No way. There is no way that the very first Super Bowl was held 49 years ago. That would make me very old and decrepit.
On that Sunday when the Green Bay Packers met the Kansas City Chiefs for football supremacy, I was reluctantly rooting for the Chiefs. You see, the American Football League was trying for equality with the older, more established National Football League. Since the infant Boston Patriots (the old days) were in the AFL, we New Englanders were duty-bound to support the Chiefs.
Everybody loved the Packers though, with Vince Lombardi, Bart Starr, Paul Hornung and Jim Taylor. Hornung, my favorite, was injured and did not play in the first Super Bowl. The Packers didn’t need him. They were the glamour team.
The Super Bowl didn’t have the national attention it does now, but we football freaks were mesmerized. Why, someday our stumbling, bumbling Patriots might even make it.
Super Bowl tickets were an outrageous $12. I cannot remember anyone discussing the PSI rating of the footballs.
Some 49 years ago, I had decided that the downtown Boston insurance business was not for me, even if it offered literally hundreds of young girls and parties at one moment’s notice. Usually the parties occurred at my Fairfield Street apartment, the size of two phone booths.
A friend of a friend was fleeing the city life to become a “ski bum” at Snow Lake Lodge in Dover, Vermont. I was not one to miss out on a good time so I packed up (both shirts) and joined him.
The problem was the lodge wanted you to wait on people and bring them food in order to get a bed and a ski pass. I signed on as a busboy, because I had cleared a few tables in my life.
It was a transitory occupation and the waiters always took off in the middle of the night, never to be seen again. Most of the crew was from New York City, former employees of the Cheetah nightclub. One of them disappeared and I became an instant waiter.
I would have been the worst waiter in the world, except for some of my fellow employees. I remember the dishwasher eating leftover steaks from the dirty dishes.
I had worked a week or so when the Super Bowl came around, displayed on a basement television. The management knew of my limited ability to remember drinks, salads, soups, entrees and desserts so I had only a few tables. I took my orders, made careful diagrams to keep the salad and dressing orders straight and promptly fled to the basement television, reappearing at halftime.
The Chiefs were behind, but close at 14-10 at the half.
When a man springs for a winter weekend at Snow Lake Lodge for his entire family, he expects at least a modicum of service. He does not expect his waiter to disappear to watch a football game. I have seen people mad in my life, but this New Yorker (naturally) took the cake. He used words I never heard before. I mean, it was the Super Bowl.
I hastily assembled his salads, dressing, soups, drinks and meals, and then fled back to the basement. When it was apparent that the Packers had the game well in hand, I returned to the dining room and my still irate customer and his family. We finished off with the desserts and I wished him a wonderful day. If he had a gun, he would have shot me in the middle of that dining room.
I don’t think he left a tip. In case you forgot, the Packers won easily, 35-10.
I don’t remember most things like my keys and where I parked the damned car. But I remember that day clearly, 49 years ago. Where has the time gone?
I left the Vermont wilderness for my first trip to Florida, where I continued my waiting career until I signed aboard the Flying Cloud yacht in downtown Miami as an “able-bodied seaman,” if you can believe it. They took so long to refit the 300-foot yacht that I fled the East Coast in a repossessed Cadillac to meet my pal Bob Marino in San Francisco for the Summer of Love. That was another whole story, or two.
But I never forgot my red-faced, screaming, swearing restaurant patron … 49 years ago.
Hey. It was the first Super Bowl.
Emmet Meara lives in Camden in blissful retirement after working as a reporter for the BDN in Rockland for 30 years.