Screen Mirror (Jun 1930 - Mar 1931)

i • JOHNNY, as everyone recalls, is a former All-American football star on the Alabama team. At the right is cute little Jane Harriet Brown, Johnny’s best pal, severest critic and only child. John Mack Brown. When that tall young man had approached and engaged him in conversation, he had proudly introduced him to Connie Foster. And when Johnny asked the girl for a dance, the freshman had not even protested losing his first dance, the inalienable right of even firstyear escorts. They danced together three times that evening. Johnny was standing on the veranda steps when she left. “Going to be home Sunday evening?” he asked, carelessly. That evening happened to be Friday. “Why, I guess so,” she stammered, surprised and thrilled. She forgot all about the date with the freshman who was saying good-night to someone at that moment. “Thought I might drop around for a little while,” Johnny threw his cigarette into the nearest flower bed and smiled into the dark eyes of the high school infant. “I’d love to have you, Mistah Brown,” Connie wished that it were morning so that she could tell the girls about the date with Alabama’s greatest football player. Then the freshman returned to her side. She smiled at Johnny and was gone down the steps. Connie spent most of Sunday afternoon getting ready for Sunday evening. Johnny brushed his hair and his suit and his shoes vigorously and changed his necktie three times before he felt ready to start for the Foster home. Sunday night was followed by Wednesday night and by Friday night and by another Sunday night. Within a few weeks John Mack Brown was a part of the family in the red brick house with the tall, white pillars and the wide lawns. Every late afternoon and early evening Johnny spent in the university’s leading haberdashery. Suddenly Johnny found that it was very much shorter to walk home to the fraternity house by way of the red brick house each evening, after the haberdashery had closed its doors to the welldressed youths of the University of Alabama and Tuscaloosa, young men who bought clothes and talked football with John Mack Brown. JV'."' The following September Cornelia Foster enrolled in the music course of the university and was no longer a high school infant. It was ever so much better because she and Johnny could steal little walks and sundaes at the popular college hangouts during the day instead of having to wait until the haberdashery had closed its doors each evening. Football season arrived and Johnny went into rigid training, but he still managed to find time each evening to drop into the red brick house for a few minutes. To talk football with Judge Foster and to talk of other matters with Judge Foster’s daughter. His gridiron career that Fall was a series of triumphs. When the team ran onto the field John Mack Brown looked first toward a spot in the fifty-yardline boxes, where sat a girl with black hair and shining black eyes. Being named AllAmerican halfback at the end of the season did not mean half so much to a tall, young man with very broad shoulders and a wide grin as did the look in the black eyes of a young lady who lived in a red brick house. It was on a cool, crisp February night in Johnny’s junior year that Connie put on his fraternity pin and sealed the engagement which had delighted the romance-loving hearts of the entire university. Then the boy and the girl sat down and talked over their plans for the future, dreaming of the day when Johnny should be a football coach and they should have a little bungalow near some college campus. The following summer, instead of spending his days in the haberdashery shop or in his father’s shoe store in Dothan, Johnny became an insurance salesman. And made money. When people looked at that white-toothed grin and listened to the deep drawl of that Alabama voice, they just naturally signed on the dotted line. When September arrived Johnny went back into training for his last year of college football. There were no more long moonlight rides. All good footballers have • continued on page 27 t