CCC Centennial

This year is the 100th anniversary of Coffeyville Community College. Except for 1924 and during World War 2, CCC has had a football team for each of those seasons. In those early days colleges scheduled games against whoever they could find. In that inaugural season they played six games. Three were against high schools, one was against an American Legion team and one was against a team called the Cleveland Negroes. No one at CCC seems to know who they were. They only played them in 1923 and no one has any information on them. I am assuming they are from the town in Oklahoma, not Ohio.

Sunflower State

Kansas is known for sunflowers. They are not evenly distributed throughout the state.  Northern Kansas has fields of wild sunflowers, while in southeast Kansas they have been a rare sight.  In the 15 years I have lived in my current house this is the first year sunflowers are growing in the right of ways.  These pictures were taken a few miles from my house this morning.

Working on Labor Day

I always found it ironic people celebrated Labor Day by not working. For the first half of my working career I did exactly that. Most of the last 20 years I have had to work on Labor Day and all holidays that fell on Mondays. This is my fourth year in a row I have had to work all holidays.

Right now I am happy to have a job. But for those of you who get tomorrow off, enjoy it. Just don’t work harder at celebrating than you do on the job.

Weeding out the help again

The good news this holiday weekend is groceries are getting to the store. The bad news is we don’t have enough people to get them on the shelf. We lost yet another person this week. She had barely been here a month and in addition to missing several days managed to fall asleep at work not once but twice. Both times she slept well past her break. I know it is overnights, but most of us learn to sleep during the day the first couple of weeks or so.

The wuflu2 hasn’t even hit yet and already our standards for hiring have dropped to “warm bodies wanted, cold ones considered.

High School football doubleheader

There has been quite a bit of talk about the shortage officials in high school sports, especially in football. Some areas in Kansas have had games rescheduled because of a shortage of officials, but not in southeast Kansas. Tonight presents a unique opportunity to watch two games in one day. Altoona-Midway hosts Chetopa in a game of 6-man football at 3pm today. Unfortunately the only other team in the area hosting tonight is Independence which hosts Wichita area school Mulvane at 7pm. I think I will give it a try.

Happy Turd Day

Tomorrow is September 1, the day major league baseball teams can call up additional players from the 40 man roster to the majors. These players were called turds as in “turd, carry my bags.” “turd, go shag some flies.” because they were considered lower than rookies. It was a great deal for the turds because a September call-up meant doubling their minor league pay in one month.

Up until a few years ago major league teams could call up as many players as they wanted off of the 40 man roster. With the new 26 man roster, they can only have 28 men on the active roster in September. Unless there are a lot of late season injuries, most of the minor leaguers are either not playing after Labor Day or playing post season games without pay.