(Author's Note: Much of what follows is true. Some of what follows is partly true. And some of what follows is outrightly false. All of what follows is intended for entertainment purposes only.)
By IRV HANSEN, JR.
WENATCHEE, WA -- Robert "Bobo" Bohart sat alone in a darkened corner of the Big Apple Bar and ordered another White Russian. He had summoned this reporter, he said, "to set the record straight and get my just reward."
Bobo lifted his Zippo, lit a Marlboro, and blew smoke at the tabletop. "I'm a patriot. And I'm a competitor. I grow sweet American cherries. I'm an ordinary guy. I pay my taxes. I don't need to stand on a pedestal. But when a man serves his country as I have, he deserves some recognition."
He had not made eye contact and stared at the ashtray, lost in thought or lost in images from long ago.
Bobo is 63, a slender, strikingly handsome man whose voice has dropped on octave, he said, from all those Marlboros. When told that he bears a strong resemblance to Dick Van Dyke, he responded, "Oh, please, I've been told that a thousand times. Once when I was walking down a street in Seattle, an old lady asked for my autograph. She said, 'You were so wonderful in Mary Poppins!'"
It was long ago in 1969 when Bobo attended the American high school in Ankara, Turkey, where his father, a colonel in the Air Force, was base commander at a military installation there. Some 400 American students attended the school, mostly dependents in military families.
Bobo said, "Before we went to Turkey, I went to school in Spokane where I was a standout wrestler and played football. I loved it. I weighed 125 pounds and played tackle. But there was none of that in Turkey. Kids just hung out at the base, usually at the snack bar, listening to music and playing pool."
Bobo was a senior at the American school and had a classmate by the name of Debbie Sapenter. They were friendly if not close friends. They rode the school bus together from their homes in the city out to the secure military base several miles east of town.
One morning, as he tells it, the bus stopped at Debbie's apartment building per usual, but she was nowhere around. The driver waited, but no Debbie. The bus pulled away and soon was barreling down Ataturk Boulevard. Bobo was sitting at the back and happened to look out the back window.
"I'll never forget it," he said. "Debbie was chasing the bus and gaining on it. I swear we were going thirty miles an hour, but still, she kept gaining on us. Man, she was fast! The driver wouldn't pull over, but when we finally stopped at an intersection, Debbie caught up and started banging on the door, mad as hell. I had never heard a girl swear like that. She never missed school and she wasn't going to miss that day either."
Bobo allowed a slight chuckle and shook his head. "Man, she was fast."
You might wonder where this was leading. What relevance did a fast-running classmate have to "setting the record straight?"
Bobo made eye contact at last. "Powder puff, man. Powder puff."
By the fall of 1969, Colonel Bohart and his subordinates had become concerned that the teenage dependents on their watch were overly bored, sedentary, and disillusioned as they sat for hours in the snack bar, smoking cigarettes, and listening to "Hey, Jude" on the juke box. While life in Turkey provided fantastic opportunities for travel and learning, many Americans considered Ankara a "hardship post" and counted the days until they were transferred out. And it was widely rumored that American kids were increasingly involved in drugs, especially buying and smoking hashish, a very dangerous activity in that foreign land.
Against these worries, the brass decided that a football field should be built behind the high school. Equipment was ordered, lines were chalked, goalposts were raised, and aluminum bleachers were erected. Boys were divided into four teams, and clad in their helmets and pads, made Saturday battles on the gridiron as the American community cheered them on.
"I didn't play," Bobo explained. "My best friend talked me out of it. His name was Tom Bohnhorst. In looking back, I can see how disturbed he was. He thought the spectacle of a bunch of Americans playing football behind a barbed wired fence on a Turkish hillside was an insult to the natives. 'An obscene gesture of American imperialism,' he called it. Bohnhorst preferred to poke around in old Ankara alleyways and drink tea with the locals. For some reason I loved the guy, but he was a crackpot."
Bobo drained his drink and lit another cigarette. "Bohnhorst started the student sit-down strike when the moon astronauts failed to visit the school during their world tour. He made me write something for a so-called "underground newspaper" which was secretly distributed to the student body. Full of left-wing nonsense. It was called RIPT as a siren call to all the American kids who were always getting ripped on dope, and believe me, there were a lot of them."
"I was torn," he continued. "I wanted to play football but I didn't want to betray my friends. I was no radical. Bohnhorst cast a manipulative spell on me. But then one day at school, while Tom was out changing the world somewhere, it happened: Debbie and her friends collared me in the hallway."
Bobo's dour mood lifted. He extinguished his cigarette and fiddled with his lighter.
"The girls were pissed," he continued. "They said the boys had everything. They had a basketball team and now they got to play football. The girls wanted to play. They wanted to play in a flag football game, seniors against juniors, on a Saturday just like the boys, with everyone there watching. Most of them didn't even know the rules, let alone how to throw a football. They wanted me to show them how to play, to be their coach. And that's how a Powder Puff football game came to be played in Ankara, Turkey, in 1969.
