Ponderous thoughts I was pondering ...

That's me on the left, charting a football game from the old Memorial Park press box.

Ponderous thoughts I was pondering while awaiting the promised downpours that may transform my yard from the consistency of your Shredded Wheat breakfast to something that's once again green and full of life ...

**As I drove past Memorial Park in Mansfield earlier today, I noticed something was missing.

Even from the distance between Park Street and the field where the Mansfield High football team had played from the 1930s until the opening of Alumni Field behind the high school in 2001, I could see that our old press box was gone.

I'm not sure when it was demolished, but it had to be fairly recently. Indeed, just a few weeks ago I drove past the old ballyard where I once played varsity baseball and noticed how badly the press box had fallen into disrepair.

That's not the first time that had happened, however.

When Memorial Park was first built as a Work Projects Administration development at the height of the Great Depression, several stone-and-mortar structures were constructed ringing the baseball diamond and football field to serve as locker rooms and restrooms. The largest structure was a giant bandstand behind the south end zone of the football gridiron -- and all of these structures remain in place today, nearly 90 years after the park's opening.

Permanent bleachers were not part of the original plan because the field was to be used for both football and baseball. The east sideline, which served as the home side, featured assembled (and frequently replaced) grandstands built of steel and wood, while during football season, temporary stands were erected in the midst of the baseball infield to serve visiting fans, and then disassembled at the close of the football season.

In the 1950s, the park added a large manually-operated scoreboard behind the north end zone, and a small wooden press box that was elevated behind the home stands. But by the time I reached high school in the fall of 1968, the manual scoreboard had long since been abandoned, and the old press box was torn down for being both unsafe and an eyesore.

The town's recreation department, which operated the field independently of the school department, sank some money into the field at about the same time. A new electronic scoreboard replaced the rotting structure in the north end zone, and a free-standing press box was built with a cinder-block foundation and three separate rooms to house the clock operator and public-address announcer, media members and home-team coaches. And it was all painted in spiffy Hornet green.

I remember feeling great pride that, as a fledgling sports reporter for the weekly Mansfield News, I would have a chance to view the field from a brand new perch once the 1969 football season began. I was actually hoping to be the public-address announcer as well -- yes, I had the voice for it even then -- but the athletic director gave that job to his son instead. That was my first introduction to nepotism.

But it didn't take long for my euphoria over having a new base of operations to be dashed.

A few weeks into the season, a group of burnout punks -- and we had a lot of those in Mansfield back in those days -- decided to take out their insecurities on the brand new press box. They absolutely trashed it -- kicking holes in all of the particle board and plywood walls, ripping out electrical connections, stomping holes in the floorboards, pouring out the contents of several beer cans everywhere, and the pièce de résistance -- several of these sub-human slugs went as far as to defecate repeatedly in all three of the rooms.

The only thing these louts couldn't damage was the cinder-block foundation.

It was feared at first that the new structure would have to be declared a total loss and then razed, but the town bit the bullet and rebuilt it. They even used sturdier building materials the second time around to serve as a deterrent to future vandalism by the punks that roamed the town under the cover of darkness. Increased police patrols in the vicinity of the park also helped.

Eventually, I got to use the new press box before completing my high school career and heading to college. It was later named for the former athletic director that gave his son the announcing job -- and in retrospect, I wouldn't have had the ability to handle it and to chart the game for my newspaper coverage anyway -- and it served the Hornet football team and the town's youth leagues for many years. Even after the high school team departed after the 2001 season to an artificial-turf facility behind the school itself, the press box continued to serve its purpose.

Decades ago, a holiday game at Memorial Park.

There have been times over the years when I wish the Hornets could still play at Memorial Park. Like Community Field in North Attleboro, it was a relic of a bygone era, but a majestic one. All those stone structures gave it the look of something out of antiquity, although none of them were very energy-efficient and not well-insulated against temperature extremes. I always thought that it could have been re-envisioned with artificial turf and new lighting and permanent stands.

But because it was under the auspices of the recreation department and not the school department, I suppose there always would have been conflicts over its use. Alumni Field is fully controlled by the school department, and while it has its flaws -- notably, an east-west alignment that creates harsh sun angles in early evening, and its piecemeal design dictated by surrounding wetlands -- it's not subject to inter-departmental conflict. Recently, the town underwrote the final pieces of a gradual expansion of grandstands that took more than 20 years to complete, and added a modern digital scoreboard, and the resulting stadium is as good as any in the area.

But I'll miss that old green press box at Memorial Park. It was my first "home" as a journalist. More proof, indeed, that you can never go home again.

** Sad news to report, amid the nostalgia that has characterized this column so far. I have just learned of the passing of William S. Bruno, 91, who was a well-known figure around Mansfield since his high school days, and the uncle of my close friend ("brother from another mother," as I call him), former classmate and current broadcast partner for Mansfield and King Philip basketball, Alex Salachi.

Willie Bruno, MHS Class of '52.

"Willie," as he was most popularly known, was a 1952 graduate of Mansfield High, where he played baseball and football at a high level and captained and quarterbacked the Hornet football team in 1951. He worked for a while at the clothing store in town that was owned by my father and his three brothers, but he also had the "writing bug," so he started to work as a part-time sportswriter for the Mansfield News in 1952.

