Rocky’s key to his athletic success was his legs. His legs were like a Road Runners. When he got them spinning, they were a blur. You find out a lot of things in the locker room shower, and when you looked at Rocky’s legs they actually looked like a Road Runners. They were sleek and skinny. At Travis, Rocky's legs made him our star sprinter on the track team.
Because of his legs, Rocky was our football team's standout player. He was our fastest running back. When we needed a score, our QB Marty would fake to our other running back JC then pitch to Rocky running around right end. If the defensive end blinked,
Rocky was gone for a touchdown.
Rocky was class favorite in each of our three years in Travis Jr Hi. He was good looking, witty, easy going, always had a smile. If you didn’t have any friends you had a friend in Rocky. Rocky was cool before cool was a thing.
Rocky was one of my best friends at PD. We especially enjoyed auto shop class together. If you were ever in shop class back then you know project funds were kind of limited. The shop teacher had to get mostly inexpensive equipment for us to work on, consequently the class worked mostly on straight 6 engines cause they didn’t cost as much. Working on 8 cylinder engines was rare and it had kind of a social status about it. If you worked on 8 cylinder engines you were head of the class cause the teacher wouldn’t let just anybody work on an 8. One day 3 or 4 of us were standing around and Rocky walks up with a piece of paper showing the Number "8" written on it. He taped on my shoulder, handed me the paper and says "Ur an eight". I smiled and looked back at him and said yeah, you’re an 8 too.
Doyle R...
I hung out with Rocky quite a bit in our younger years... I've got lots of fond memories, here's a couple...
After graduation in ’70, me, Rocky, JC L and Ronnie W drove my ’57 Chevy up to Hutchinson KS to watch the annual Super Modified Sprinter Championship at the Kansas State Fair (see Doyle's '57 Chevy story elsewhere on this site). It’s a half mile race on dirt, pretty exciting especially for an enthusiast like me. Going up we stayed with my grandparents in Jett OK, had a great time with them as my Grandma cooked her famous fresh country fired chicken and home-made noodles, it was to die for. Anyway, the next day we got to Hutch. It’s a state fair and there are a lot of preliminaries. They of course had a parade and right in the middle of the parade were the trophy queens clad only in bikinis sitting atop Chevy Corvettes. The event Queen happened to be riding on a ’58 Corvette, which has always been my favorite model. This particular car was convertible, had a huge chrome scoop and blower coming up out the hood, exhaust pipes extruding on each side, painted in metal flake candy apple red with accent chrome all round. Probably the sweetest ’58 Corvette I had ever seen. I turned to Rocky and said “Wow, would you look at that!”, he said “yeah, she’s pretty nice”, and I said “no, the car… look at that Vette !”, he looked me in the eyes and said “Doyle, you’re the only man on the face of the earth that would choose that car over that woman”.
Going back to Amarillo, we diverted our trip and went over to see Boot Hill in Dodge City KS, then we came down and again stopped at Jett, this time to see my cousin. He had recently converted part of his ranch land into a little rodeo arena. He was and is a big cowboy. If it’s got four legs, he’s got it on his ranch. To entertain guesses and newbie’s, my cousin raised a goat who had big horns. For kicks, the idea was to put the newbie out in the corral, and give him a cigarette to feed the goat, but you first had to rope the goat by the horns. What they don’t tell the newbies is when that goat feels that rope, he bucks like a Bronk. Well, everyone chose Rocky to go out there and show us how it’s done. Amazingly Rocky got it roped pretty quickly, but when the goat started bucking Rocky said he wanted no part, he was done. We all nagged him until he got the rope, pulled in the goat, held him down and fed him that cig. Once the goat started chewing that cig he calmed down immediately. It was all a hoot and Rocky handled it like a champ.
Rocky, I miss all those good times with you.
as always... comments, critiques, content contributions ~~> paloduro@webzone.net
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