"We had a practice beforehand, and I showed them formations and the basic rules, gave them positions. I must say, they were quite enthused. So, we get to the big day, the bleachers are full, and everyone's excited, a lot of noise. We get the ball after the kickoff and my team huddles up. And stays huddled, and stays huddled. They never broke for the line of scrimmage, and they're arguing, everyone talking at once. I called timeout and ran out onto the field.
"My quarterback was a short girl named Nancy Bilderback. And when I got to the huddle, all the girls were intense and got quiet, staring at me. Nancy's was the lone and scared voice. She looked at me and asked, 'What do I do?'
"It was then I remembered sitting at the back of that school bus when Debbie Sapenter sprinted across the city to catch up. So this is what I told Nancy: 'Just hand the ball to Debbie. Get the hike, and just hand the ball to Debbie. Every time, every hike. Just hand the ball to Debbie.'"
Bobo's eyes widened. "And that's exactly what Nancy did. Debbie grabbed the ball and shot like a bullet around that cluster of girls and became a blur all the way to the end zone. The world was on pause while Debbie was on fast forward. The bleachers sat in stunned silence. It seemed like a mass hallucination. And on every possession, Nancy gave Debbie the ball, and every time, Debbie ran like a demon possessed all the way to the end zone. The crowd went nuts. She must have run for 800 yards with nary a finger touching her. Not even close. We never had a second down. I don't remember the final score, but we, or should I say, Debbie, beat the juniors by a hundred points.
"Debbie was carried off the field on her teammates' shoulders and when she was set down, she ran to me, and grabbing me by the shoulders, cried, 'I couldn't have done it without you! I didn't know I had it in me!' She embraced me and cried. Never seen a happier person my whole life.
"It may have seemed like a small and sweet thing at the time. But how was I to know that my short-lived career as a powder puff football coach would change lives and American history forever?"
After graduating from high school in Ankara in 1970, Bobo wound up a cherry farmer near Wenatchee, married with two small children. "I was sitting on top of the world. Literally," he mused. His orchards, in the Bohart family for generations, grow atop a mountain overlooking the Columbia River valley.
Harvest comes in July when workdays extend from dawn to evening. The harvest in 1976 was no exception.
"I remember the night like it was yesterday," Bobo said. "I was dog tired, and I sat down in front of the TV with a cold one to watch the Olympics in Montreal. As the Fates would have it, it was the night of the women's track and field events. It came time for the 4X400 relay finals and they introduced the teams. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I spewed beer across the living room and nearly shit myself."
There, running for Team USA, stood the one and only, Debbie Sapenter.
"Actually, I think I did shit myself," Bobo recalled.
The East Germans were the prohibitive favorites, and they set a new world record by coming in under three minutes and 20 seconds. But the Americans, with Sapenter running the first leg in 51 seconds, grabbed the silver.
"She shot out of the blocks like a greyhound," Bobo continued. "The whole world was watching. But my memories filtered the TV screen. All I could see was Nancy Bilderback handing Debbie the ball, and Debbie making the long turn around the juniors and racing for the end zone again and again and again. And her crying on my shoulder, 'I couldn't have done it without you. I couldn't have done it without you.'
"And then there she stood with her teammates on the podium, with their silver medals hanging from their necks, and the flags hoisted in the air -- oh, my God, the flag! -- the whole world watching, the U.S. coming in second, way up there, wedged right there between East Germany and the Soviets. What a moment in my life.
"And okay, let's just say it for the record: The USA should have won gold. Those East German women had five o'clock shadows and sang baritone. Testosterone, man. Hormone injections. But hey, what a moment."
The Big Apple Bar had become quiet. The regulars had left and the juke box was silent. Bobo blew smoke at the ceiling.
A minute passed before he asked, "Does it really matter whether you're running for your country or running for the seniors in a powder puff football game? The emotions are the same. Tears of joy are tears of joy.
"I will carry to my grave these questions: If Debbie hadn't missed the school bus on that morning in Turkey, if I hadn't settled the confusion in that huddle that Saturday, if Nancy didn't do what she was told, if I hadn't broken free for a few days from bad influences… well, would history have turned out differently?"
Couldn't Bobo acknowledge that without his tutelage and powder puff prowess, Debbie would still have come to discover her God-given talents for herself, that it was her discipline, dedication, and hard training that paved the way for an Olympic triumph?
"Impossible to know," he said. "Debbie deserved all that she got. But I wonder when she takes her Olympic medal in her hands and remembers the glory of those days, that she might also remember how it all began, on that glorious day when the seniors routed the juniors on a plot of fresh grass just outside Ankara, Turkey. And if it occurs to her to whittle a small shaving from that silver and send it my way, well, I would understand why."
By IRV HANSEN, JR.
WENATCHEE, WA -- Robert "Bobo" Bohart sat alone in a darkened corner of the Big Apple Bar and ordered another White Russian. He had summoned this reporter, he said, "to set the record straight and get my just reward."
Bobo lifted his Zippo, lit a Marlboro, and blew smoke at the tabletop. "I'm a patriot. And I'm a competitor. I grow sweet American cherries. I'm an ordinary guy. I pay my taxes. I don't need to stand on a pedestal. But when a man serves his country as I have, he deserves some recognition."
He had not made eye contact and stared at the ashtray, lost in thought or lost in images from long ago.
Bobo is 63, a slender, strikingly handsome man whose voice has dropped on octave, he said, from all those Marlboros. When told that he bears a strong resemblance to Dick Van Dyke, he responded, "Oh, please, I've been told that a thousand times. Once when I was walking down a street in Seattle, an old lady asked for my autograph. She said, 'You were so wonderful in Mary Poppins!'"
It was long ago in 1969 when Bobo attended the American high school in Ankara, Turkey, where his father, a colonel in the Air Force, was base commander at a military installation there. Some 400 American students attended the school, mostly dependents in military families.
Bobo said, "Before we went to Turkey, I went to school in Spokane where I was a standout wrestler and played football. I loved it. I weighed 125 pounds and played tackle. But there was none of that in Turkey. Kids just hung out at the base, usually at the snack bar, listening to music and playing pool."
Bobo was a senior at the American school and had a classmate by the name of Debbie Sapenter. They were friendly if not close friends. They rode the school bus together from their homes in the city out to the secure military base several miles east of town.
One morning, as he tells it, the bus stopped at Debbie's apartment building per usual, but she was nowhere around. The driver waited, but no Debbie. The bus pulled away and soon was barreling down Ataturk Boulevard. Bobo was sitting at the back and happened to look out the back window.
"I'll never forget it," he said. "Debbie was chasing the bus and gaining on it. I swear we were going thirty miles an hour, but still, she kept gaining on us. Man, she was fast! The driver wouldn't pull over, but when we finally stopped at an intersection, Debbie caught up and started banging on the door, mad as hell. I had never heard a girl swear like that. She never missed school and she wasn't going to miss that day either."
Bobo allowed a slight chuckle and shook his head. "Man, she was fast."
You might wonder where this was leading. What relevance did a fast-running classmate have to "setting the record straight?"
Bobo made eye contact at last. "Powder puff, man. Powder puff."
By the fall of 1969, Colonel Bohart and his subordinates had become concerned that the teenage dependents on their watch were overly bored, sedentary, and disillusioned as they sat for hours in the snack bar, smoking cigarettes, and listening to "Hey, Jude" on the juke box. While life in Turkey provided fantastic opportunities for travel and learning, many Americans considered Ankara a "hardship post" and counted the days until they were transferred out. And it was widely rumored that American kids were increasingly involved in drugs, especially buying and smoking hashish, a very dangerous activity in that foreign land.
Against these worries, the brass decided that a football field should be built behind the high school. Equipment was ordered, lines were chalked, goalposts were raised, and aluminum bleachers were erected. Boys were divided into four teams, and clad in their helmets and pads, made Saturday battles on the gridiron as the American community cheered them on.
"I didn't play," Bobo explained. "My best friend talked me out of it. His name was Tom Bohnhorst. In looking back, I can see how disturbed he was. He thought the spectacle of a bunch of Americans playing football behind a barbed wired fence on a Turkish hillside was an insult to the natives. 'An obscene gesture of American imperialism,' he called it. Bohnhorst preferred to poke around in old Ankara alleyways and drink tea with the locals. For some reason I loved the guy, but he was a crackpot."
Bobo drained his drink and lit another cigarette. "Bohnhorst started the student sit-down strike when the moon astronauts failed to visit the school during their world tour. He made me write something for a so-called "underground newspaper" which was secretly distributed to the student body. Full of left-wing nonsense. It was called RIPT as a siren call to all the American kids who were always getting ripped on dope, and believe me, there were a lot of them."
"I was torn," he continued. "I wanted to play football but I didn't want to betray my friends. I was no radical. Bohnhorst cast a manipulative spell on me. But then one day at school, while Tom was out changing the world somewhere, it happened: Debbie and her friends collared me in the hallway."
Bobo's dour mood lifted. He extinguished his cigarette and fiddled with his lighter.
"The girls were pissed," he continued. "They said the boys had everything. They had a basketball team and now they got to play football. The girls wanted to play. They wanted to play in a flag football game, seniors against juniors, on a Saturday just like the boys, with everyone there watching. Most of them didn't even know the rules, let alone how to throw a football. They wanted me to show them how to play, to be their coach. And that's how a Powder Puff football game came to be played in Ankara, Turkey, in 1969.
