An embodiment of the American Dream, my father, didn’t have a pair of shoes until his tenth birthday, rode the rails to the University of Colorado in 1932 to walk on their football field and lead the Buffaloes to 3 National Championships as he became an All-American Tackle for the same three years. Pearl Harbor interrupted graduate school and his nascent coaching career at Colorado while he served in the Pacific aboard the USS WASP. Returning to college-level coaching (Wyoming, Oklahoma, University of Maryland), he transitioned into the NFL as the GM/coach for the Baltimore, Colts. Management worked for him, and he worked his way up the corporate ladder in various companies until founding, Dribeck, the sole distributor of Beck’s Bier, in the late ‘60s.)
My desperation led me to employ a biographer who shared his generation and, therefore, his “context.” The Depression experienced in the dust of Texas, WWII in the United States Navy in the South Pacific, football fanaticism, the Korean Conflict, the McCarthy Era, the Kennedy Assassination, Viet Nam from a WWII veteran’s perspective, the Cold War, and lastly, the Reagan/Clinton years.