Doesn’t’ seem that long ago but in 2018, one of best guys we know gave another one of the best guys we know a gift certificate to Superior’s Steakhouse, and he used the card to treat the Shreveport-Bossier Journal staff to lunch with local sports icons Bobby Aillet and Leo Sanford.
We are easily led. Especially when free food is involved. And lunch with heroes.
In a comfy “meeting” room, we sat there for nearly three hours and overate and listened to these two Louisiana Tech Athletics Hall of Famers and, at the time, besties for 70 of their nearly 90 years as bona fide dudes.
There are worse ways to spend time and money.
When Mr. Bobby died three years ago this week, age 93, it was J.J. Marshall who recalled that day and said to me, “I could have sat there and listened to them talk all afternoon.”
We just about did.
And now Mr. Leo has passed this early spring at 94, two of the final members of The National Association for the Advancement of Grandstand Quarterbacks (NAAGQ), an exclusive “club” for more than 70 years, formed by Tech football teens going off to war in 1943, a group whose families grew up together and, through the years, grew old together.
They weren’t stingy about sharing stories — if they were asked. No chest-beating in this bunch. Thankfully, they shared enough of themselves that we’ll always have stuff to carry around.
Leo was a member of the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame, the Ark-La-Tex Museum of Champions, a star at Shreveport’s Fair Park High, a Pro Bowler in the NFL, a league champ in 1958 with Johnny Unitas and the Baltimore Colts, a humble bear of a man with oven-mitt-sized paws who, after this playing days, sold class rings and letter jackets to students all over the area; he sold that stuff but the smiles and understated jokes, he did those for free.
He loved to tell about him and another Tech recruit being driven from Shreveport to Ruston by legendary Tech football assistant Jimmy Mize, and Coach Mize asking Leo’s friend what he wanted to major in, and the kid said, “Engineering,” so then Coach Mize asked Leo the same thing, and Leo said he was thinking that if his buddy could learn to drive a train, so could he, so Leo said, “Engineering.”
Another one’s about Coach Joe Aillet with Leo and some other linemen in a crescent moon around Aillet and the coach hollers “I need a dummy!” and nothing happens for like five second so Leo jumped out toward coach and Aillet said, “Not you, Sanford. I need a BLOCKING dummy.” (Leo would tell the story and shrug his shoulders: “He said he needed a dummy so …”)
When Sanford established the largest endowed scholarship in Tech Athletics history in honor of his wife Myrna after her passing in 2018, Leo told his buddies at their Friday morning unofficial club meeting at Shreveport’s Southfield Grill that “I’d be happy to have given the second-largest endowed scholarship if one of you other guys would step up.”
It was an almost ordained sort of special, the times Leo and Bobby and their football friends and families got to share. Disheartening to think it’s over, but then again, these were times built on love, and love never dies. No good thing ever does.
Speaking of love, this is from Myrna’s obit: “On their first real date he told her he was going to marry her, and she told him he was crazy. While she spent the next 68 years admitting he was right, she’d also tell you he was still crazy.”
Curt Joiner, one of Leo’s sons-in-law, will tell you it’s always been a “good” kind of crazy. “I don’t know if there’s any guy in the world I enjoy spending an evening with more than my father-in-law,” Joiner said.
A lot of guys share that feeling.
Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu