Back in the day I wrote my stories on a Smith-Corona typewriter my sister bought me and submitted them to a newspaper several cities away.
By John Murphy
July 20. This is the day. The day the CIF-State board of managers meets to determine the fate of high school sports for 2020-2021.
There is little suspense. The braintrust has no option but to postpone sporting activities until January due to COVID-19 and then hope for the best.
I was thinking about it and concluded this will likely interrupt my streak of covering high school football every fall. I have observed prep football for one newspaper or another every Autumn since 1974. That’s 46 years.
This includes my college days toiling for the now-closed San Mateo Times for the princely sum of $7.50 a game. That seems like a ridiculous amount and it is. But also figure a gallon of gas then was 53 cents per gallon, a quarter-pounder with cheese cost 60 cents and a Lucky 12-pack of beer went for $1.99 – not that we ever partook.
The first game I covered for The Times was a defunct school in my hometown of San Bruno called Crestmoor traveling to Daly City to meet Jefferson. Jefferson is John Madden’s alma mater.
It rained like Hell that September day and the game turned into a mud bowl. Both teams wore blue and gold and Crestmoor had three running backs that were all the same size, including twin brothers Jeff and John Maxoutopoulis. By halftime I couldn’t make out anyone’s number and quit taking stats.
My beat was the old North Peninsula League. It included Jefferson, Westmoor and Serramonte all of Daly City; South San Francisco and El Camino of South San Francisco; Terra Nova and Oceana of Pacifica; and Half Moon Bay.
The teams were all athletic and the competition and rivalries fierce. That was especially true in South San Francisco where rivals South City and El Camino met in the annual Bell Game. Things got a little out of hand one year, as an El Camino student got the bright idea to blow up the scoreboard with a pipe bomb during the national anthem. He succeeded, with hunks of metal scoreboard flying onto the field.
By 1978 I graduated from San Francisco State and the $7.50 per game did not seem so grand – especially since I worked on a portable typewriter and had to submit my stories to a newspaper a few cities away.
So before the ’78 season me and another Times correspondent, Paul Salvoni, went to the newspaper management requesting higher pay. We had all our reasons outlined and presented our case and – presto! – got a raise to $8.50 a game. We were going to be rich!
I never benefited, though. The sports editor down in Watsonville accidentally drove his car off a cliff and died and I was hired to replace him. So I packed up my belongings and moved south and have been writing prep stories for newspapers ever since.
Main Street Dog 