Marty Urand - Not Recommended for College

Not Recommended
for College

Marty Urand

Copyright 2015 by Marty Urand

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011906176

ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4628-6013-5

Softcover 978-1-4628-6012-8

eBook 978-1-4628-6014-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 04/09/2015

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Contents

Quarter One
Growing Up in the city
1943-1961

Quarter Two
College & Basketball
1962-1966

1961-1962
The Freshman Year

1962-1963
The Sophomore Year

1963-64
The Junior Year

Back to Kansas City:
Will it be back-To-back?

1964-1965
The Senior Year

Third Quarter
My Career
1965-2004

The Staff was Great,
but the Job was Difficult!

The Fourth Quarter
Retirement
2004 - ?

Not Recommended for College

The words on the following pages represent the dash between the two dates seen on most grave monuments at cemeteries. The story is a factual chronological order of events that God only knows why they occurred within Martys life!

The story begins in the city of New York (Rochester Avenue, Brooklyn) and will end in Texas, hopefully in no less than twenty five years (2035). Since basketball was the ticket for traveling from New York to Texas, the story is told in quarters, like a basketball game.

It is a story of a kid who finds out that there is a fine line between a leader and someone who is being chased!

A leader on the streets as well in sports, organizations, and schools, but who was chased all the way to Texas because of education! His lack of education and loss of his four year old brother left him down, but not out. It took caring people to end that chase and hardship by giving him their compassion, love, and most of all high expectations for achieving a better life.

Those who reached out to him through their careers such as school custodians, a singer, N.Y. Police Department (P.A.L.), a college professor, and coaches, blessed him! But best of all, it was a fictitious coach who filled his head as he tried to learn how to read through a non-traditional method.

Marty was able to build a life based on a fictional coach within the Chip Hilton Series. Not only did this series teach Marty the basics of reading, but this series inspired him to enter coaching as a lifelong profession.

Not Recommended for College was an outcome, based on a set of beliefs that a school system with counselors lacking high expectations for their students can often contribute to their students lack of success.

Martys life took many twists and turns. The Not Recommended for College stamp which appeared on his high school transcript haunted him for many years. He was determined to overcome that repelling message and prove not only should he be recommended for college, but he would spend decades teaching and inspiring other students to rise above their labels and put forth the effort to achieve greatness.

Circumstances dont make you, they reveal you!

Chuck Pagano, Colts Head Coach

QUARTER ONE

Growing Up in the city
1943-1961

Back in the day, the best place to play basketball, or even to learn to play basketball, was in the city of New York. The Knicks had been in New York long before I came into play in 1943, on Rochester Avenue in Brooklyn. My first venue was in our apartment across the street from Tilden High School, where my mother had attended school for two years before going to work for the rest of her life.

Evelyn and Jack Urand ( 1942)

My Dad was in Panama representing our country in the U.S. Army, but The City was too much for him to leave behind. He was discharged because of a busted eardrum, and he returned to New York when I was two years old, living with my mother in East Brooklyn.

I learned many of my eastside traits from my dad, one of which was to fight and scrap for whatever I wanted ... even when I was fighting for things that did not belong to me! My first real physical fight occurred in pre-school as I pushed my way to the front of a block-built truck that several of us had constructed together. I knew there was only one place on this truck for a driver, and I decided that no matter what, the driver would be me. All it took was a push here and a shove there before I would end up getting my way. I enjoyed these fast and easy lessons, and the easiest lesson for me to learn was to fight for what I wanted.

In life you are either a passenger or a pilot, it is your choice.

Author unknown

To me, being a leader meant always being the driver every day!

I already knew that attending school and studying was going to hamper my style. Again, like my dad, I liked living on the edge. Even at a young age, it was fun getting away with things that even I knew were wrong!

For example, when I was five or six years old living on Rochester Avenue in a fifth floor apartment with no air conditioning, during the hot city summers I raced downstairs when I saw the iceman coming down the street on a horse drawn wagon filled with blocks of ice. He sold either full blocks or half blocks of ice and even carried them to his customers apartments. The icemans customers leaned out of their apartment windows, yelling down to him with their ice orders as he pulled the wagon into the curb to keep it from rolling. Then, using his large steel calipers with two extremely sharp pointed claws, he dug into the ice and grabbed an ice block. To keep the ice from melting, he covered the ice blocks with large sheets of rawhide while he delivered the ice blocks to his customers. He could carry several heavy five or ten-cent blocks that rested on a small piece of rawhide lying over his shoulder.

Once the ice was securely on the icemans shoulder, he entered our apartment building and delivered the ice to his customers. While he was delivering his blocks of ice, I scrambled down the five flights of stairs, grabbed a half block of ice from his wagon, and with my block of ice I quickly scrambled back up those five flights of stairs, and ran back into our apartment. I usually heard a mixture of yells from those who saw me, Hey kid, youre going to hell, or That a boy, hold it tight! I never knew how people would react; it was always such a mixed bag on each adventure.

When I finally made it into our apartment, I placed the ice on a large metal pan and set a small fan facing the ice away from the window so the cold air would not escape. Then I got my mom, led her into the kitchen, and sat her down in front of the cold iced air. She must have loved it because she never once asked where this ice came from or how I paid for it.

I loved standing behind her, with my arms around her neck and my cheek next to hers as we enjoyed the magnificent cool breeze together.

I would have to say that the ice stint was one of many wrong doings that occurred during my youth. The excitement was a great thrill for me! I remember my friends always telling stories of how they did this and that, but they were always group things. I took great pride in accomplishing this ice caper by myself, and I never shared this achievement with others. Keeping this to myself made it special. I had a satisfied smugness, a self-dignity in knowing what I had done. I felt more grown up because I did something I thought was great, and I was able to keep it special and secret from the others.