A Season To Remember: Fall 1946 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798292157182)

John Decker is a young sportswriter for a New York newspaper who has been assigned to travel across America in the fall of 1946 to report on college football games. It is the first full season of college football following the end of World War II. Players and coaches have returned to their campuses in what is regarded to be a renaissance year for the sport. Players like Glenn Davis and Doc Blanchard of Army and Johnny Lujack of Notre Dame and coaches like Fritz Crisler of Michigan and General Neyland of Tennessee have become national celebrities, and games are being televised for the first time. But Decker's editor wants him to write not just about football but about the America he finds in his travels through North Carolina and Michigan, Kansas and Texas, Oregon and Minnesota, to observe a nation that is still grieving its losses from the war, yet celebrating the nation's victory, grateful for their freedom and prosperity. Decker gathers stories from farmers and bankers, coaches and writers and inventors. He finds love and lives a full life with his wife until 70 years later his children convince their widowed father to move into an assisted living facility, where at age 96 he finds a new reason to write.