Champions and friends

"We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead."
Martin Luther King, Jr. 1963

The year Martin Luther King made his "I have a Dream Speech" marked the first season Lionel Aldridge, Henry Jordan, Ron Kostelnik and Willie Davis anchored the defensive line for the Green Bay Packers.

The four men went on to play together for six more years and earned three consecutive world championships, including two Super Bowl titles. En route they formed a friendship that transcended both race and the playing field. Although three of the four died far too soon -- Henry at age 42, my Dad and 53 and Lionel at 58 -- their legacy stands as much for their athletic prowess as for their loyalty to each other. All four have been inducted into the Green Bay Packer Hall of Fame and two, Willie and Henry, are enshrined in Canton.
One day more than 25 years ago, my Dad picked me up from my college apartment and asked if I'd help him with a project.
"I need to find Lionel," he said.
Dad had heard a report that Lionel was homeless and living on the streets of Milwaukee. Though we spent that afternoon visiting Milwaukee homeless shelters looking for him, we did not find him that day. The shelters took my Dad's contact information, though, and a short time later my Dad reunited with his old friend.
From that day until his own death in 1993, my Dad kept close tabs on Lionel, a gifted speaker whose battles with schizophrenia have been well documented.
We last saw Willie Davis at the Packer Alumni Brunch earlier this year. The only surviving member of the line greeted us with a big smile and a hug.  
I think often about how fortunate these men were to play during the Glory Years, when they lined up against a backdrop of such tumultuous historical events but alongside the same fellows year after year. There are all kinds of ways to measure a team's success and, in the number of rings they wore and friendships they maintained, the 1960's Packers topped them all.

This Packer defensive line played together for six consecutive years.

Lionel Aldridge sat with my dad at my 1987 wedding.

Here is Willie Davis with my nephew Michael Kostelnik
at the Alumni Brunch earlier this season.

A happy holubki birthday tribute

In honor of my dad's joint birthday with my grandma, Molly and I made holubki. There are as many different ways to prepare these Russian cabbage rolls as there are proper ways to spell them, but we stuck to the Kostelnik family recipe, which means we winged it just a little.
My Grandma cooked stubbornly and without measurement, and when you entered her warm little house on 20 Row, you ate. Period.
We once drove 12 hours through the night to visit my grandparents. She was nearing 80 at the time so I told her not to cook for us. "Shhh," I said to my husband as we tiptoed into the house at 2 a.m.
"Hiya," my grandma said brightly from the stiff backed chair on which she had been crocheting and keeping vigil. "Sit down. Eat."
And we sat down to a full course meal of holubki, breaded veal, potato salad and apple cake. "Grandma, I thought you said you weren't going to cook," I said around a big mouthful of food.
"I didn't cook. I just heated up," she said.
As sweet as a crisp Polish dill, my grandma lived by strong principles based on family loyalty. Molly has fond memories of the time my Grandma pulled me through a grocery store in Ebensburg, Pennsylvania by my left ear lobe.
We just loved our trips to Pennsylvania and we use our kitchen for occasional trips back in time. What follows is our recipe for holubki, with love for Grandma Jay.

 Ingredients

1 head cabbage

1 1/2 pound ground chuck
salt and pepper to taste
1 cup rice (Not Minute Rice, Grandma was very specific about that)
2 cans Campbells Tomato Soup

 1) Call your Aunt Martha because she is the keeper of family history and she will help you through this. If you don't have an Aunt Martha, we will try to walk you through this crazy Ukrainian dish anyway.

 2) Scald the cabbage. This means you have to boil it in hot water until the leaves pull off easily. Aunt Martha warned me that this would take a couple of scaldings and, sure enough, we had to douse that head three times. We boiled the cabbage for 15 minutes to start off.

 3) Meanwhile, prepare your rice. Conveniently, we cooked our rice for 15 minutes, which worked out perfectly for us as that was exactly how long we boiled the cabbage. 

