OF DELOREANS, SPATULAS AND MAPLE TREES

By STEVE KING

As you’ve read here any number of times, we’ve billed Browns Daily Dose, right from the very start a little over five years ago, as a place where you, our treasured readers, are going to find interesting and thought-provoking articles about the Browns that you’re not going to see anywhere else.

That is definitely the case with this piece.

I’ve written on several occasions about my dad and, with his love of sports, how he and that helped me become a sports writer.

But it takes an entire household to raise a kid, and as such, my mom deserves a lot of credit for that effort, too.

My mom would have turned 106 on Thursday. She was born 106 years ago, on Nov. 5, 1914, as the third of 11 children, on a farm located halfway between the tiny burgs of Sistersville and Middlebourne, W. Va., not far from the Ohio River.

First, though, here’s a quick interesting fact about Nov. 5. In the movie, “Back to the Future,” that is the date in 1955 to which Marty McFly gets transported as he goes back in time. You can see it right there in bright red letters and numbers on the dashboard of the souped-up, enhanced, reconfigured DeLorean in which he was traveling. Exactly two weeks later, I was born. With my mom being 41, an incredibly old age to give birth 65 years ago, both she and I darned near died in the process.

Anyway, my mom knew next to nothing about sports, nor did she care to learn. The only thing she knew about sports was that she was living in a house with two males who cared passionately about them. So instead of bucking the trend and trying to cause a fuss about it and create disharmony in our home in suburban Akron, she was her usual selfless self, going with the flow and doing all she could to encourage my pursuit of covering all these silly games, players and coaches, including letting me, as an eight-year-old, barrow the spatula from her gadget drawer in the kitchen and use it as a makeshift microphone with which to announce make-believe Browns and Indians games under the big maple tree in the back yard.

Thanks, Mom. Unfortunately, I never told you that then, but I am now. Better late than never, though, huh?

And also Happy Birthday! Tell Dad I said hi.