Soccer (Football)
I have always liked soccer. As a kid I first played it at Camp Dudley and then in high school. My junior year at Kiski the JV coach was Ed Schuster and at the end of the season I didn’t travel to the last game. He told me that I was the only kid he ever coached that went from starting at the beginning of the season to being at the bottom of the roster at the end. And I honestly couldn’t figure out why. Another case of me not being able to understand some of the adults in my life. I didn’t play in college but continued to follow the professional game. / Jürgen Kracht was a (very cool) colleague of my fathers at Allegheny College and in the summer of 1968, he and some of his friends asked me to join them to go to Municipal Stadium in Cleveland to see Pele’s Brazilian club Santos play the Cleveland Stokers in a friendly. It think we went in his lovely little red Fiat 850 Special. It was a memorable game in that the Stokers won 2-1 in what seemed a massive upset. Looking it up on the net I found the exact date to be 10 July of that year. We sat quite high up in the stadium, and even though capacity was around 80,000, I seem to remember it being mostly sold out.
Peter is in DC doing an internship with DC United and he was able to get me a ticket for Saturday’s first round playoff match with the Red Bulls at RFK. It was a pretty good match; ended up 1-1 and the crowd at the stadium was really rockin’.
Salvatore is the “12th man” and moves around the ground beating on his drum. I just love the matador get-up. I was hoping to get a shot of him looking at the camera, but I think he was leery of a flash going off. The return match is scheduled for this Wednesday at 8 (NBC Sports Network) at Red Bulls Arena in Harrison, NJ. Go United!
Sunday in PA and Ohio
Today, Peter and I drove from Meadville to Cleveland, mostly on Route 322. It was a cool gray morning and 322 is a road that I have ridden on and driven many times. The fields were so green and lush; soy beans and field corn grown mostly on small family farms. I had wanted to stop and photograph on our way to the Indians game, but I felt a bit of pressure to get to the stadium and park with plenty of time to spare. It was a great game for the many Sox fans that made the trip with Boston winning 14-1. Afterwards Peter and I had an amazing meal at Mallorca.
As we were driving back to Meadville I was again taken by the rural beauty of Eastern Ohio and Western Pennsylvania. The roads are in quite good shape and the farms are nicely kept. This shot is facing East on Ohio Route 167 not far from the PA line. There was so little traffic that I just stopped the car in the road to take it.
I stopped to photograph the fields on the way home and found myself thinking about the farmers in the midwest who are suffering through one of the worst droughts in recent history. Not four hundred miles west of here in Indiana the corn is dying for lack of rain. And yet the farmers in this part of the world seem to be in the midst of a bumper crop. I actually thought that if the Indiana farmers saw these fields they might cry.
And finally, our route back to Meadville took us through Linesville, PA. I got the chance to show Peter the famous spillway on Pymatuning Lake where the “ducks walk on the fishes backs”. I know it is really bizarre, but it is something I grew up with and it doesn’t seem that weird. We met a nice woman who is driving across the country visiting places like this. Here’s a link to her blog.
Jon Crispin's Notebook 
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