"We had a practice beforehand, and I showed them formations and the basic rules, gave them positions. I must say, they were quite enthused. So, we get to the big day, the bleachers are full, and everyone's excited, a lot of noise. We get the ball after the kickoff and my team huddles up. And stays huddled, and stays huddled. They never broke for the line of scrimmage, and they're arguing, everyone talking at once. I called timeout and ran out onto the field.
"My quarterback was a short girl named Nancy Bilderback. And when I got to the huddle, all the girls were intense and got quiet, staring at me. Nancy's was the lone and scared voice. She looked at me and asked, 'What do I do?'
"It was then I remembered sitting at the back of that school bus when Debbie Sapenter sprinted across the city to catch up. So this is what I told Nancy: 'Just hand the ball to Debbie. Get the hike, and just hand the ball to Debbie. Every time, every hike. Just hand the ball to Debbie.'"
Bobo's eyes widened. "And that's exactly what Nancy did. Debbie grabbed the ball and shot like a bullet around that cluster of girls and became a blur all the way to the end zone. The world was on pause while Debbie was on fast forward. The bleachers sat in stunned silence. It seemed like a mass hallucination. And on every possession, Nancy gave Debbie the ball, and every time, Debbie ran like a demon possessed all the way to the end zone. The crowd went nuts. She must have run for 800 yards with nary a finger touching her. Not even close. We never had a second down. I don't remember the final score, but we, or should I say, Debbie, beat the juniors by a hundred points.
"Debbie was carried off the field on her teammates' shoulders and when she was set down, she ran to me, and grabbing me by the shoulders, cried, 'I couldn't have done it without you! I didn't know I had it in me!' She embraced me and cried. Never seen a happier person my whole life.
"It may have seemed like a small and sweet thing at the time. But how was I to know that my short-lived career as a powder puff football coach would change lives and American history forever?"
After graduating from high school in Ankara in 1970, Bobo wound up a cherry farmer near Wenatchee, married with two small children. "I was sitting on top of the world. Literally," he mused. His orchards, in the Bohart family for generations, grow atop a mountain overlooking the Columbia River valley.
Harvest comes in July when workdays extend from dawn to evening. The harvest in 1976 was no exception.
"I remember the night like it was yesterday," Bobo said. "I was dog tired, and I sat down in front of the TV with a cold one to watch the Olympics in Montreal. As the Fates would have it, it was the night of the women's track and field events. It came time for the 4X400 relay finals and they introduced the teams. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I spewed beer across the living room and nearly shit myself."
There, running for Team USA, stood the one and only, Debbie Sapenter.
"Actually, I think I did shit myself," Bobo recalled.
The East Germans were the prohibitive favorites, and they set a new world record by coming in under three minutes and 20 seconds. But the Americans, with Sapenter running the first leg in 51 seconds, grabbed the silver.
"She shot out of the blocks like a greyhound," Bobo continued. "The whole world was watching. But my memories filtered the TV screen. All I could see was Nancy Bilderback handing Debbie the ball, and Debbie making the long turn around the juniors and racing for the end zone again and again and again. And her crying on my shoulder, 'I couldn't have done it without you. I couldn't have done it without you.'
"And then there she stood with her teammates on the podium, with their silver medals hanging from their necks, and the flags hoisted in the air -- oh, my God, the flag! -- the whole world watching, the U.S. coming in second, way up there, wedged right there between East Germany and the Soviets. What a moment in my life.
"And okay, let's just say it for the record: The USA should have won gold. Those East German women had five o'clock shadows and sang baritone. Testosterone, man. Hormone injections. But hey, what a moment."
The Big Apple Bar had become quiet. The regulars had left and the juke box was silent. Bobo blew smoke at the ceiling.
A minute passed before he asked, "Does it really matter whether you're running for your country or running for the seniors in a powder puff football game? The emotions are the same. Tears of joy are tears of joy.
"I will carry to my grave these questions: If Debbie hadn't missed the school bus on that morning in Turkey, if I hadn't settled the confusion in that huddle that Saturday, if Nancy didn't do what she was told, if I hadn't broken free for a few days from bad influences… well, would history have turned out differently?"
Couldn't Bobo acknowledge that without his tutelage and powder puff prowess, Debbie would still have come to discover her God-given talents for herself, that it was her discipline, dedication, and hard training that paved the way for an Olympic triumph?
"Impossible to know," he said. "Debbie deserved all that she got. But I wonder when she takes her Olympic medal in her hands and remembers the glory of those days, that she might also remember how it all began, on that glorious day when the seniors routed the juniors on a plot of fresh grass just outside Ankara, Turkey. And if it occurs to her to whittle a small shaving from that silver and send it my way, well, I would understand why."
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