This was how I became very athletic. As far as a sports town, Montgomery was great. We had termite and peewee football, three or four YMCAs, swim teams, basketball and baseball teams. Our two high schools, Sidney Lanier on my side of town, and Robert E. Lee on the east side, were big rivals in football, baseball, and basketball. The schools for the black communities were George Washington Carver High School and Booker T. Washington High School.
We had the Montgomery Rebels baseball team at Patterson Field. They were a minor league farm team of the Detroit Tigers. We also had Crampton Bowl, where local high school football games were held as well as the annual Blue-Gray Classic, a nationally televised college bowl game played annually. Some excellent athletes came out of Montgomery and went on to professional careers. Terry Beasley, Oscar Gamble, Tommy Neville, and Richmond Flowers, just to name a few.
Montgomery also had the Garrett Coliseum, which hosted trade shows, the South Alabama Fair, and numerous musical concerts. The WBAM shows and Dick Clark’s Caravan of the Stars, played there a couple of times a year.
So, the ‘50s passed on into the early ‘60s. I played Little League Baseball, football, YMCA basketball, swim team at the Y and summer camps, Rotary and Camp Belser. I was honor camper one summer and had my picture taken for the newspaper.
My mother and father officially divorced, dad moved to Atlanta, got remarried, my brother and I would spend the summer visiting him in Atlanta and going to camp. Upon returning from a visit with my father, my mother sat my brother, Lee, and me down and informed us that she and my grandfather, Glynn, were getting married.