Chapter 1
For all it's worth, life holds innumerable disappointments, setbacks and sorrows. The joy of living is humanity's greatest claim—the desire to excel the biggest challenge. And yet, regardless of humanity's stubborn resistance to reversal and hardship and its boast of achievement, the time arrives when words, wisdom and great deeds are totally insufficient. Such an occasion came to pass one week ago, Wednesday August 23rd, when Elwood Panther football coach Bob Downham succumbed in his battle against Hodgkin's Disease.
—Gene Conrad, sportswriter
Kokomo Tribune, Kokomo, Indiana The First Day Riding north out of Indianapolis, the now-tall fields of corn passed in a blur. My thoughts fastened for a minute on making raspberry jelly, and my eyes scanned the fences for the ripening fruit. But we were on the interstate, moving too fast to see. And besides, it was probably too late for raspberries. What was the date anyway? August something. Oh yes, the twenty-third. I wrote it somewhere earlier in the morning on a form.
We passed a roadside billboard showing a man on crutches with his aproned wife and two children standing on their front porch. The caption read: "Coming home is wonderful with Blue Cross/Blue Shield." We had Blue Cross/Blue Shield, too, but my husband wasn't coming home. I wondered how much of the bill Blue Cross/Blue Shield would cover, and I knew that I would never forget the irony of seeing that billboard. The next sign I saw on the highway gave directions for Methodist Hospital, where our son was born, and I allowed my thoughts to move from death to life. . . .
Nineteen Months Earlier The labor was hard; the baby weighed ten pounds, and when he announced his arrival into the world, I passed out. I came to in the recovery room and Bob was with me, looking haggard and worried. A nurse was checking a catheter tube and my body was crying out to be left alone. I tried to move away, but Bob touched my shoulder and told me to try to relax. "Everything's going to be okay," he said as he took my hand, yet kept an eye on what the nurse was doing.
"The baby . . . ," I queried into his concerned face, "is the baby okay?"
"Yes. Fine. Don't worry. Everything's going to be fine," he said in short, clipped words.
The nurse gave me a shot, and I winced from the pain and the fact that I still had not been told what I wanted so desperately to hear. I felt myself slipping into unconsciousness again, so I squeezed Bob's hand, as if to hold on to him until I found out about the baby.
"But . . . what is it?" I could barely stay with him.
"A boy," he said, with no joy, no smile, and I slid into a darkened realm, away from the brightness around me. "A little boy!" I thought, "we have a little boy. Tamara has a little brother. . . . we have a son." But in the ensuing hours of troubled slumber, my mind kept replaying Bob's empty words of reassurance, the concern in his eyes, the way he kept telling me not to worry. What was there to worry about? Unless . . . he wasn't telling me what was going on. Unless, something went wrong. Then I thought the unthinkable, "Maybe the baby died. That's it—we lost the baby and they didn't want to tell me."
When I awakened again, my overnight case had been placed on the gurney by my feet and an orderly was ready to wheel me from recovery to my room. I felt frantic that no one was there to level with me, to tell me the truth about the baby. The orderly said my husband was making phone calls, so I decided to take matters into my own hands.
"Excuse me, but could we go by the nursery to see my baby again?" I asked, trying to sound like an excited, new mother. He didn't seem willing, so I said, "Oh, please . . . it's got to be on our way. Just for a minute?" He shrugged a reluctant consent, and my heart began to pound. We stopped at the nursery window but the curtains were closed. He knocked and a nurse appeared. "The Downham baby," he said, obviously bored with his job or this diversion. She looked at me and I forced a smile, praying she couldn't see my panic. She left and returned a moment later saying, "What's the last name?"
"Downham," I tried to say but my voice cracked. Then she said that there was no Downham baby there. My heart stopped. She asked when he was born, and I didn't know. I didn't know anything, except that I had just gone through a whole lot of hard work and there was no baby at the end of it. Finally the nurse said, "You'll have to try the next nursery," and hope spread over me like wildfire. We went to two more nurseries until we found him, and when those curtains opened no one had to tell me which one was mine. I knew him. At a strapping ten pounds, he was not one of the high-risk infants needing a watchful eye. He had kicked out of his papoose-style wrappings and was moving his arms and legs, as though he had waited too long for such freedom. The nurse brought him close to the glass rewrapping his blankets. She was fussing at him about how big and active he was, but her words were lost as I looked into those precious dark eyes. He even seemed to be looking back as if to say, "Hey, where have you been? And where's my breakfast?" I asked to hold him, but in 1965 "rooming-in" was only in trial stages; she told me I would have to wait until the next feeding.