He only did that gig for about a year before he was inducted into the U.S. Army in April 1953, but he made it a memorable one. Willie had a natural and engaging writing style and the experience of having been a legitimate athlete. His boss at the News, Dick Yager, said young Willie didn't have much of an idea what newspaper operations were like when he first started, but that he was a quick study and became ultra-productive in the role.

One of Willie's crowning achievements at the paper before he left was a multi-part series highlighting the accomplishments of some of Mansfield's greatest football teams of the more distant past. That underscored his respect for the town's history and the past accomplishments of talented athletes whose feats of glory might have been forgotten under the shifting sands of time.

"Now, wait," you may say. "How do you know all this? You weren't even born yet!" That is true, I entered this existence on Jan. 7, 1954, a year and a half after Willie graduated from MHS. I grew up knowing him primarily as Alex's genial and sports-minded uncle. But when I started working at the Mansfield News in 1969, I made it a point to research back editions (thanks to a sparkling new microfiche reader in the office) so I'd have an idea of what came before me -- and so I wouldn't fall into the trap of writing about mundane accomplishments as if they were the greatest thing that ever happened in our sleepy little hamlet. 

Still enjoying games in his 90s.

When I saw Willie's writing and realized that he also appreciated the context of history, it indicated to me that I may have been on the right path. And knowing that he did good work as a young man fresh out of high school, he inspired me to reach for a similar level of accomplishment, if just a little bit earlier in my life. Indeed, I consider him one of the major inspirations for what became my life-long career.

Willie went from the Army to Bridgewater State College and then entered a career in education. He became a teacher and then an administrator in several neighboring communities, and served for quite some time on the Mansfield School Committee and the town's School Building Committee. He eventually retired to the coastal town of Mattapoisett, where I could always contact him if, in my later career as the 500-pound sports gorilla at The Sun Chronicle in Attleboro, I needed to dig up some factoid of local sports history that eluded my own searches.

I offer my deepest condolences to my friend Alex, for whom Willie became more than just a mentor after he lost his own father during his college years, as well as to his wife Ann Marie, daughters Julie, Beth and Maria, sons Paul and David, and the entire extended Bruno family.

** I seem to be missing the point of the change in college sports these days. The specter of "Name, Image and Likeness" (NIL) benefits certainly has changed the game, and not necessarily for the better. 

Admittedly, college athletes have been taken advantage of for many years. Their performances, fueling the rise in popularity of their sports, raked in billions of dollars for their institutions without returning anything to the so-called amateur athletes that made it all happen. Now that's no longer an issue, but probably because we don't produce too many high-level Division 1 athletes in these parts, I haven't really taken the time to measure or grasp exactly how significant those benefits are.

Recently, however, I heard that a female basketball player from a nearby community was recently recruited to a middle-of-the-pack Division 1 school, and she was given $80,000 as well as a new Jeep in addition to her scholarship. And to be honest, I'm not sure the young lady in question is that impressive of a recruit.

We're all going to hell in a handbasket.

** OK, I gave in and went to see "Fantastic Four: First Steps" at the theater even though I never really had much interest in that Marvel franchise during its heyday. I bought a few FF comic books in the 1970s and only recently benefitted from the experience by reselling them for about $100. 

Kirby and Pascal: Bor-r-r-ring.

The best thing I can say about the movie? I won't have to see it again.

Sure, it was a novel idea to make it a period piece in a parallel universe, but that wore thin quickly. The increasingly overexposed Pedro Pascal (Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic) spent the whole movie either looking concerned, or brooding, or basically playing a wimpy second fiddle to Vanessa Kirby (Sue Richards/Invisible Woman). The Thing and Human Torch had their moments, and they turned the Silver Surfer into a hottie, but the little robot was a pain in the ass. And what did Natasha Lyonne’s character have to do with anything? Waste of a quirky talent.

To me, the movie was just one big gimmick. Both this one and DC's James Gunn-authored "Superman" have turned to the so-called Silver Age of comics for inspiration, when stories were far too exaggerated to be even remotely believable. I'll give props to MarvelStudios for creating an alternate universe in which the kitsch of the 1960s was merged with elements of science fiction that the FF's presence might have influenced, but having grown up in the '60s, I found it too unreal to be relatable.

But hot damn, that product placement! Too bad they don't serve Canada Dry in the Showcase Cinema's drink dispensers. Or maybe they do. I was too pissed off to look when my Cherry Coke Zero button malfunctioned halfway through my cup and I had to complete the choice with Pibb Xtra. Ugh.

All in all, I have yet to see any reason to believe that the FF will be any better as a lasting film franchise this time around, although the desperation move of turning Robert Downey Jr. into Dr. Doom will draw some suckers into the next movie. 

I understand John Malkovich’s scenes were cut from this, and my guess he won't be terribly upset as long as the check clears.

**OK, time to shuffle off. I've got a very important missive in the works for next week, so keep an eye out for that. In the meantime, let's get those Epstein Files out there once and for all!

MARK FARINELLA wrote for 42 years for The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro, Mass. Feel free to contact him at theownersbox2020@gmail.com.