Harold "Red" Grange, Forksville, Sullivan County

March came in rainy and chilly, which I don't especially like. It's going to be an extremely busy month for me, for multiple reasons, although the panic has not quite set in. Not yet. Probably next week, when it hits me that Zenkaikon is coming up fast and I need to be ready to present. Did you ever hear that advice about how, if you get nervous when public speaking, you should picture audience members in weird costumes? At Zenkaikon I don't have to picture anyone, because half the audience is in costume. I don't get very nervous anyway, but the costumes make it a little easier to relax.

But before I head to Lancaster and prattle about historic buildings and Japanese cherry blossoms and samurai visiting the White House (yes, those are my topics this year), we'll take a run up to lovely Sullivan County and talk about a guy who played football. That is, of course, putting it mildly.

Walter B. Tewksbury, Tunkhannock, Wyoming County

I want to open this week's quest log with a huge thank you, because once again, the blog has broken its record! In June I had more than 14,000 views, according to Blogger's metrics, and that was the all-time high. But as of this writing, I'm just shy of 17,000, which has me absolutely gobsmacked. So thank you to everyone who has liked and shared and commented on my posts over the years, because every little bit of interaction goes a long way!

Speaking of interaction, I've never used Instagram in my life. I don't entirely understand it, to be honest. But after speaking with one of my much-younger coworkers who has a better grasp of such things, she's helped me to see that it could be beneficial for the blog to have an Insta account and, thereby, an Insta following. So I've downloaded the app onto my phone (baby steps) and will be taking a few days to give myself a learning curve, and the plan is to debut the official MQ Instagram with the first August post. 

The trick, as always, is to pretend I know what I'm doing. 

Meanwhile, today we're going to make our first visit to scenic Wyoming County, where Kevin and I spent a little time during last week's trip. Shout out to the delightful Tioga Bistro in Tunkhannock, where we stopped for lunch - best grilled cheese sandwich I ever had that wasn't made by my mother. We also stopped on the grounds of the high school, to collect the marker for someone who didn't have to pretend he knew what he was doing. Well, maybe he did, I can't say for sure. But it got him all the way to some Olympic medals, so whether or not he faked it, he certainly made it.

Lehigh-Lafayette Football Game, Bethlehem and Easton, Northampton County

The weather this week has been really hard on me. I've been taking pain medicine at night in order to be able to sleep. Between the excessive heat warnings, the (sometimes fulfilled) threat of thunderstorms, and the rising humidity pushing the barometer down, I haven't been exactly well. My longtime readers know that I'm very much at the mercy of the weather for a lot of things, and it's hard to be awesome when you don't want to move. But I'm doing my best here.

Being subject to the weather isn't helping with another problem - I'm running low on stockpiled markers, as I've mentioned. I'll be fixing that a bit in the coming weeks; I have a planned day trip to Schuylkill County near the end of July to collect markers with a college friend, and a few other possibilities up my sleeve. I have some plans for posts on the other blog as well, such as next month when some of my friends and I go to Dorney Park in Allentown and celebrate the 100th birthday of the roller coaster Thunderhawk.

All of that is to tell you why this week's post is about a football game. I just collected the second of the two relevant markers during a trip to Bethlehem with best friend Andrea last week; we were a little bored, the weather was decent, and we decided to grab a few markers in the nearby city and follow up with ice cream at the historic Bethlehem Dairy Store, familiarly known as "the Cup." I'd heard of it but never been, and I definitely recommend it to anyone who finds themselves in the vicinity of Lehigh University. A proper marker hunt always involves ice cream, you know, it's a rule.

Veterans Stadium, Philadelphia, Philadelphia County

Here we are, the final blog post of 2022! Well, almost - next week I'll be sharing my annual wrap-up post, where I talk about the statistics of the blog and the new friends I've made and what I've got in mind as I head into the next year. I will then be radio silent, apart from occasional posts on Facebook, for the month of December. (Why? Because as my longtime readers know, my day job is retail. That pretty much says it all.) In 2023, I'll be heading into my fifth year of this blog, which kind of astounds me.

We're going to close out the active blogging year with a visit to a place that has been gone for many years. Unlike many of the buildings I've profiled on this blog, however, this one is like the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia - I've actually been inside. I grew up roughly an hour's drive away from Philadelphia, depending on traffic anyway, and the two big settings for much of anything in those days were Veterans Stadium and the Spectrum Arena. Nothing else really compared to the two. Both were part of the South Philadelphia Sports Complex; both were home to Philadelphia pro sports teams (baseball and football at the Vet, hockey and basketball at the Spectrum); and both were popular venues for concerts and other large-scale events. Both are also gone.

Eddie Plank, Gettysburg, Adams County

As I mentioned when I wrote about the Pottsville Maroons, I am not the biggest sports fan in the world. I respect the athletes and everything; I just don't find it very entertaining to watch other people play a game. I support the Philadelphia teams more out of proximity than anything, though between the Phanatic and Gritty I also think we have the best mascots. 

Having said that, I can definitely appreciate that sports have had a role in the history of our country and our state, and when I was in Gettysburg for my birthday last year, I discovered the story that I'm sharing with you today. I'd never heard of Eddie Plank, but he's quite the legend in his hometown.

Pottsville Maroons, Pottsville, Schuylkill County

Today we're going to be looking at a subject that doesn't usually interest me: football. After all, this is Super Bowl weekend coming up! Sure, I cheered as much as anybody else when the Eagles won the 2016 Super Bowl - I live in Eagles Country, after all. And I did spend my final two years of high school as a member of the varsity football team. (No, really, I did. I was the equipment manager.) But in general, I'm not super enthused about the sport. 

However, today's story is one that I find pretty intriguing despite my usual apathy for the topic, because the controversy has endured for nearly a century. Who really won the NFL championship of 1925?

The Penn Relays, Philadelphia, Philadelphia County

As I mentioned back when I first started this blog, I'm approaching it somewhat like the quest journal of a video game. Well, sometimes in my favorite games, there are quests that I can't undertake alone; sometimes things are just simply inaccessible to me. That's when I have to rely on one of my companions for assistance. Whether they build a bridge, lend me a horse, or just act as my bodyguard on the mission, it's always good to have friends.

Today's blog post is crafted with the help of one of my real life "NPCs." My former coworker Sheila was kind enough to take some pictures of a couple of markers and their subjects down in Philadelphia and send them to me.