Larry Curtis was one of the best athletes in Lindsay High School history.

He stood about 5 feet 11 inches, weighed perhaps 170 pounds, and ran the 100-yard dash in 9.9, maybe 9.8 seconds.

This was in the early 1960s, when high school sprinters in small towns like Lindsay ran on dirt.

Larry also was a halfback on the Cardinals' football team that went undefeated in the fall of 1962. He was a senior, a star on a team full of stars.

His senior class -- the Class of 1963 -- had 50 girls and 43 boys. Lindsay had 5,000 residents. The Cards in fall 1962 captured the community's heart. I was a seventh-grader at Lindsay Jr. High School.

Larry later ran track at College of the Sequoias and University of Nevada-Reno, sold cars at Hallowell Chevrolet in Fresno, then moved to Oregon. He died July 31.

He was 63.

***

I don't recall ever speaking to Larry. He was four years older, and I knew him only as the brother of a friend.

But over the decades I often thought of Larry, his teammates, and his classmates. That's why I was sitting in the corner of Farewell's chapel, notepad in hand.

I wondered if members of the high school class of 1963 were unique. Not just at Lindsay High, but at all the high schools in the central San Joaquin Valley.

I thought the fall of 1962 might be the pivot in the history of Valley high school football.

Maybe the seasonal, lightly-regulated, relatively small-stakes game of the past was giving way to a new game dominated by money, fame, science and technology -- not to mention legal and social forces outside the control of any coach, school board or parent.

And I wondered if the high school seniors in fall 1962 were a group unlike any before or since.

They were born in 1945, amid the grief and chaos and hope of the last year of World War II, and served as springboard to the Baby Boomer era that began in 1946. Their senior year was nearly cut short by nuclear war; when they graduated in June 1963, America's president had less than six months to live and a war in Southeast Asia was about to heat up.

I went to Larry's memorial service to listen to his teammates and childhood classmates tell stories that might confirm my notions. But none of the former showed up, and only two of the latter -- Judy Embree Russ and Byron Charlebois. The service had plenty of stories, but none about Larry's youth.

So, I went looking for Larry Curtis and his history. It's our history, too.

***

Patricia Barker was editor of the Lindsay High yearbook -- The Comet -- in the 1962-63 school year. She was born July 6, 1945.

Ten days after her birth, the United States exploded the first atomic bomb in the high desert of New Mexico.

On Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Imperial Japan surrendered, and America had no need to invade Japan as it had Europe.

Because there was no invasion, some historians contend, an estimated one million American casualties and millions of Japanese casualties were avoided.

Patricia Barker would marry Barry Smith, the other halfback in Lindsay High's T-formation backfield. Smith, the student body president, was a senior in fall 1962.

Two of Lindsay High's 93 seniors were foreign exchange students. Shigehiro Nakamura was from Japan -- everyone called him Shig.

Long after graduation, the Smiths visited Nakamura in Japan. They toured the museum at Hiroshima.

"When we came out, we could not talk to him," Patricia Barker Smith says. "It was hard for us to know what to say."

Later, she says, she and her husband told Shig they were sorry for the destruction.

But, she adds, there is no easy resolution to the moral and political and military dilemma that haunts the world to this day: Were the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki necessary?

"You have to look at what was going on at the time," Patricia Barker Smith says.

***

Patricia Barker Smith says of the Lindsay of 1962-63 had one key virtue: "It was consistent."

To a teen, the town had all the solidity and stability of Lindsay Peak and Elephant's Back, the foothill landmarks outside town.

Coleman's Drive-In, the Grove Theatre, the Mt. Whitney Recreation Center (the pool hall), the Olive Bowl (the Cards' home field), the homes of friends -- all were where they were supposed to be, day in and day out.

But change was coming fast, and Patricia Barker Smith knew it even as a 17-year-old. The cover of the 1963 Comet is a color photo of the front of Lindsay High, with the main building's classic Spanish tile roof, high windows and second-story balcony. A wide sidewalk led to double-doors.

In 1966, the building was torn down and the school moved to a new campus northeast of town.

***

The 1963 Comet's back cover shows the school gymnasium. The gym had no bleachers, and the basketball teams (boys -- there was no girls teams) played home games at Strathmore High, four miles to the south.

It's useless to look at the photo and try to spot the gym's weight room. There was none.

One day last summer, I spent two hours in the Clovis East High School weight room as football coach Tim Murphy put about 35 players through a workout of such intensity that it left me, a mere spectator, overwhelmed. There was plenty of loud music, but everyone was all business, and Murphy never had to raise his voice to keep his players focused.

Everyone then walked across campus to an auditorium with individual seating and video. Murphy and his players had plenty of football to discuss.

That summer, I visited high school weight rooms from Kerman to Kingsburg, including most of those in the Fresno and Clovis schools. None of the workouts matched Clovis East's for intensity, but each program had coaches and players utterly dedicated to weight-training, conditioning and the intellectual side of football.

And to one degree or another, this is the norm year-around at high schools throughout the Valley -- for all athletes, not just football players.

It was different at Lindsay High in the summer of 1962, as the seniors-to-be prepared for the upcoming season.

"We took football seriously. We lifted some, and did some running," says Tony Wollenman, the Cards' 215-pound fullback. "But we all worked in the summer."

***

The Cardinals played only nine games in 1962, four non-league and five in league. Only a few years earlier, a season consisted of eight games.

There were no Valley playoffs in 1962.

The Cardinals won their first three non-conference games, beating Exeter 19-0, Dinuba 26-3 and Mt. Whitney 12-6.

They rolled through their league: 32-12 over McFarland, 34-13 over Woodlake, 14-0 over Strathmore, 47-0 over Avenal and 27-7 over Orosi.

This was The Bee's banner Page 1 headline on Oct. 23, three days before the Woodlake game:

"Russ Head for Cuba Collision,
Warn of Thermonuclear War"

"Russ," of course, refers to Russia. "Cuba Collision," of course, refers to the Cuban missile crisis. "Thermonuclear War," of course, refers the very real possibility of Hiroshima and Nagasaki repeated on a worldwide scale.

The Cardinals played in the Central Sierra League, a league that stretched from the Tulare County-Fresno County border in the north (Orosi) to Kings County in the west (Avenal) to Kern County in the south (McFarland).

The season's only blemish: a 0-0 non-conference standoff against Redwood in Visalia's Mineral King Bowl.

Mt. Whitney would share the Central Yosemite League championship with Porterville.

***

Larry Curtis played junior varsity football (the B team, as it was called then) as a junior. His first varsity game was Sept. 21, 1962 against Exeter.

In the second quarter, Curtis scored his first varsity touchdown on a 75-yard run. His best game was Oct. 26 against Woodlake when he scored on runs of 31 and 15 yards.

Wollenman was the team's offensive star, scoring at least nine touchdowns that season, all on runs.

Merle Flattley, in his fourth year at the school, was head coach. John Perkins was his only assistant. Both would go on to coach at the community college level.

***

The 0-0 tie against Redwood on Oct. 12, 1962 still rankles some Lindsay players.

Quarterback Dave Paul recalls a sellout crowd at Mineral King Bowl. Lindsay had won a close game the previous year, and the Rangers, loaded with talent, wanted revenge, he says.

In the third quarter, Paul threw a 35-yard touchdown pass to end Don Block. It was nullified by a Lindsay holding penalty.

Block intercepted a pass in the end zone with 30 seconds left in the game.

***

From Fresno to Bakersfield, 1962 was memorable for high school football.

Roosevelt and Bullard tied for the North Yosemite League title.

Bullard edged defending champion McLane 15-14 on Thursday, Nov. 15 to finish 5-1 in league. With Allan Longcor scoring three touchdowns, Roosevelt routed Fresno 32-7 in front of 8,000 fans at Ratcliffe Stadium the following night.

It was Bullard's first taste of a varsity football championship.

Shafter won the South Sequoia League title, finishing with the school's first undefeated season. Claude Gilbert, who would go on to coaching success at San Diego State and San Jose State, was the Generals' coach.

Lindsay would've had its hands full in a playoff. Caruthers won the North Sierra League crown, finishing undefeated with one tie.

***

There was room for sentiment in Valley high school football in 1962.

Jim Ashjian, senior quarterback at Bullard at the time, remembers coach Robin Rush playing records of the Notre Dame fight song before the Knights took the field: "It was supposed to pump us up. We wanted to listen to something else."

It wasn't a game for the meek.

Helmets had a single bar to protect faces. Adds Ashjian: "I didn't use a mouthpiece."

Ernie Westbrook was a senior halfback at Orosi. He ran for four touchdowns and caught a touchdown pass in a 41-19 rout of Woodlake on Nov. 9.

Early in the game, Westbrook recalls, he carried the ball on a sweep and got nailed by a Woodlake defender. Westbrook was knocked out.

"I was seeing stars," he says.

It happened on the Orosi sideline, so they dragged Westbrook to the bench, passed some smelling salts under his nose, then asked how he felt.

"I wanted to play," Westbrook says. "I hated the heck out of practice, but I loved playing the game."

***

The 1962 Lindsay Cardinals were a senior-dominated team.

The backfield -- quarterback Paul, halfbacks Curtis and Smith, fullback Wollenman -- were seniors.

The team picture reveals one of the Cards' advantages: They were big.

The back row is dominated by linemen such as Alan Newkirk and Brad Stark, and Wollenman. Each was about 6-3 or 6-4, and weighed more than 200 pounds. All were seniors, and none had a double chin.