 4) Mix the rice with the raw hamburger and season it with salt and pepper.

5) Line your crock pot (here is the first time we went off script. Grandma did not own a crock pot. We love ours though and our holubki cooked all night and was tender and delicious the next day). Anyway, line the bottom of your crock pot with cabbage leaves.

 6) Peel off cabbage leaves. Place about a tablespoon of the meat mixture in the center of the cabbage leaf and roll the leaf up. Per Aunt Martha, which worked out splendidly, roll up the bottom first, fold in the sides and then roll the rest of the way.

7) Place cabbage roll in the crock pot.

 8) Continue creating the cabbage rolls until your crock pot is full. You can layer the rolls on top of each other.

9) Spoon tomato soup on top of the cabbage rolls and cover with extra cabbage leaves.

10) Cook on high until tomato soup boils, and then turn to low.  We cooked ours all night.

This is my Grandma and me cooking in her Pennsylvania kitchen.

Core the cabbage before you scald it.

You can let it cool before you peel off the leaves. We had to
scald it again as we got closer to the center.

Meanwhile, add your cooked rice to your raw hamburger and season.

Place the meat mixture in the cabbage leaf and roll tightly.

Add tomato soup to the top of the cabbage rolls.

Cover with extra cabbage leaves add the crock pot top.

Yum!

Love on the beach

We enjoyed a sweet convergence this weekend when Vince's recently engaged sister and her fiancé invited us to Florida to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary.  

Chip proposed to Elaine on a Florida beach at sunrise on New Year's Day, and the twin toasts of that new love and our anniversary made the entire weekend extra warm and lovely.
In keeping with the weekend's theme, I spent some time on the beach whipping up shower invitations for another extra special wedding, my sister Kathy's. Kathy and her fiancé Keith will be married on a Florida beach in June.
As it turns out, my artistic eye was bigger than my sand art talents and I had to be rescued from the project by yet another celebratory couple, my college roommate Trish and her husband Tim, who married the week before we did and flew south with us to mark the occasion.
Let's pause a moment to review the players: Silver anniversary couples (2), recently engaged couples (2), big fat Florida full moon (1).
We clinked our glasses to all of the above on many, many occasions throughout the trip and I am happy to report I returned home with a warm heart, a few more freckles and, with the help of my friend, a shower invitation for my sister Kathy. Whew!

Here we are celebrating with the happy couple who got engaged
at sunrise on New Year's Day. The ring is as beautiful as the bride.

I had this great idea to write a heart in the
sand for my sister's shower invitation. On my
way home from church, I stopped along the beach
and went to work. Mostly, I was concentrating on
keeping shadows and beach walkers out of the picture.

But when I reviewed the pictures, I realized I
had drawn the heart upside down. How embarassing!

So, my friend Trish, an artist, went to work and her husband,
a construction engineer, jumped in to help.

They spent a lot of time on this project while I sipped iced
tea and snapped photos.

To get the best picture, Trish wanted to shoot above the heart,
so she climbed up and angled the lense. Such a good friend.

Voila! A perfect shot for our invitation.

Playoff or Porcelain Bowl, ask Coach Lombardi

Apparently, Vince Lombardi was as nauseous as my mother when the Packers played the Browns on January 5, 1964.

They had all gathered in Miami for the Playoff Bowl, a game so anticlimactic Mr. Lombardi referred to it as a "hinky-dink football game, held in a hinky-dink town, played by hinky-dink players."
Coach Lombardi expressed his disgust for the bowl, which pitted the two second place teams against each other and took place one week after the NFL title game, to anyone within earshot, a considerably wide range for the vocal Italian. My mother, meanwhile, was pregnant...with me.
We found my dad's handwritten notes recently, and they piqued our interest in one of sports history's oddest bowls. Deemed an exhibition game, the Playoff Bowl did not count toward any statistics. Even though Bart Starr completed 15 of 18 passes for three touchdowns and 259 yards, including a record-setting 99-yard touchdown pass, none of those numbers factored in his career numbers.  
Other records set that day but not counted included:

• Most points scored in game- by the Packers (40) and both teams (63).

