Don’t be a turkey; celebrate Thanksgiving, a wonderful holiday. Paul Goldfinger photo in Ocean Grove, NJ (July 4 parade) © Reposted from 2014 on Blogfinger.
On Thanksgiving morning, the Rutherford High School marching band would arrive at Passaic High School stadium for the oldest high school football rivalry in New Jersey. We played the Thunderer for most of our half time shows. I was in the sax section where I kept one eye on the flute players and the other on the fringed Indians—the Passaic cheerleaders. What’s better on Thanksgiving than beautiful girls in leather.
Then, after the inevitable loss on the field, we consoled ourselves with the knowledge that our band was better; then it was back across the river and home for turkey.
JOHN PHILLIP SOUSA with the Thunderer March.
Norm: Don’t get carried away with excessive pride. At RHS we had about 250 boys in the entire school. If you subtract the non-athletes, the hippies, the overweight and the underweight, the math geniuses, the grease balls,the wimps, the lovers, the soccer players, the musicians, the college bound working on their resumes etc, it’s amazing that we could field a football team at all.
Passaic, a school with excess numbers of tough guys (those students named Norman were the exception) and a school population of what—over 1,000? How could the Bulldogs compete against the Indians? Some of the girls at your school were tougher than our front line.
But, I have to say, that we once beat Hackensack.
I, as the sports editor of the R-Hi, editorialized about how Rutherford, a group 2 school at best, needed to change from the NNJIL (Englewood, Ridgewood, Hackensack, Teaneck, etc) to a league that was more our size. We needed to stop being boys among men.
Finally, RHS did just that, and the annual Passaic Thanksgiving game was ended because Rutherford could never beat the big boys from across the river.
But, Norm, over 90% of our seniors went to college. What was that stat at PHS? Let’s settle this in the spring and have an ice cream eating contest at Days. —Paul
As an alumni of Passaic High School and an attendee at those Thanksgiving football games, it was pleasing Paul to see you acknowledge the better team.