Among other seniors who played key roles: linemen Jim Newman, L.Z. Johnson and Jack Humbarger, and ends Lyn Stachler and Block.

Wollenman signed with USC, Paul with Washington, Stark with the Air Force Academy. Newkirk walked on at Fresno State.

Paul finished at San Francisco State and Stark at Stanford. Newkirk's career was ended by injury.

Newkirk, Stachler and Curtis have died.

Barry Smith went to USC, where he played rugby.

"He was an All-American," says Paul. "I thought that was a pretty big deal."

***

Wollenman and Smith served as army officers in Vietnam.

Wollenman did two tours, flying helicopters. He was wounded in his first tour.

***

Jim Byrd, a big, tough senior tackle, perhaps best typified the Cardinals' excellence on the field in fall 1962.

The rest of his time on earth perhaps best typifies what's truly important in life.

Byrd signed with Oregon, but didn't like the college game and returned to the Valley. He and his wife, Luanne, lived in Visalia. They were married 44 years, and had two children.

Byrd died in September 2007.

"He was a good man," Luanne Byrd says. "He was a hard worker. He was a good father.

***

Probably only the most prescient of Lindsay fans sitting in the Olive Bowl in fall 1962 could have anticipated that some of the local boys would soon be fighting a war halfway around the world.

The adults, having lived through the Great Depression, World War II and the Korean War, were no innocents to the strange turns of the world.

But, if they'd had a crystal ball, they surely would've been stunned by what lay ahead. So, too, with folks throughout the Valley that fall.

Yet, the signs were there.

***

Take, for example, the ethnic makeup of Lindsay High's Class of 1963. Most of the surnames were northern European: Smith, Stark, Byrd, Newman, Block, Newkirk, Stachler, Johnson. There were six Hispanics.

Lindsay lived and died with agriculture, mostly the labor-intensive orange groves that surround the community. Teens were expected to work in the fields during summer, pulling sprinklers or spraying weeds, or in the packing houses.

Then, as now, labor was scarce at times, especially during harvest. The bracero program had helped fill the gap since the early 1940s. The program would end in 1964. Immigration laws would change dramatically over the next decade. So would immigration patterns.

Today, Lindsay is largely a Hispanic community. It was named an All-American city in 1995.

The class of 1963's valedictorian was Eddie Valenzuela.

***

In summer 1962, Lindsay's downtown sparkled with economic vitality.

It was a time when even a farm town of 5,000 could support a small J.C. Penney store. Lindsay's downtown had two five-and-dime stores, two hardware stores, a furniture store, a stationary store, and a handful of apparel stores.

On July 2, 1962, two days before the annual fireworks show at the Olive Bowl, Sam Walton opened his first Wal-Mart half a continent away, in Rogers, Ark.

***

Eight days after Walton's seemingly inconsequential store-opening, a satellite built by a team at Bell Telephone Laboratories was launched at Cape Canaveral.

Its name: Telstar, the first satellite able to relay television signals.

***

In the winter of 1962-63, a serious freeze hit the Valley. I lived on the northern outskirts of Lindsay, about a hundred yards from orange groves.

Growers soon had hundreds of smudge pots operating at night, the smoke from the burning fuel creating a visible (and heat-retaining) cloud cover. Some growers burned mounds of tires.

I awoke in the mornings with soot ringing my nose. When the freeze broke, homeowners throughout Lindsay had to wash their interior walls.

On Sept. 27, 1962, less than a week after the season-opening victory over Exeter, Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" was published. The environmental movement was born.

The days when my older brother and so many other Lindsay boys thought nothing about making a few extra bucks by spraying parathion were numbered.

And so, it appears, is the Friant-Kern Canal that runs along Lindsay's eastern border. When it dies so the San Joaquin River may live, Lindsay and much of the Valley's east side will die, too.

***

On Sept. 28, 1962, the same day Lindsay beat Dinuba by three touchdowns, a federal appeals court found Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett in contempt for his actions in preventing James Meredith from enrolling at the University of Mississippi.

Meredith was trying to become the first African-American student at Ole Miss. The federal government and courts prevailed, and Meredith registered the following week.

At the same time, Ernie Davis was dying of leukemia. The former Syracuse running back had won the Heisman Trophy in 1961, the first African-American to do so.

In the year after the Class of 1963 graduated, President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

***

In November 1962, as Lindsay was thumping Orosi on the road in a game that decided the CSL title, author Betty Friedan was putting the finishing touches on her book, "The Feminine Mystique."

It was published Feb. 19, 1963, about the time Orosi was getting its revenge by beating a talented Lindsay squad to win the CSL basketball title.

