"Patriarch of Goalies"

Jim Scott

"Patriarch of Goalies"

(Image from Jeanie's Slides)

Life is frighteningly serious these days, what with its Islamist terrorists, its financial crises, its presidential elections, but we sometimes just have to take a break and simply enjoy a game.

Apparently, my old high school math teacher, Mr. Jim Scott, feels the same way . . . or at least got roped into a impromptu game of soccer and accepted the position of goalie. Either way, he must have done a respectable job, for he earned the designation "Patriarch of Goalies" from his daughter Jeanie, who sent me this image above, along with 22 others in a slideshow.

I don't recall Jim being a soccer fan back in the old days. He certainly didn't care much for baseball or basketball, the only sports around my hometown parts back then, and once told me that he only enjoyed bareback bronco riding in rodeos, which he had done in his youthful days as a cowboy. He found the other riders -- the very ones with whom he was competing -- to be downright chivalrous in giving one another tips on what move a particular horse would make and how one could successfully counter that move.

The summer that I worked for him as a chainman on his surveying crew, we kept encountering folks in the backwoods areas of the Ozarks who knew Jim from his cowboying days. Those days had been only two decades earlier, but I was merely 19, so those 20 years seemed like antiquity. Jim was 44 when I worked for him, so he must be about 76 now, but he still looks quite fit in the photo above.

Jim was a fine mathematician, so far as I know anything about that, but he was also a sometime art teacher, a one-time music teacher, an anytime mechanic who could disassemble and reassemble a truck engine, a long-time homebuilder who built his own home, and probably a lot of other many-time things that I don't know about.

Anyway, if you're into family-oriented activities, here's Jeanie's slideshow of the impromptu soccer game that took place on their Ozark farm.