Honor came to Mama some years after her attempt to reform politics in our town. She was appointed to the school board. It was the first honest appointment in years, and people wondered whether Mama had gone into the school supply business, had a lot needed for a football field, or was thinking of running a snack bar off the High School grounds, where the football players could lose their salaries on punch boards. Football was then the ninth national industry, being just behind songs about Mammy and Dixie….
The truth was that the political boss, Silver Dollar Hansen, and the Major's family, which owned the town factories, had a falling out as to where the High School cement oval for football games should be built. The Major owned a bus line past some swamps, and Silver Dollar had a rabbit patch he wanted to see marked off by goal posts—for a small sum of fifty thousand dollars. Papa had some worthless land along a creek bottom … and being honest and a loyal follower of the track teams, he stepped in and gave them the worthless land for nothing. And both Silver Dollar and the Major, to spite each other, planned the cement football oval there on Papa's land. As a reward to Papa for such honesty, Mama was put on the school board to help vote for cement, steel, and sod to build the field, and also to see that the football players were not molested by studies at school while they were digesting their food and keeping their minds keen for the coming Saturday….
Both sides overlooked the fact that Mama hated football in her mature years … a very un-American thing in our town. We were proud of our six cripples and the one broken neck we produced each year during the season's touchdowns.
Mama asked Papa how to act at the first board meeting.
“You will find the Major will tell the board how to vote, and Silver Dollar will pass the hat for the votes….”
“What's Silver Dollar doing on the school board?” asked Mama.
“Every town group has their man on the board.”
Mama pulled on her gloves. “He must be the example of those who can't read or write.”
The first meeting of the board with Mama sitting on it did not go well. Mama told me all about it. Mama had tossed in a scented bombshell by saying that football was a fool's game and not worth the candle, and the wind of disapproval was against it … so let's put our shoulders to the wheel and give the money for the field to the fund for free milk for school kids. After this mixed-metaphor speech Mama sat down and asked for a vote. She lost.
Mama said she wasn't going to give up … she was out to do away with football in High School, and then she would tackle it at the College…. “Not 'tackle' it,” she said. “That's football talk.”
The great Football Rebellion is history now. Mama worked hard at it and got two others on the board to join her demand for more learning and less dropkicking.
Mama came home, and Papa told-her-so. And she said she wasn't through … she was going to get Ogell-muggell to join her group!
Papa opened his mouth and let words come out. “Ogellmuggell!”
“And why not?” asked Mama.
“But he's the greatest football player ever seen in these parts! When he goes on to the College, he's All-American!”
Mama smiled, as if he had asked her to climb a tree by using only her small white teeth. “You agree, then, that if I get Ogell-muggell on my side, I can win?”
“Now, Sara,” said Papa, “it's like asking the Prince of Wales to give up polo.”
“He should in his position,” said Mama, and went upstairs to rest before dinner. Papa looked at me and shrugged his shoulders.
“We're in a spot, Stevie.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Mama has a cause again.”
“'Cause what?” I asked.
So Papa said I could go out and hunt water bugs, but not to bring them into the house again; they had a habit of falling into the flour bin.
“Of course, she can't get Ogell-muggell … not a chance. He's only a football player, and not very human, and you can't talk to him very much … he only understands motions.”
“He's pretty bright,” I said. “He refused to pick up a red-hot stove on a dare last week.”
But Papa warned me not to talk about Ogell-muggell at the dinner table, since Mama was excited enough as it was. In such times Papa had to do the cooking….
Papa decided to make Mama a Longstreet Long Lobster Cocktail, which was a long name for it; mostly we called it “Longie,” and everyone knew what we were talking about.
