What has August 15th meant to us? Everything

Mike Burke

On Friday, four friends and I went boating on the Chesapeake Bay, reliving old times, creating new ones, and reveling in each other’s company for a far-too-short glorious summer day in the Land of Pleasant Living.

Todd Martin supplied his boat and the captainship for the day. Besides myself, the other members of the crew were Kevin Royce, his dad Earl Royce, Donnie Nau and Scott Christopher. It was a perfect day, filled with a lot of laughs, a lot of emotions and a lot of stories of The Day, when we were brought together by Fort Hill football.

Kevin, Earl and I have been friends since Kevin and I were in first grade at Johnson Heights Elementary School when Miss Coretta Davis was our teacher. Todd and the Royces have been friends for nearly as long. We all came together, though, because of football as Todd and Kevin were two of the Sentinels’ star players, Donnie was a team trainer while Scott and I served as managers and statisticians.

All five of us would stand for Todd the day he married his high school sweetheart, the former Lynn Christopher.

When I asked on Friday if anybody “realized what tomorrow is,” Todd didn’t have to be reminded. It was August 15th, the first day of football practice for Maryland public high schools, and for the first time in nine years, he wouldn’t be there as a coach for the two-time defending Maryland 3A state champion River Hill Hawks of Clarksville.

When Kevin heard the words “August 15th” he took a hearty swig of his refreshment and said, “My ribs just started to hurt,” and we were off, telling stories about our experiences on the Fort Hill football team as though they all had taken place the day before.

Names of teammates, coaches, events, buzz words and the stories came ringing in from the past, all beginning and ending, of course, with the guy who was called everything from The Old Man, The Cat, Big Daddy and The Duke — none other than head coach Charlie Lattimer, who was called nothing other than “Coach Lattimer” or “sir” during face-to-face meetings.

There was the story Todd told about a scrimmage during which the Sentinels did not perform particularly well, and a disgusted Coach Lattimer telling his team as it boarded the bus, “You’ll be lucky to win a game this year (to nobody’s surprise, the Sentinels would win nine games that year). I don’t want to hear a sound on this bus on the way home.”

Then, upon entering the bus, Coach Lattimer discovered that while everybody on board was eating their bagged lunch from McDonald’s nobody had bothered to provide one for him. Coach immediately announced in his own distinguished manner that if everybody on that bus knew what was good for them when they returned home from the scrimmage there had better be at least one lunch on that bus with his name on it. In less than a second, through the cold stone silence, over 40 bags of McDonald’s carryout where thrown to the front of the bus where Coach Lattimer sat.

There was the time Fort Hill scrimmaged James Wood into the dark evening hours on the upper practice field behind the press box. Nothing seemed to be going right for the Sentinels, and for close to an hour, the James Wood coach asked Coach Lattimer if his team could please leave, because it was dark and his players were tired.

“We’re not done,” Coach Lattimer kept saying, seemingly forcing the James Wood team to stay on for as long as he saw what he needed to see.

We talked about Coach Lattimer breaking his toe on a metal tool chest when one of the student trainers (who happened to be on the boat that day) had forced him to use a timeout by not getting an equipment change taken care of in time. We told our Coach Dick Bittner stories, and we remembered the likes of Coach Glenn Cross, Coach Tony Changuris, Dave Kirby, the great Steve Trimble, Chuck Spangler, Mark Paupe (or “Pulpee” as Coach Lattimer would say), Trippy Nelson, Billy Feeney, Wendell Elliott, Jeff Beck, The Big Set of Keys, our Lattimer haircuts, the Morningside jayvee game, Coach Jimmy Manges — a.k.a. Columbo — Doc Himmelwright and Doc Poling (“Come on everybody, let’s hit-hit-hit-hit; ball-ball-ball.”)

We talked, and laughed, and wiped away a tear in such a non-stop over-eager fashion that the day and the evening went by in a flash — just as seemingly as our days together at Fort Hill had.

“Coach Lattimer was lucky to have you guys,” Todd told Donnie, Scott and me. “Believe me, high school coaches today can’t get guys like you who they can trust with the keys to the kingdom.”

They were much appreciated words coming from one of the stars of the team, yet it’s not as though as managers and trainers, we were ever made to feel we weren’t part of the team, either by the players or the coaches. They made us a part of the team, and the truth is we all realized we had been and remain lucky to have one another, and that that wouldn’t be the case had we not fallen under the roof of one Charles E. Lattimer and his Fort Hill football program.

I watched and enjoyed each of my friends on Friday and I considered what they had all gone on to accomplish in their lives and what they have become right up to this day. I am immensely proud of each one of them. They’re successful in their careers, they have loving home lives and families. And they have a long and deep base friendship with hundreds of others who have not been so lucky in life, or who have not been as successful. And it’s all because of that first August 15th so many years ago.

We are, in fact, who we are because, over 30 years ago, of the way we were.

Mike Burke is sports editor of the Cumberland Times-News. Contact Mike Burke at mburke@times-news.com.