Posted by Terry Carter
on 10/21/2009, 10:18 pm, in reply to "Re: Coach Blandford"
96.231.24.213
Sorry if this is TMI, but I’ve long carried an intensely vivid memory of Mr. Blanford.
Mr. Blanford might not have been an assistant coach for the football and basketball teams at Harry Hunt in 1963 – the school’s first such teams for competing with other schools – but he was around a lot and helped out.
Very pleasant. Quick smile. Nice guy. Approachable on a human level as far as teachers were concerned.
But I have a painful memory of him, extremely so. As we segued from football to basketball with no break in between, I carried over from one sport to the other a certain fungal irritation that bears the name of that odd G-string for guys we’d been issued at Harry Hunt.
It was bad. So bad that one day after practice I showed my problem to Mr. Blanford in the locker room. It has got to be pretty bad for a 13-year-old to display giblets to a grownup not of kin and ask for help.
Mr. Blanford said he knew what to do. He got the spray can of stuff they used to put on Walter Tobler’s right hand in bad weather so he could grip the football for passing. (I also believed it was why Walter never shoveled the ball to me on option plays when I was in – maybe it was stuck – keeping it himself, instead. Better for the team, too.)
The stuff in the can is called Tough Skin. It’s a spray-on band-aid that’s basically glue and ALCOHOL.
Mr. Blanford sprayed it all over the considerable expanse of blood-raw skin on the upper-most inner thighs. And I immediately saw evidence of John Glenn having been in the same orbit not long before.
Soon after, I discovered Cruex. It is a kinder, gentler, surer cure.
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