• Most yards gained rushing- by Green Bay (231)

• Most total yards gained- by both Green Bay (490) and Cleveland (418).

The Playoff bowl lasted a decade from 19961 through 1970, a remarkable run for a game hardly anyone wanted to play.

The 1963 Packers won the 1964 Playoff Bowl, a game
their coach called the toilet (or something less appropriate) bowl.

We found these notes and started wondering
why the team would be preparing to play a
football game after the NFL championship
game already had been played.

They took notes on scratch paper back in the day.

Pretty thorough preparation for a game no one wanted to play.

lay.

Our friend Trina gave us hope

The last ornament hiding on a lower branch of our Christmas tree had the biggest story to tell and made the melancholy task of its removal all the more so.
Our friend Trina gave us our "hope" ornament and I spotted it stubbornly clinging to the tree well after I thought I had taken down all of the ornaments. I even chuckled a little because it was so appropriate that my Trina ornament would outlast all the rest.
Trina, who rose to the challenge of a stage four breast cancer diagnosis with tremendous grace and strength, died on October 2 this year. The terrible irony of Trina's death is that the cancer did not kill her. She wouldn't let it.
Handed a death sentence, Trina fought back. She travelled back and forth across the country for weekly treatments at MD Anderson in Houston, Texas. She took advantage of holistic techniques and made dramatic changes to her eating habits. And when the breast cancer invaded her brain, she battled that back too.
During this extraordinarily difficult period in her life, Trina became a local celebrity. She launched the Trina Fund to help women defray the cost of cancer treatments. She organized her hundreds of followers into a group called Trina's Warriors and urged them to pray for other cancer victims. She chatted companionably with all kinds of people, both in person and via the Internet.
Trina triumphed over her cancer and, for a short while, she enjoyed a relatively carefree life again. Little by little, though, death launched a second front and Trina began to slur her words and have trouble with her balance. Necrosis of the brain stem, a chance reaction to radiation, did what the cancer could not. Eventually, it killed her.
Sometimes we have to plow through a tremendous mound of sorrow to uncover hope. Thanks to Trina, I think I found it on my Christmas tree.
I hope we'll all continue to support cancer research so heartbreaking battles like Trina's will not be in vain. I hope we all find a tiny measure of the fierce determination to live Trina displayed, and that we use it to appreciate our own opportunities here on earth. And, finally, I hope we can keep our minds open to the possibilities that transcend us.
Because as I yanked the last string of lights off our tree this year, and I am happy to report that Molly witnessed this small miracle, I found one last ornament. The engraved silver star read "Believe."

It was tucked away so we could barely see it,
but eventually we found the hope.

In the middle of her battle with cancer, Trina, left, and her
daughter Hillary, right, came to see Katherine in Madison .

Trina fought her cancer with a sassy attitude and a twinkle in her eyes.

Trina was a beautiful woman who raised two beautiful children.
Below is her daughter Hillary's video. Hillary was born a gifted
musician and her journey with her mother has given her music
extra poignancy, depth and beauty. Enjoy.

*For more information about the Trina Fund, see this page:

http://www.womensfundfvr.org/html/grants.php#Trina

Spontaneously we took the plunge

One New Year's morning eight years ago, I woke up and decided I wanted to take the Polar Plunge.

