JACKSONVILLE - Driving around Springfield, sans-elegant urban neighborhood where I grew up, eyes saddened. Life there has gotten a lot tougher.
Businesses are shuttered. Houses crumbling. Tough kids walk streets with sneers. Cops troll. But you hear hope, with fragmented early signs of revitalizing, including move-backs from 'burbs by the more affluent.
My retro tour continues ...
Arlington, just across the Mathews Bridge, where Marcy and I were married, is also a ZIP code that has generously slid. Many fearsome signs. Like our old apartment building, where there is a guns-and-drugs look.
Then, it was back toward downtown, landing in Fairfield where I experienced second grade. Jewels are being mined there. It is today's locale of 75,000 seat Alltel Stadium, which in seven months hosts Super Bowl XXXIX.
Odds for such a happening, in my youth, were a schmillion-to-one.
Jacksonville, my home base from age 7 to 30, boasts a wealth of 2004 sparkle. A downtown chocked with high rises. A splurge of trendy areas, mostly east and south, now captivate. Always ... the wide, meandering, captivating St. Johns River.
A half hour east, beside the Atlantic Ocean, are Ponte Vedra and Sawgrass, home to two major sports tours, golf's PGA and tennis' ATP, a community that was mostly sand dunes - Lovers Lane, it was known - in my teens. Now loaded with homes from $400,000 to $4-million.
I'm eternally thankful to Jacksonville ... my ticket to a newspaper career truly flickered to life as an eighth-grader working summers at Durkee Field, a minor-league baseball park.
In the summer of '53, I was a 14-year-old usher and Hank Aaron played second base for the local Braves. He was 19, a .362 hitter and one season away from a career in the bigs that would vault him past Babe Ruth as history's home run champ.
I got to know media covering the Class A team, eventually begging a job opportunity. At 15, a $1-an-hour shot as a Times-Union gofer/trainee got my size-12 foot in a vital door. Loved it so, I went to work more than 400 consecutive days.
For generations, Jacksonville's runaway sports pride was two college football happenings - the Gator Bowl around New Year's and a well-fueled, spirited matchup every November between the Georgia Bulldogs and Florida Gators.
But nobody ever dreamed, nobody imagined, when talking full-time athletic Jacksonville entities, of anything higher than a Triple-A baseball franchise. Nothing loftier in pro football than feisty NFL knockoffs like the WFL and USFL.
With population - and, more vital, TV audience numbers - well below Florida metros of Miami/Fort Lauderdale, Tampa Bay and Orlando, it seemed this old Navy town could never aspire beyond the minors.
Then came a stunning break.
Jacksonville had generated enough '80s audacity to become a long-shot (most national analysts said no-shot) bidder for an NFL expansion team, but the city's fate appeared in the same also-ran bucket with fellow southern middleweights Memphis and Birmingham.
In 1993, with all the NFL world figuring St. Louis and Carolina as the anointees, there was a monstrous stroke of civic fortune for Duval County. St. Louis muffed it.
There was organizational breakdown among bidders from Missouri. Jacksonville was lurking, there to scoop up the fumble and run to glory. One new NFL franchise went to Charlotte, as expected, the other crash landed in Jacksonville and became the Jaguars.
Look at my old hometown now. In grappling for a Super Bowl, another enormous void had to be overcome. Jacksonville is well shy of the usual demand for hotel space but civic hustlers along with Jags owner Wayne Weaver sold NFL bosses on bringing in huge cruise ships to be moored along the St. Johns, providing thousands of XXXIX accommodations.
So here sits a town known originally as Cowford, with its own NFL team, plus enduring Gator Bowl and Florida-Georgia attractions ... now, a Super Bowl. Upset of the municipality century.
To enhance the Alltel Stadium venue, the Baseball Grounds is a gorgeous new 10,000-seat brick-faded facility for the Double-A Suns, a throwback in the style of Camden, Turner and other 20th century ballparks.
Also, next door, the decaying Coliseum has been flattened and 16,000-seat Veterans Memorial Arena offers a dandy facility comparable to the finest NHL and NBA palaces. All, along with Alltel, on the same chunk of Fairfield real estate where I played at age 7.
