It was fun to watch him start off on a winning note with a 6-0 win over Hidden Valley, Ore. I feel we can look forward to more fun times under Hadfield.

I covered Warrior head football coaches 1 to 10 last week. This week I will cover 11, 12 and 13.

Coach No. 11 was me. This was like a dream come true. I look back to when I played my senior season as a Warrior in 1950, under coach Chuck DeAutermont and assistants Tex Gatlin and Mike Whalen and dreamed of someday being able to patrol the Warrior sidelines, like they did.

In 1980, when I had the chance to return to Del Norte as athletic director, dean of students, and coach football, it was the fulfillment of that dream. Before taking over as head coach, I enjoyed six seasons working as offensive coordinator for coach No. 10, Jerry Smith.

Ellen was the oldest in a large family and knew how to prepare easy, inexpensive meals. She could turn a box of macaroni and cheese into dinner in 8 minutes and she could whip up a mean skillet lasagna using half the recommended amount of hamburger meat. On the weeks when she shopped, we usually got change back from our $5 contribution towards groceries.

Ellen was thrifty and proud of it. She owned an old Opel Kadett and I often bribed her with gas money (not a big deal at 36 cents a gallon) to give me a ride to Petrini’s or Safeway so I wouldn’t have to take the bus. She’d wait in her car while I pushed my cart down the aisles waiting for inspiration. My mother’s cooking revolved around better cuts of beef from the steer we put in the freezer each year and the backyard fryers we butchered as needed. I was accustomed to real milk and potatoes, not the powdered stuff in a box. Inevitably I overspent, exceeding our $25 budget and driving Ellen nuts.

Nearly 30 years ago, Ernie Felio was the officer who investigated my son’s death after a tourist wandered off the road and hit him. Long after his duty hours had ended, Ernie sat in the hospital with my little girl asleep in his lap. For the remaining two months of his life, having lost a son himself, he provided emotional and spiritual support to our family. His death was both unnecessary and devastating.

A few years later I was arrested by a CHP officer, and dumped into a concrete room to have the DTs. Once sober, my behavior horrified me so that I never had another drink. After a month of sobriety, I went to the CHP office to thank the officer for saving my life.

Fast-forward 5 years, and I’m rushing home from a CR class that ended at 10 p.m. When I came to a stop sign and saw nothing moving for blocks, I went right on across. The flashing red and blue lights nearly gave me a heart attack.

The scenes of the towers exploding and the screams of the fleeing people are etched almost as deeply as the hollow echo of a telephone piercing the bedroom darkness with the news of my cousin’s death that day at the Pentagon, along with 46 others from the county of my northern New Jersey upbringing.

My anger and, yes, hatred, toward the people who committed the atrocities, as well as those on this side of the Atlantic, who with cowardly impotence failed or refused to hunt down those responsible, still wells up during the second week of September.  Which is when, knowing of the personal dividend evil and hatred invariably yields, I know I have to find some measure of value and goodness in the event, lest I become crazed.