My then 14-year old daughter Katherine offered to join me, which both surprised me and committed me to the event. The temperatures hovered around 0 as we rooted through the house for appropriate gear. Hampering our search was our clear realization that we had no idea what constituted appropriate gear for jumping into a frozen lake. We thought shoes might be a good idea.
Molly, then aged five, and Vinnie, aged 11, volunteered to be our wingmen and an extremely skeptical Vince agreed to be our driver.
If Katherine had second thoughts as we fought our way through the festive crowd to the opening someone had thoughtfully chopped into the thick ice, she did not say. As it was my idea, I plastered a giant grin on my face and pretended not to be scared. This façade came in handy when I heard my name called out over the din.
A colleague waved cheerfully from the pier. Until that moment it had not occurred to me that anyone I knew would see me flailing though the icy water in my swim suit.
Worse, I spied photographers.
Adrenalin propelled us forward and we ran into the water. Not too bad, I thought, and I stupidly dove under. For just a moment there under the water, safely hidden from the paparazzi, I thought I was going to die. My brain stopped communicating with the rest of my body and my limbs would not move. I might have stayed lodged there until spring had not my maternal instincts finally kick in. "Must. Save. Katherine," I thought as I struggled to my feet. This is how I remember it anyway.
Photographs of the event tell another story, one far less heroic. The truth is my skinny 14-year old daughter dragged me out of the icy water that day and into the blessed arms of little Vinnie, who stood at the edge of the water with a big blanket for us.
I have not once since that morning awoken with an urge to jump into icy water, but I don't regret our plunge. It taught me two valuable life lessons:
1) That skinny 14-year old is stronger than she looks
2) It's not the size of the wingmen that matters, it's the size of their heart (and the blanket they hold).

Here's our before shot. We weren't sure we would survive.

Photographic evidence of Katherine yanking me out of
the water. She is being helped by then Appleton Post-Crescent
City Editor Bernie Peterson, who sent me this photo.

That's Molly in the front wearing my coat.
We were thrilled to see them on the shore
as we emerged.

This is a hilarious shot of us being interviewed following the big plunge.

Note the gentleman walking on the ice behind us.

The NFL career that nearly wasn't

Just 20 years old when the Packers offered him a contract in 1960, my dad needed a parental signature to launch his NFL career. That took some convincing.
My grandma, Julie Kostelnik, worried her young son would get hurt and she initially refused to sign.
As Phil Bengston, reporters, Dad and his college girlfriend Peggy Fey all crowded into my grandparents' small living room, my grandfather, a coal miner named Mickey Kostelnik, chuckled.
"Hey," he said. "Why don't you interview a man who works for a living?"
Eventually, Grandma relented and signed the contract that paid my dad, a second round draft pick, $8,750 for the season. He used the $750 signing bonus he received to buy an engagement ring, setting up a memorable weekend the following June in which he and my mother hosted a rehearsal dinner on a Thursday night, graduated from the University of Cincinnati on Friday and  married on Saturday. Less than a week later, following a send-off brunch at which all of my mother's relatives cried because no one had ever heard of Green Bay Wisconsin, the young couple packed up and drove away.
My dad went on to play nine years in the NFL, earning five NFL championships including two Super Bowl titles.
The irony of that success is that no one saw it coming. My dad didn't play football at all until high school and his college career developed only by chance. The UC coaching staff spotted him in game film they were reviewing of Ed Denk, an offensive lineman from a neighboring high school. The Bearcats ended up signing both Ed and my dad, once they'd tracked him down.
Ed actually had to convince my dad to accept the scholarship and the two prep opponents became carpool buddies and, eventually, lifelong friends.
And, as thrilled as she was when my dad graduated from college thanks to the scholarship he earned on the football field, my grandma never did warm to the game.

It took some convincing for her to sign it,
and then my Grandma kept the contract for more
than 40 years before she eventually gave it to me.
Of all the signature's on this document, including Pete
Rozelle, Phil Bengston and Vince Lombardi, Julie
Kostelnik's turned out to be the most coveted that day.

Back then everyone received essentially the same
one-page, two-sided contract with hand written amounts.
The only addendum on my dad's contract was this paragraph
regarding his bonus.

Baba and Pap, shown here in their living room in 1989, were not
very impressed by their NFL visitors back in 1960.

He had to convince his mom to let him play.