When we were released to go home, Bob picked us up in our dark-green Volkswagen Bug. I held tightly to my sleeping bundle with one arm and with the other hand held onto the rubber handle on the dashboard. Bob drove about fifteen to twenty miles per hour, carrying on a conversation with other motorists, warning them to keep away. He had long since reassured me that the concern he had in the recovery room after Tommy's birth had nothing to do with the baby, but when they could not get my blood pressure reading he was fearful of losing me.
In the car, I removed the blanket he had brought to put over both of us, as though it were the middle of January instead of October. When we stopped at the light at Meridian Street, he rolled down the window to give us some air and hollered out the window, "Look out Indy, I've got my son in here." We both laughed and cried and I didn't think I had ever felt so much joy. We had a beautiful three-year-old daughter at home, and now this. What more could we ever want?
No one could have made me believe that in less than two years I would ride home from another Indianapolis hospital with no hint of joy to be found. This time my sister's husband, Jack, was driving and Bob's mother, Marie, was beside him. From the backseat I heard Jack ask me if I was okay. I said yes, while wondering if I would ever be okay again in any dimension of my life.
We passed a green sign on the interstate with a smaller sign below it bearing the words Butler University and an arrow. That was where Bob went to college, where he played football and where we spent most of our married life. "Football" and "Bob Downham" had seemed almost synonymous since the first time I saw him play, and my mind wandered safely back to a warm Friday evening in August, almost exactly seven years earlier.
Seven Years Earlier As we stood in line to pay for our tickets at Southwestern High School, I couldn't help thinking that his whole school looked like it was plopped in the middle of a cornfield or a pasture. Bob's brother, John, and his wife had picked me up at Loeb's Department Store, where I had a summer job, and drove me out to this newly built, country high school. It was the week before school started for our senior year. I had been dating Bob only for a few weeks, yet it seemed terribly important to him that I attend his first game of the season.
"Want to find a seat?" John asked me, as I stood looking out at the players, wondering if cows had recently grazed in that field.
"Uh . . . no, I think I'll just stand here by the fence and watch a little while. I'll join you and Jean in a few minutes."
It all looked so different from my high school in the city, but I loved sports and the fervor here seemed the same. The teams sure looked the same. It was hard to tell one player from the next, and I watched them warm up, wondering what number was Bob's. The smell of popcorn reminded me that I hadn't eaten dinner, and as I turned to find the refreshment stand a player ran over to the fence and said, "Hi." I turned back, and there he was, with his tanned face and brown, almost-black eyes staring out at me from under his helmet.
"Hi!" I replied. "We made it, even a little early, I guess."
"I'm glad you're here."
"Yes, me, too."
"Well I gotta go," he said, looking back over his shoulder, "but I'll tell you what. . . . the first time we have the ball and I get it, I'll run it back for a touchdown. Okay? Just for you."
"Well, sure. . . . I mean, okay. . . . That sounds great."
And he was off. It was the last time he ever spoke to me so close to the starting time of a ball game. I asked him once if he ever thought of me while he was playing ball, and he said, "hell, no." I guessed this was serious business. After that first football game, I said good-bye to his family and waited by his car thinking about all I had just seen. His team won the toss, chose to receive, and on the first play Bob took the ball the length of the field and into the end zone, just as he promised. His team won the game and Bob was responsible for most of the points they scored. I had walked away from the fence before the game with some reservations about this guy. I had known him for such a short time, and his bravado about "first touchdown . . . just for you" seemed too overconfident for me. But my reservations quickly melted as the game progressed. He knew what he was doing out there, and all the fans knew it. Everyone cheered him on, and even this new spectator thought he was the best she had ever seen. As he walked out of the locker-room doors, fans and schoolmates were waiting to say, "Good game, Bobby." And, suddenly, I w...
