Our lives play out against a backdrop of history, but even the most engaged citizen pays far closer attention to the ups and downs of his own life than he does to the events that shape the world. So it was with the boys of the St. Louis University High class of 1970.
The civil rights movement and the Vietnam War were impossible to ignore-and the Jesuit-trained kids did not want to ignore these things-but there were tests to take, girls to chase, beer to find and a state football championship to pursue.
Joe Castellano, a co-captain of that football team, recounts the quest-and that time-in "Bull in the Ring," a nonfiction account that is part sports story and part coming-of-age tale.
Even while writing about high school football, Castellano is careful to mention the outside world the kids were eager to join. The summer of their junior year, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. The day they started football practice that year, half a million young people came together for Woodstock. The big world was always right there around the corner.
Sometimes it reached into their little world and smacked them. An older brother of one of Castellano's classmates was killed in Vietnam.
As the boys readied for their senior year, they rented an apartment in northwest St. Louis as a place to hang out. One day, one of the young men was robbed and shot while on a beer run. It seemed unfathomable to the boys. Castellano describes that sense of innocence. He writes that the victim had been "full of optimism, dismissive of the concept that bad guys doing bad things was inevitable and unavoidable, flush with the potential of a harmonious society."
The young man's murder was one of the 309 homicides in the city during the bloody year of 1970. The murder was never solved.
Mostly, though, the book follows the team's pursuit of the school's first-ever state championship in football. If you like high school football, you'll enjoy the book.
But it wasn't the football stuff that most interested me. It was the high school stuff.
St. Louisans can seem almost obsessed with high school, and this book goes a long way toward explaining it, at least as far as SLU High is concerned. The boys in Castellano's book feel, with much justification, that they have been selected, anointed as tomorrow's leaders. Accomplishment and success are expected. The bond with their school is deep.
In the book's prologue, Castellano writes about a classmate who is dying of cancer in 2013. A doctor, trying to determine the man's acuity, asks him to name the president. "You mean of 'The U High'?" the patient responds slyly. Acuity sharp, pride in school intact even at the end, is the message.
In addition to being co-captain of the football team, Casetellano was president of the student council.
After graduating from Northwestern, Castellano worked as a sports writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat years before joining Anheuser-Busch, where he became a top executive.
"Bull in the Ring" is his first book and captures the culture of an iconic St. Louis institution. I hope his second does the same thing with the brewery.