Papa would cut a twelve-inch lobster that had been boiled and cooled into small cubes. To this he would add a half pint of flaked crab meat and a pint of cubed cucumber and a trickle of mayonnaise. When this was chilled, and just before serving, he would add a sauce made of two ounces of tomato paste, a half pint of mayonnaise, a tablespoon of tarragon vinegar, an ounce of onion juice, an ounce of chili sauce, one tablespoon each of well-chopped chives and parsley, a few drops of Worcestershire, salt, pepper, and a fistful of whipped cream well folded in. Then he touched it up with Gramp's secret: some Cayenne pepper and six drops of his best gin. The gin really helps.
But even a Longie, much as Mama enjoyed it, didn't take her mind off her football plans.
She spooned up Longie and said, “The key to it all is Ogell-muggell.”
Papa wasn't listening. He said, “No, it's the gin.”
We spoke no more of Ogell-muggell that night.
Ogell-muggell wasn't his name, of course. His real name was twice as long and twice as hard to say. He was half Spanish peasant and half Tyrol waiter. He was called Ogellmuggell because of a line in a high school play he once saw. Two of the local co-eds were dressed as witches, and they stirred a pot and sang a song that began:
“Ogell-muggell, boil and bubble Stir and sing of coming trouble Ogell-muggell, boil and bubble….”
He was impressed by this song and asked someone if this ogell-muggell was good eatin'. Some town wit said it was, and the poor football player went down to Tom's Tony Diner and asked for a “big dish of ogell-muggell.” Tom winked to the village loafers gnawing their way through their evening toothpicks like eager beavers, and he mixed up oatmeal and catchup, and from then on the football player was known to everyone as Ogell-muggell.
Ogell-muggell was six feet tall and almost as wide. His face was square and bland, and he started life in the icehouse carrying blocks of ice as big as himself. Papa said when they were placed side by side it would have been hard to tell which was Ogell-muggell and which was the block of ice, except that one wore a checked cap.
The College used the High School as a sort of hothouse. They found young human colts and sent them to a boarding house, and if they made good on the high school team, they would one day play for the simon-pure college, at a living wage. They were also on the payroll of the Old Grads during their stay at the boarding house. Ogell-muggell had a simple job there while playing high school football. At nine every day he got up and went out in the hall and pulled down a window blind to keep the sun off a rubber plant in a brass pot. He got five dollars a week for this, and stunted the rubber plant for life. When he made twenty touchdowns in six games, he was allowed to pull down two blinds, and for this his wage was doubled. So you can see how Papa felt when Mama said she was going to bring this honest, hard-working blind-puller over to her side. He was already thinking of the job the Old Grads had waiting for him at College … where he would get a prince's salary at a frat house for counting the bowls used for corn flakes every morning.
Mama opened the attack by forcing a ruling at the next meeting of the school board that every high school student who fell below a certain standard of study would be helped by a personal interview with the board. The board did not notice the gleam in Mama's eye when they passed this ruling; they were all feeling good that they were giving valuable time to speak kindly to some dopes who would drop out anyway to work in the town laundry, or end up in Congress.
It was a shock to the board to see the names of the team's fullback, right-end, and left-half on the list Mama produced at the next meeting. The right-end and the left-half promised to try better, and not again answer all questions by saying, “You bettin' on us this Saturday?” But the fullback couldn't promise because he never talked to the teachers, In fact, although he had heard there were teachers at the school, he spent his spare time resting from curtain-pulling in the woodworking department, where he was making his mother some shoe trees.
Anyway, the time came when Ogellmuggell appeared before the school board to report on his progress.
Ogell-muggell came to the board meeting. I still remember him—I was there, as Papa was off on a land deal and I was to take Mama home late at night. Ho stood there smiling as if asleep and having a dream of food and touchdowns….
“Well, Ogell,” said the Major, “that was a nice run you made Saturday.”
“It was nothin' … ninety yards.”
“What are you planning against Milltown High?” asked Silver Dollar.
“Your usual attack?” asked the Major, sniffing the end of his good cigar. They were trying to show Ogell-muggell was human.
“Who was the great blind poet of the Greeks?” asked Mama.
Ogell-muggell smiled at Mama. “I don't follow them western teams, Miss.”
“Young man,” said Mama, “unless you answer my questions you will be dropped from all your classes.”
“Thank you,” said Ogell-muggell. “I was wonderin' why I had to go suddenlike to all that writin' and readin'….”
The Major coughed. “Now, my boy … a little education is a remarkable thing. I myself am a Yale man.”
“Lousy team this year,” said the football player.
The Major coughed into his cigar tray and looked at Mama, fear in his eyes for the first time.
“Football is an evil, brutal thing,”
said Mama. “You are engaged in battering and crippling other young men.”
Ogell-muggell nodded. “Did you see me clip that punk last Saturday?”
Mama said, “I am going to do away with football in the High School, and you will thank me in time….”
Ogell-muggell looked at Mama as if she had said there was no God or chocolate ice cream. “No football?”
Mama rattled some papers. “I want to ask you about your studies. It costs six hundred dollars to send a man through High School….” Mama looked at the rest of the board like a Roman lion daring one of the Christians to bite him first. “It costs two thousand to train and fatten a football player for four years….”
The Major said, “May I ask where these figures come from?”
Mama smiled. “From your report on the needs for a new field, and twenty tons of cement every twenty feet.”
Silver Dollar nodded. “We could sell four thousand tickets to a section, sixteen thousand customers a game, I figure, if we get State Champ honors….”
“That so?” said Ogell-muggell. “I didn't know there was that many people alive at one time in the world.”
Mama got up with dignity. “There is a lot you don't know. One week from tonight you will be given an oral examination on your year's work, by this board. If you pass, you will have set back education in America fifty years, and you will have built a field we don't need for anything but cows…. But if you fail,” said Mama, “I will try and get you your job back at the icehouse.”
The news spread at once. Three days before the State Champ game that would give our town the first State Champ title in twenty years! And Ogell-muggell dreaming of ice again, the way a Southerner in exile dreams of juleps.
At first there was talk of burning our house down, or lynching our cherry tree, or kidnapping our privy and holding it for ransom. But womanhood was sacred in those days, and no real action was taken against Mama. Poor Ogellmuggell was the sufferer; but like a gallows, he was built to take it.
He was walking a hired girl home from a mushroom hunt they had organized in a near-by forest, when suddenly sixteen fellow students from the High School appeared.
“What's up, fellers?” said the hulking faun.
“Ogell-muggell, you have to pass those tests.”
“No dice,” said Ogell-muggell, who spoke the tongue of sportsmen. “I jest ain't got it in me.”
“You're coming with us,” said the leader of the mob. “and we're going to teach you the whole year's course.”
“In two days?”
“In two days!”
They grabbed him, and his strength was not in him. He let himself be led away, the hired girl shouting he was a goddam sportsman … in a pig's eye he was! And Ogell-muggell disappeared from the sight of the town.
Nothing was heard from him for a day; then suddenly down the main street a huge, nude man was found trying to batter his way through a locked door….
Papa and I were passing, on our way to pick out some cigar bands for my collection (poor Papa smoking the shape that was enclosed by the band I picked). We saw this sobbing naked man; he turned to us, the look of a hunted thing in his eyes….
“Help! Help me! I can't do it, I tell you … I just can't!”
“It's Ogell,” said Papa.
“He's lost his track pants,” I said.
“They locked me up, they took me clothes, they fed me coffee … then, then….” He couldn't go on … whatever foul thing they had done, he couldn't go on. He shivered.
“There, there,” said Papa.
“They had bright lights in me eyes all night. They said things, and I hadda say it after 'em. They was fiends … I couldn't get it, I couldn't say it….” The big man began to sob. “So I got out over the shed roof … but no clothes, and….”
Just then the posse caught up with the football player. They piled over him. He fought, but his heart and spirit had been broken by verse and six-times-twelve and the verb as in French. They led him away to texts and sonnets….
