Sandy Stephens and Bill Munsey came here from the same Pennsylvania locale, Uniontown, to greatly assist in the Gophers' only two trips to the Rose Bowl after the 1960 and 1961 seasons.
Munsey once said Sandy and he would take the short ride from campus to Hennepin Avenue, and then stand on a corner, just to see and talk with some black people outside the football team.
That's the Minnesota where I grew up. I spent the first 16 years of my life in Fulda, in the southwest corner of the state. There were 15,000 residents of Murray County in 1960 and I can almost guarantee there wasn't a black person among them.
There were a couple of black fellows temporarily, in the summer of 1949, when my father Richard hired Hilton Smith and Earl Ashby to play baseball for the Fulda Giants. This was a political move, in a way, for Richard figured if the Giants were to provide a proper level of entertainment, the citizens might approve a bond issue to install lights at the Fulda ballpark.
That's exactly what happened. I went to Fulda to look through the archives of the hometown Free Press in 2001 (when Smith was to be inducted into the Hall of Fame) and discovered that the expenditure for lights was approved with ease.
I spent my senior year at Prior Lake High School, then a small school serving a small Irish village. It was as lily white as was Fulda in 1963.
I was headed to the University of Minnesota and landed a job as a copy boy in the sports department at the Minneapolis Morning Tribune. There wasn't a black man or a woman of any race working in that department, not even for the menial task of answering calls.
We had the quarter system at the university and I was taking astronomy in the spring. Someone told me Bobby Bell was back from the Kansas City Chiefs that spring, working toward a degree, and he was enrolled in that class.
