Football and the Depression: Some Things Were Never Uniform

In Florida the Great Depression really started in 1925. That's what Daddy (Lamar T. Graham) remembers. He was going to quit high school before his junior year, but the job he hoped to get never panned out. It didn't happen his senior year either, so he stayed in Bradenton High School (now Manatee) and graduated before he needed to go to work full time with his father, who founded the Bradenton Credit Bureau.

The high school had located to its current site on 32nd Street West, but the ball fields were still over on 9th Street West where the pros now play baseball, McKechnie Field. Nearby, just to the east, his grandfather Joseph Sheffield had harvested rice, and somewhere else in the same area was the city's first golf course where Daddy caddied for some of the city's most prominent businessmen, including Robert M. Beall, Sr., founder of the V (Five) Dollar Limit Store that later became Bealls Department Store.

A skinny kid from a merchant class family with four boys surviving the depression, Daddy and his brothers played baseball and football for BHS. One of the biggest annoyances happened when the boys arrived for games to find their shoes missing, quite an expense for players who had to provide their own uniforms and equipment. Once his baseball glove was even missing, but the coach did nothing except if it was the star player who had a problem. When Flint Gullett couldn't find his cleats, the football coach let the tackle sit on the bench until the adult came back with the shoes in hand. There were no helicopter parents back in the day. Parents of that Depression were growing vegetables or milking the cow that still lived in the back yard right in town, not volunteering or even very often showing up to watch a high school sports event.

When it came time for college, no scouts came looking for players to fill scholarship spots. My dad needed to go right to work helping with his father's business, even if there had been college scholarships for athletes of his caliber. Girls' sports weren't even though about, by the way, but Mother's (Edith Lucille Jones) family was more able to send her to teachers' college -- one of which included that Florida State College for Women (said the Gator grad) considering the fact her father was the mayor of Bradenton (Asaph R. Jones) and her uncle was State Sen. Lee S. Day.

But it was probably just as well. Because the uniform of the day for football was a leather helmet and shoulder pads, if you could afford it. And baseball, well, Daddy remembers the day he played in a pair of pants with one leg ripped off at the knee. Maybe that's when the fashion started, because I notice a lot of the teams wear those knee-length pants today.