty sure I got a piece
of the ball — meaning it shouldn’t have been a penalty.
Plus, the ball nearly hit the photographer, who happened
to be the dad of my best friend, the quarterback. If I didn’t
block it, then the poor punter managed to gain negative
yards with his kick.
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Three years ago, I wrote a column for The Virginian-Pilot in which I recalled my playing days and my girl, the 1976 homecoming queen. Because all this reimmersion into high school football has me feeling nostalgic — and because I can, dammit — I’ll rerun that column below.
I hope you enjoy it.
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Young love, a homecoming queen and the internet
By Charles AppleIt all happened, innocently enough, because of a message I posted at a Web site for newspaper designers.
We were talking about how newspapers are portrayed in the movies. When someone mentioned The Daily Bugle in the Spider-Man movies, someone else asked why no one seems to like Kirsten Dunst.
“I love Kirsten Dunst,” I posted. “She reminds me very much of Annette, my first teenaged love…”
Except, I used her full name.
Big mistake.
I’ve written online about Annette before, but I’ve always been careful to practice good “webiquette,” by only using her first name. It was very much unlike me to make a slip like that. But slip I did.
You can guess what happened next.
One of Annette’s friends – who apparently has waaay too much time on her hands – was messing around with Google one day and ran Annette’s full maiden name. Bingo: One hit. On a newspaper design Web site. Posted by some clown in Virginia Beach.
Annette was most amused to find me on the internet. She was even more amused to find herself compared to Kirsten Dunst. So she e-mailed me.
And I freaked.
The Annette of 29 years ago indeed resembled the comely Miss Dunst. Annette’s soft, round face and blonde hair framed a pair of eyes that gave the most incredible, heart-stopping flirty glances. Her perpetual smile sat between the cutest dimples one could find in our tiny hometown.
Annette was wonderfully athletic, excelling at basketball, softball and nearly every other sport she tried. Yet, she was fiercely feminine; the kind of girl who would kick your butt in a game of one-on-one hoops in her driveway, but then invite you in for lemonade and flirt shamelessly with you. The one time she tried to teach me tennis was a disaster – I had way too much fun simply watching her chase down my errant returns.
It would be an exaggeration – and also a bad pun – to say our tennis game ended in love, however. The most we ever shared was an occasional sweet peck on the cheek. To this day, though, I can practically name you the places and times of each. I was hopelessly smitten.
As is the case in any good story of young love, however, there were obstacles. First, Annette was an equal-opportunity flirt. She liked all boys and she seemed to revel in the attention they lavished on her. I would watch from a discrete distance with red-faced jealousy as older, more confident guys were drawn to her like mosquitoes to a bug-zapper. And she’d use her killer smile and her quick wit to obliterate every teenaged pest who ventured into range. What a woman!
The other problem was that she was a whole year older than I. A year can be an enormous gap to an insecure 15-year-old. I felt totally outclassed by Annette, so I never really made a play for her.
Once, I sent her a letter telling her how I felt. Groping for words, I quoted to her the one song that seemed to sum it up best. Imagine my surprise when, decades later, I watched Hugh Grant quote the same song – “I Think I Love You,” by the Partridge Family – to a girl in Four Weddings And A Funeral.
How come it’s cool when Hugh Grant does it, but it only makes me the world’s most hopeless nerd?
Left: My current ‘official mug,’ taken in August, 2003.
Right: My senior portrait from the fall of 1979.
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I was a dreamer. Mostly, I dreamed about being anywhere but in my small South Carolina home town, about an hour north of Augusta, Ga. I was about as socially inept as any kid has ever been. I read a lot. I practically memorized Star Trek reruns. I spent way too much time writing and doodling.
But I also played football – in fact, I was one of the larger guys on our woefully undersized team.
Every fall, each player could select a girl to sponsor for homecoming queen. I spent the opening weeks of my ninth grade year agonizing over just how to ask Annette if I could have the honor of sponsoring her.
Surprisingly, I finally found the fortitude to ask. To my astonishment, she immediately said yes.
Which is how Annette became the 1976 homecoming queen of Long Cane Academy.
End Tommy Lee, me, Annette, 1975 queen Brenda
Creswell. The crown-bearer in front — who looks
terrified — happens to be my brother, Artie. Who
would have been four when this picture was taken.
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The next summer, Annette and her family moved away. Granted, it was only an hour-and-a-half up the road, but it seemed like yet another insurmountable obstacle to wishful young love.
Annette returned that fall to pass along her crown to the next homecoming queen. I once again floated across a football field with an angel clutching my arm.
I escort Annette to midfield during halftime of homecoming
‘77. By this time, Annette had moved away already.
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And then we lost touch.
Twenty-nine years later, I found myself hyperventilating as I read her e-mail. Ohmygod. Ohmygod. Ohmygod…
We wrote each other several times over the summer, bringing each other up-to-date on the paths our lives have taken. My wife of 21 years – proving once again her qualification for sainthood – suggested we drop by for a visit the next time we passed through her town. The three of us spent an afternoon sitting by her pool, catching up on old times and watching our combined brood frolic in the water.
Once the most outgoing and nurturing girl in our school, Annette is now a registered nurse in a women’s clinic at a nearby college. She’s a divorced mother of two boys. They live out in the country, where they keep a horse out back. Annette always loved horses.
I got what I wanted out of life, too: I thankfully lost my shyness but none of my chronic awkwardness. I’m still writing and doodling, but now I get paid for it. My news graphics career has taken me to Raleigh, Chicago, Des Moines, Norfolk and, soon, Boston.
Someone, please cue the Harry Chapin music.
I’m still tall, of course, but now I’m also old and bald. Too many years sitting in front of a Macintosh computer and a well-earned aversion to athletics has left me many, many pounds heavier than that skinny high school lineman.
But Annette is still gorgeous. She still has her fresh, athletic frame, her blonde hair and her cute dimples.
Me and Annette, August 2005.
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We took pictures. We collected hugs. We each made our kids wonder: So what’s the deal with that old geezer?
How does this story end? Not like a Hugh Grant movie. Annette and I are just friends. Come to think of it, that’s all we ever really were. I certainly have no regrets: I wouldn’t trade my marriage for anything.
But the experience has been a powerful reminder about who you can bump into on the internet: Friends, colleagues, strangers who share your interests.
Or your first high-school love.
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Charles Apple has been graphics editor of The Virginian-Pilot since 2003.
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