Read from "Creighton Years" in Searching for My Destiny by George Blue Spruce Jr. as told to Deanne Durrett:

"Many years before my high school graduation and the Elks banquet, my parents had vowed that their children would go to college. They acted on faith that there would be a way for me to achieve a college degree and began making definite plans for my education during my junior year of high school. Knowing of my strong desire to become a dentist, the Christian Brothers at St. Michael’s spoke to my parents and recommended Creighton University, a Roman Catholic university with a dental school. In the Brothers’ opinion, there were no better educators than the Jesuit priests. Daddy had great respect for the Christian Brothers, and once they had made their recommendation no other colleges were considered. I was going to Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.

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Read the "Wheaties" entry from Football: An Encyclopedia of Popular Culture by Edward J. Rielly:

"Wheaties, the Breakfast of Champions, was created by accident in 1921 when a health clinician in Minneapolis happened to drop some wheat-bran gruel on a stove. The heat converted the gruel into wheat flakes that, the clinician noted, tasted quite good. The head miller at Washburn Crosby Company (later General Mills) agreed, and a new cereal was born. Initially called Washburn’s Gold Medal Whole Wheat Flakes, when the cereal was ready to be marketed in 1924 it was renamed Wheaties so that the food itself rather than its name would be the mouthful.

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Read from "At Last: Nebraska 24-Miami 17-January 1, 1995" in Forever Red: Confessions of a Cornhusker Football Fan by Steve Smith:

"But in a stirring string of events, Nebraska found itself at the Miami 15, and seconds later, Frazier put the ball in fullback Cory Schlesinger’s hands. No. 40 slipped past the line, leaped over a Hurricane at the 5, and remarkably, bounded into the end zone. Then Frazier fired a bullet to Eric Alford for 2 points, and the game was tied. At some point during all of this, I turned to Michael. He was looking at me, holding up four fingers. Then he asked: “Do you believe?”

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Read from Chapter 1, "Aboard the Glacier" in Ambassadors from Earth: Pioneering Explorations with Unmanned Spacecraft by Jay Gallentine:

"Larry Cahill sardined himself into the communication shack with James Van Allen, who had headphones popped over his ears. It was quite hot and late at night. Both were thankful that they could be near the top of the ship, because that was farthest from the blistering engine room.

“Well, I wonder if that could really be it,” Van Allen said to nobody in particular. There was this inexplicably goofy beep-beeping sound in the headset. Something didn’t add up here. He glanced around. On the assembled faces were looks of confusion, like something didn’t fit. Like a game of Clue—everybody knew it couldn’t be Colonel Mustard with the rope, but all the evidence said otherwise.

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Read from Dream of Reason byRosa Chacel, translated by Carol Maier:

"In the spring of 1932 about two years had passed since I returned from Europe. My absence had lasted almost as long as my entire life—when I left Buenos Aires I was only a few months old. Even so, even though that period was not clear in my mind, the idea that I had been here was always with me. The idea? Why not the memory? A memory is passed on, inherited, adopted. Yes, I always remembered having been here and always felt certain I would return. I knew I’d return to the city and the house where I’d been born, knew what the furniture was like in that house, and everything I did when I was very young—the trips and studies—was something I started so as to have it done with before I returned. Then once I was here, it was a question of recovering things, not of becoming acquainted with them.

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Read from the first chapter, "A Leap into the Prairie Sea" from Seldom Seen: A Journey into the Great Plains by Patrick Dobson:

"In the spring of 1994, it came time to swim.

For weeks, the smell of redemption floated through windows on sweet western winds. Without my noticing it, every breeze became laced with fragrances of mown hay, cow dung, and dew on willows; perfumes of grass and rain and plowed ground. The ocean-like expanses of prairie promised baptism—a transformed life. When I slept, thunder rumbled through dreams the color of maturing wheat. I only needed a push, however slight, to jump into the grassy sea. 

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Read from the first chapter, "Something Stirring on the Prairie" in Frantic Francis: How One Coach's Madness Changed Football byBrett Perkins:

"Because Francis Schmidt operated somewhere between oddness and madness, it has always been difficult to determine which stories about him are true and which are myths. Everything he did had a manic quality, making even the outlandish tales hard to dismiss. But the truth is fascinating enough. He worked eighteen hours a day, devoting most of his waking thought to football, and even a few hours of sleep failed to interrupt his passion. He kept a pad and pencil hanging from his bedpost so he could jot down ideas that came to him in the night. Besides coaching his own team during the football season, Schmidt attended as many football games as possible, whether they were at a university, a teachers’college, or an all-black high school. He filled notebooks with endless notes on what he saw, always looking for variations of plays or formations that might be new to him. There weren’t many. The diagramming—or creating—of football plays was his most famous obsession. Schmidt worked at creating plays the way a chain smokerworks a cigarette. Using Xs and Os to represent players and arrows and dashes to represent movement, Schmidt was a mad scientist seeking a cure for touchdown deficiency. His mind seemed unable to disengage from this pursuit, and he frustrated all who knew him by mentally disappearing during conversations, parties, and bridge games.There had to be a million possible plays, and Schmidt seemed determined to discover and document every one in a notebook, on a napkin, or on random scraps of paper. This prodigious output was always his blessing as well as his curse.

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Read from "The Bells of the Mountains" in Swords from the West by Harold Lamb, edited by Howard Andrew Jones:

"Rorik the Yngling tried to catch up with the bell. It was the only thing he could hear moving around him, but he couldn’t find it.

He had taken the wrong path; he was lost, and unless he worked his legs fast he was going to be late for the battle.

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Read from the new introduction to More Than Winning by Tom Osborne with John E. Roberts: "Following the 1983 football season I was approached by a publisher to write a book. I was asked to write about my life experiences, starting with my formative years on through coaching the Nebraska Cornhusker football team. Special emphasis was placed on my years as head coach at the university from 1973-83. Jack Roberts, who at that time was working with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in Kansas City, Missouri, agreed to help write the book. Jack and I had a series of interviews, … Continue reading Off the Shelf: More Than Winning by Tom Osborne

Read from "Helen and Frida" in Call Me Ahab: A Short Story Collection by Anne Finger:

"I’m lying on the couch downstairs in the tv room in the house where I grew up, a farmhouse with sloping floors in upstate New York. I’m nine years old. I’ve had surgery, and I’m home, my leg in a plaster cast. Everyone else is off at work or school. My mother re-covered this couch by hemming a piece of fabric that she bought from a bin at the Woolworth’s in Utica (“Bargains! Bargains! Bargains! Remnants Priced as Marked”) and laying it over the torn upholstery. Autumn leaves—carrot, jaundice, brick—drift sluggishly across a liver-brown background. I’m watching the Million Dollar Movie on our black-and-white television: today it’s Singin’ in the Rain. These movies always make me think of the world that my mother lived in before I was born, a world where women wore hats and gloves and had cinched-waist suits with padded shoulders as if they were in the army. My mother told me that in The Little Colonel Shirley Temple had pointed her finger and said, “As red as those roses over there,” and then the roses had turned red and everything in the movie was in color after that. I thought that was how it had been when I was born, everything in the world becoming both more vivid and more ordinary, and the black-and-white world, the world of magic and shadows, disappearing forever in my wake.

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