Have you ever had a flashback about something you haven't thought about in years and it just warmed your soul? I had one recently. A friend was telling me about a college football pick 'em contest he entered and won second place in and I instantly flashed back to my childhood when a newspaper called "The South Omaha Sun" had a similar contest every week.
The paper discontinued operations in the 1980s, I believe.
But I can remember waiting for it to show up each week when I was a kid so I could make my college football picks. I think the contest included 20 games and it always included the Nebraska game. And as a tie-breaker, you had to guess the score of the Nebraska game. After completing the form, you had to clip it out and mail it to the newspaper by Thursday.
I have such great memories of sitting around the radio on Saturday afternoons waiting to hear the scores. During halftime of the Nebraska game radio broadcasts, an announcer would break in and run down the scores of every game in the country. I'd cheer or boo, depending upon the way my predictions were going, and then I'd wait for the post-game show to mark a big X next to the games I got right. I never won the contest, but I had so much fun competing that it really didn't seem to matter.
I searched ebay over the weekend and found a copy of the South Omaha Sun from 1949 that someone is selling for $3.00. He allowed me to use the picture of his newspaper for this post.
