Larry Tucker

Football season is well into the season and homecoming queens, senior night and band sweethearts are on the horizon. With those things in mind, my thoughts wander to classic rivalries between schools in their competitions. Mineola and Quitman have always been rivals on the sports field. For the next two years, there will be no Mineola vs. Quitman football game. I have also watched some pretty good grudge matches in football and other sports between Quitman and Grand Saline; Mineola and Winnsboro along with some classic Quitman vs. Hawkins battles in the 1980s.

I grew up in Dallas, the Pleasant Grove community in fact. I went to Samuell High School and our rivals were the Bryan Adams Cougars and Spruce Apaches (now the Timberwolves). It seems like we were the rivals for a lot of other schools because of our Grove Rat pedigree. The Grove Rats were a legendary neighborhood gang which grew into an urban legend still talked about today.

People just love to beat those people from “The Grove.” We grew up proud of that Grove Rat tag and wore it as a badge of honor although most of us had not a clue about the original “Rats.”

Growing up in Dallas and watching the Cowboys, the first real hated rival was the Green Bay Packers of the Ice bowl era. After that, it became the Washington Redskins and Philadelphia Eagles. In the college ranks it’s hard to beat Texas and Oklahoma especially since the Longhorns and Aggies don’t compete in football anymore.

I grew up going to Nathaniel Hawthorne and was proud to wear the black and gold of the Hornets. Our big rival was the Ireland Wolves. From there, I went to Fred F. Florence where I became a Gladiator and we had some small wars in football, basketball and baseball against the pesky Hood Rebels. Those events were important to me because my family had moved and nearly all my friends went to Hood. It was strange going against my old teammates and tough because they usually won. I was fortunate that my best friend Michael Don Smith had moved and went with me to Florence.

In high school, the big rival became Bryan Adams (B.A.), although Spruce High School was in the Grove and was becoming a bitter opponent. At Samuell, we had the “Big” Dairy Queen (on Buckner), the “Little” DQ (at Prairie Creek and Bruton) and the Pizza Inn on Buckner to hang out, congregate and listen to Otis Redding on the juke box. Spruce had Griff’s Burgers and we rarely went to their territory. Off the field, we sometimes “ran into” the Bryan Adams folks at the Buckner Drive-In on Saturday nights or White Rock Lake while cruising on Sunday afternoons.

It was always a lot of fun if you got the opportunity to date a young lady from a rival school. I dated a Spruce girl my sophomore year and a B.A. young lady my junior year. My senior year, I found the new sophomore group of Samuell/Grove girls to be very enticing so I stayed closer to home.

If you talk to folks around Mineola and Quitman, someone always has a good story about when they beat the other.

My Tucker grandparents, George and Artie, lived just outside of Mineola near Youth Foundation Park on Martin Bridge road while my Stedry clan (Fred and Mary) had a farm seven miles from Mineola and seven miles from Quitman on that same road.

When my Dad was in high school the Tucker family lived one of the many farms they would work. My dad, Clent, and my Uncle Glenn were “recruited” by Mineola for football and Quitman for basketball. The Tucker brothers chose Quitman when they were furnished with an old Model T for transportation.

I saw the rivalry over the years through my cousins, the Tucker kids (Betty, Joyce, Sandra, Bobby and Anita) and the Blackmon girls (Linda, Brenda and Lainey). After I moved to the area in 1981 I got involved with my Dad coaching my son’s summer baseball teams. It was there, I saw the Mineola-Quitman rivalry close up.

In those summers, many times we would with teams from Mineola and Grand Saline for baseball . In those days I discovered folks that became good friends over the years like Bobby Dan Speights, Bob and Donna Curtis, Kenneth and Dolores Slaton, James and Sarah Dowdle, George and Brenda Melvin, David and Jeannette Castleberry, and from Grand Saline Joyce and Larry Hathcock.

Through those many summers and long nights at the ball parks and the playoff runs, I sure made some good friends I will always cherish, even if they are from Mineola and Grand Saline.