No one saw Ogell-muggell the next day. There was a rumor he was dead, strangled by an adverb he couldn't keep down, or that he had gone mad and stabbed himself with an algebra book left carelessly within his reach. But these were only snide remarks by the loafers around the town depot … they did not care about State Champ honors.
Mama was the hardest hit. She sat in darkness in the parlor, and she was pale but her head was high. She looked at Papa as he lit the lamp.
“I must go on, Henry. I believe in something.”
“Sara, you do what you think is right.”
“But they may kill that poor boy.”
Papa shook his head. “I don't think so … his head isn't built to absorb anything. They're not overloading him, because he can't take it.”
“I'm right … what if some fall by the wayside … think, Henry, of all the kids for generations to come who will get free milk in school. And all the broken necks that will not crack.”
“Now, Sara,” said Papa, “you're acting like Ogell. You're excited and you're upset … you go lie down.”
Mama felt better and went to bed….
Friday dawned clean and respectable. The town was hung in banners. The students had collected all the loose wood, fence rails, and tar barrels in that part of the state for the big bonfire that would be a pyre to victory that night. But their hearts were not in it. They overlooked twenty railroad ties right under their noses just outside town.
The tests at the school board hearing were set for three o'clock in the afternoon. Mama dressed with care, as if for a hanging. The streets were silent; people stayed indoors, and anyone caught out on an errand hurried along, looking from left to right with downcast eyes. It was a crisis in the town's life, and it may appear foolish, overvalued, and small-village in outlook; yet the town team's honor, the nearness of State Champ standing, were all enough to drive the weaker citizens to drink. This was before radio “war experts” and bigtime advertising. People took their entertainment in the flesh. The talkies were undreamed of, the gramophone was wound by hand, and no idea of music by the mile or the juke box was around. No, it was either a hanging or a big game that could excite the town. And this matter was bigger than just the town, too. The College was preparing to take on the nation's best teams in the next few years. A railroad president and an oil well digger had died in the same year, and their wills had left millions to the College if its teams won a certain number of games, and if they were admitted to the Eastern Football Conference … and Ogell-muggell was the man to win all this for them….
At two-thirty Mama, pale but game, wearing her best hat and the best feather that was brought out only for births and burials, came downstairs. I was starched and slicked, and Papa had brought his best collar home from the laundry….
Outside the door stood the Buick that was almost paid for, and the professor of law and shoe shining who acted as our colored butler and woodchopper in his spare time from his legal studies, had shined her up like a Winter Pippin.
Everything was very formal. Mama got into the car holding against her tiny body the questions that she was to ask Ogell-muggell. Papa drove, me by his side, and we slowly crossed the city to the Town Hall.
The Major and Silver Dollar had pulled a political trick. They had called an open meeting at the Town Hall for the questioning, and so not only the school board, but two hundred of the best citizens and worst ward heelers and their mobs had managed to crowd into the Town Hall, and a great many citizens milled around outside the hall.
Overhead a great cotton banner swayed in the warm wind … STATE CHAMPS AT LONG LAST! Mama spelled it out and grew paler. The Town Hall greeted Mama with silence. We went in. The school board sat, shaved and ready. Silver Dollar called the meeting open. Mama sat down and opened her folder and placed her paper before her. A door squeaked, and Ogell-muggell came in. He was as solid as ever, his face, for all the torture he had taken, was as numb as ever. His nose was skinned, and he sucked a puffed lip … but his board of experts who came with him showed more damage; these forerunners of the tattered, aged experts on the radio quiz shows did not look happy.
It was then Mama showed the stuff of which she was made. She looked round her and saw the people, saw Ogell-muggell waiting for the axe. And she leaned over and tore up her papers. It was still so suddenly you could have heard a cat drop.
Mama turned to the football player.
“You must answer three questions. If you pass, you play tomorrow. But you must answer all three.”
The board of experts groaned. Papa shifted in his seat and scowled at everyone.
Mama said, “In what way does football differ from baseball?”
