What is your inspirational story...?

[Curt]

Good Afternoon,

 

I read lots of good things through these forums and enjoy the stories but I'd like to know more of your background stories. What influences your love of football? What influences your love and involvement with electric football? My dad just loved football. [I'm guessing because grandpa did. My grandpa was a drum major at Ohio State which is where dad went] When we lived in Atlanta in 1970, dad took my brother to see his favorite team, the Minnesota Vikings play the Falcons. When we moved to upstate New York in 1972, he took me to see my favorite San Francisco 49ers play the Buffalo Bills, way kewl. 🙂 We had a tradition so to speak where after church, we would stop by the cider mill for fresh cider and cake donuts. Then when we got home, we put a fire in the fireplace and watched football on TV. Shortly after having moved to New York, my dad transferred to Dallas where his boss had season tickets to the Cowboy games and sometimes let our family use them. My favorite game, probably of all time, was Thanksgiving 1973 (?). He, his boss, my brother, and I were absolutely freezing in spite of jackets, blankets, and hot cocoa but once the Cowboys started to rally against Washington and the game got real exciting all the way through to a victory for the Cowboys, the cold just disappeared. Yeah baby, I was there! Ok, I think that covers real football. Now let's talk about Electric Football. 🙂

 

In Atlanta, a friend of mine had an electric football set with Detroit and Miami which I enjoyed playing. My dad got my brother and me a set when we moved to New York. We ordered a few teams, painting them ourselves and started our own "league" with the Vikings, Falcons, Lions, 49ers, Steelers, Raiders, Broncos, and Eagles. My brother eventually started to drift away from it but I always enjoyed it. In time, the boards got bigger and I gradually added more teams until I had reached 24 teams in 2000. My brother visited in 2004 from Seattle. He got so excited that I had so many teams, he ordered me 8 white sets to paint and finish out the current NFL league teams. My nephew and his mother moved in next to my wife and me in 2003. Also in 2004, he showed me how adding the Houston Oilers to make a total of 33 teams would solve a few scheduling issues I wanted to clean up. By the time everything was painted and set up in 2005, my current solitaire league was in action. My nephew and I play together when we can. We set it up to remove as much control as possible so his favorite Seattle Seahawks don't always win and shotgun offenses don't always get met with blitz defenses etc. I think you get the idea. It is meant to make it seem like the teams really do play each other. COVID-19 delayed our schedule a little bit but we look forward to catching up asap. 

 

I hope you enjoyed this and that I didn't ramble on too long. I look forward to hearing more tales of your influences. Have a blessed day.

[Capanther]

I grew up in small town America ...there were about 8 or 10 boys my age in about a 4  block area and we all had electric football games...some had the big super bowl 3 and some had the big grass endzone browns Giants and some had the little colts Packers game.....most had 8 or 10 Tudor teams....we were always playing football and basketball outside but on rainy days we played electric football....it was just the era we grew up in and electric football was the game of choice for so many of us.....I used to get a few teams in the little brown box from Tudor on Christmas and my birthday every year.....good memories.

[NO Dave]

I grew up in a suburb of New Orleans, LA. In the fall of '80, My friend showed me a Model 660 with the Cowboys and Steelers. It had been his older brother's, and was quite beaten up. Nonetheless, I found the game loud, but fascinated. I was a young artist, so it wasn't so much about the game, but the figures and the colors. Oh, and the fact that the pieces would move! 

So I would say it was my interest in Electric Football that got me into understanding real football. In Christmas of '80, Santa brought me a 660 of my own with the Steelers and Rams. I collected all 28 of the teams and made my own Solitaire League.  In '83, I had a neighborhood league for the few days it was too cold or rainy to play outside during the winter in South Louisiana. We never actually decided a champion, we just played against each other for bragging rights. Our neighborhood league had the Saints, Rams, Steelers, Redskins, Cowboys, and Oilers. 

Game play continued off and on for the next year, and I had also dug out my Dad's old Gotham G-880 from the attic as well. I am still fascinated by that game, but that's a post for some other time. Because my world of interests was about to change again....

For Christmas of 1984, Santa brought me an Apple IIe computer with a color monitor, and I was hooked. The board games were packed away, and my love affair with computers began. High school became a challenging time and there wasn't a lot of time for games between school, working, and well, being a teenager in New Orleans. In 1990, I left for the Army after high school, and my mother dutifully packed it all away until I came home.  When I returned home from Active Duty in 1996, I gave all that stuff to a thrift store (MISTAKE!!). 

So, in June of 2000, I receive this huge box from my friend, and he's laughing hysterically as he tells me "Dude, open it."  So, I do. Lo and behold, it's a Miggle Super Bowl Board with the Rams and Titans! I tell him, "Joke's on you, I had one of these, now let's play!" Inside that box was a copy of the newsletter that Miggle Toys published. This was before Electric Football had hit the Internet, and the community kept in touch by way of a quarterly newsletter. Sure enough, I read about a gentleman from Harvey, LA (across the river from me) who had just won the National Electric Football Tournament. His email address was in the article, so I contacted him. 

The next day, I get a reply back, and he invites me to meet the rest of the fellas in Baton Rouge at one of their game days. Later that year, I joined the New Orleans Electric Football League. We had eight members, six from New Orleans and two from Baton Rouge. Hurricane Katrina knocked out our league, and I helped start the Jefferson-Orleans League in 2006. That league ran until 2018. 

In that time, I have had the great pleasure of meeting some amazing people because of this hobby, and I have participated or officiated in several of the national conventions from 2004 until 2017.