Within a decade, the Civil Rights Act would get an amendment called Title IX. Among other things, it mandated male-female equity in athletics at publicly-funded schools.

Title IX was too late for the 43 girls in Lindsay High's Class of 1963 -- their options in competitive athletics were limited to swimming and tennis.

But their daughters would reap the benefits.

***

And on Nov. 8, 1962, the day before Lindsay crushed Avenal, the New York Titans of the young American Football League imploded financially.

The team couldn't meet its payroll, and the league took over the Titans' operations.

In early 1963, an investment group headed by Sonny Werblin bought the franchise and renamed it the New York Jets. Werblin wasn't afraid to spend money in the AFL's war with the National Football League, and in 1965 he signed a quarterback from the University of Alabama named Joe Namath.

In January 1969, the Namath-led Jets upset the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. Bill Baird, a 1957 Lindsay High graduate, was the Jets' starting free safety.

***

Judy Embree Russ and Patricia Barker Smith gently but firmly dissuaded me of my first notion. The Lindsay High Class of 1963 is not unique, they say.

Many classmates keep in touch. "The connection was so tight," says Judy Embree Russ.

But they're regular people. And so it must be for the Class of 1963 at other Valley high schools.

***

But my second notion may have merit. The fall of 1962 might be when Valley high school football headed in a new direction, one that explains how we got to where we are today.

Roger Kelly, the former Redwood High and COS coach, started his coaching career at about this time in Paso Robles. He played football in the 1950s at Bakersfield High under legendary coach Paul Briggs.

Valley high school football in the 1950s and early 1960s was a time of intense hometown loyalty, Kelly says. The best players were two and three-sport stars. The Friday night games brought a community together in part because there wasn't much else to do.

A clearly-defined chain of command was understood by all, he says.

The football players back then "would run through a brick wall if you told them to," Kelly says. "Now, they'll ask: 'Why can't I climb over the wall, or go around the wall, or dig under the wall?' And it's their parents who are probably telling them the questions to ask."

In the early 1960s all those social and legal and economic forces discussed earlier began to converge in football as well as the rest of America. Television exploded, the pro game grew rich and fast-paced, the college game did the same, and opportunities opened to groups of people long marginalized in society.

Much of it, particularly the greater opportunity for every American, was a blessing, Kelly says.

Training, nutrition, technology and coaching grew more sophisticated as the margin between the best programs narrowed. The obsession for advantage intensified. Middle-of-the-road programs clawed toward the top. Mediocre programs rushed to catch up.

It's my opinion, not Kelly's, that fall 1962 is as good a time as any to mark the beginning -- or, more accurately, the irresistible acceleration -- of these trends.

Kelly says J.R. Boone and his innovative offenses at Reedley College in the late 1960s and early 1970s were one of the important influences on Valley high school football in the post-1962 era. But there were many others, Kelly says. Too many to count.

Kelly says he doesn't like the specialization of today's high school game. "I'm a dinosaur," he says.

But, Kelly adds, "the athlete of today is far superior to the athlete of yesterday because of all the advantages they have."

***

Larry Curtis was described at his memorial service as a man of faith who loved family and life. He hated ties. He enjoyed a Bloody Mary at breakfast, but only on vacation.

His Lindsay High classmates say Larry Curtis was kind and fun-loving. He was a good singer. He was the envy of many in high school with his 1957 Corvette.

A clue to Larry Curtis might be found in the background music prior to the start of his memorial service.

Hank Williams Jr. was followed by James Taylor singing "Up on the Roof."

"When this old world starts a getting me down
And people are just too much for me to face
I'll climb way up to the top of the stairs
And all my cares just drift right into space."

Larry Curtis spent his last years living on two acres next to a river in Oregon.

Says Tony Wollenman, his backfield teammate at Lindsay High: "That sounds pretty good to me."

***

Another Valley high school football season begins Thursday.

I love the month or so before the season begins. Teams often practice at night, under lights. Confidence and enthusiasm are everywhere.

I walked my dog at Bullard High several days before Larry's memorial service. It was about 8:30, and I stood for a moment in the dark on the soccer field.

The tennis courts ahead of me were ablaze with light. It was so bright that I couldn't see the football field on the other side of the courts.

But I could hear it. Coach Donnie Arax and his assistants were putting the Knights through a tough workout.

It's amazing how coaches use their whistles. Tweet-tweet-tweet means one thing. Tweeeeeet means something else.

Pads and helmets smacking into pads and helmets -- another memorable sound.

And the players -- who can understand what they're shouting when a teammate makes a big tackle or a long run? Then, again, who cares? Their excitement is infectious.

These sounds drifted above the blinding light. I like to think they mingled somewhere with the lingering sounds of all past summer football practices at Valley high schools, the youthful voice of Larry Curtis among them.

In the Valley such sounds are a family tradition.