Suddenly everyone cheered. Mama had given in! She wanted Ogell to answer the questions! Answer them right!
Ogell stood sweating. He began to think … or tried to come as near that process as he could. “Can you say that again?”
“Certainly,” said Mama, and repeated the question.
Ogell-muggell said, “Well, let's see … football? baseball? I think the balls ain't the same shape….”
Mama said, “I will accept that answer.”
After that, Ogell-muggell felt sure of himself. He told Mama that a goal post was something you ran between when you had the ball, and he said it was called football because you sometimes kicked the object referred to as a ball.
There was a cheer that almost lifted the rotted roof off the town hall, and the people left their seats and ran towards the center of the room. Ogell-muggell stood there waiting for them to lift him on their shoulders. He was almost the most amazed person in the room when they didn't … Mama was the most … when they lifted her off the floor and placed her on their shoulders. It was the high tide of her office-holding career.
That night the bonfire burned bright and high, and all of us kids who were to be bathed Saturday night had our baths a day sooner, and look them Friday, with or without protest (Mama cheated and worked in a few more baths for me during the week…. But mostly, in the past, our nation has believed that bathing more than once a week was unhealthy).
And Mama gave a dinner for Ogellmuggell and the school board, for Mama was made of stern stuff; if she sold out her ideals and wanted to be punished for it, she wanted to suffer in public.
The main dish was … can you guess? … ogell-muggell. Papa had invented it for the dinner and named it after the football player. It's a rare dish these days, and is sometimes called Terrapin Maryland, but we old-timers know its real name.
Papa took two female terrapin out of the Major's best terrapin pond. He made a sauce of two garlic cloves, bay leaves, shallots, four onions, four carrots, and a pint of raw bacon and ham. All this he simmered in a pot with a fistful of butter, and then added some salt and a pint of red wine.
When this tasted right, he added a tablespoon of flour and let it boil again, and then added a half pint of Madeira and a pint of chicken soup stock. When the mixture had boiled down by half, he added the terrapin meats cut into cubes. The sauce, when it began to bubble, had one lemon wrung over it and an ounce of fresh butter dropped in. Then it was served at once.
Football players have died for dear old Rutgers, busted an arm for Army, and collapsed for ol' Cornell when fed with ogell-muggell.
The sight I remember the best of that dinner is Ogell-muggell (the man, not the little terrapin) standing up at the cries of “Speech! Speech!” and wiping his large mouth with the back of an honest hand. He looked at Mama and smiled.
“I ain't one for making speeches … not me. But I gotta say Mrs. Longstreet sure cooks up a tasty snack. I've et this ogell-muggell before, but it alas tasted of ketchup. This time it's the McCoy, and if anything I can ever do … why you just ask me, that's all!”
Mama smiled and stood up and said, after great effort on her part, “Just go in there tomorrow and win!”
Having sold out, Mama couldn't keep from sticking pins into herself. Everyone cheered, and Silver Dollar fell out of his chair and said he was going to run Mama for Congress (which he never did … a shame, since Mama photographed much softer than Clare Luce.)
Ogell-muggell began to cry, and said, “If it kills me (sniff) I'll do it. I'll win for you … if it kills me (sniff) … I'll murderlize 'em!”
And someone set a fresh bowl of ogell-muggell before him, and he wept and lapped and spooned all at once.
The next day he won the game with a wonderful seventy-two yard run and a drop kick. And next year he played for the college and got married; and when he was made All-American, he had a wife and two children and was a simple, honest fellow. I remember Papa and Mama and me sitting on the front porch watching Ogell-muggell running home from the football field Saturdays … his pay envelope unopened in his teeth and his arms full of liver and oatmeal and beer for the wife and kiddies. And he would wave a loaded arm at us and trot on home. Mama had long sincere tired from reforming sports.
Papa used to take Mama's arm, and Mama would say, “There goes the remains of a pretty good ice man….”