More on Alex Box

Six years ago, after a story I wrote about the atmosphere at Alex Box Stadium at NCAA regionals, I received an e-mail about it. The sender's name got my attention.

It was from Alex Box.

I soon learned he was the nephew of the former LSU baseball and football player and living near Augusta, Ga.

Alex, 63, and I have remained in contact.

The more I exchanged e-mails with him, the more I realized he felt a deep connection to LSU and to Baton Rouge. As the possibility of Alex Box Stadium closing grew from speculation to reality (when LSU officials realized renovation wasn't feasible), I began communicating with Alex more frequently to get his take on the prospect of LSU moving into a new ballpark and shutting down the old one.

He arranged for me to meet his father, Sam, the older brother of the late Alex Box. On the way to the LSU-Auburn football game in 2006, I stopped with photographer Bill Feig of The Advocate to visit Sam at an assisted-living facility in Mobile, Ala.

I spoke on the phone several times with Alex, and we met in late June 2007 when he and his wife were on their way to Lafayette. Their reason for that trip explain a lot about Alex's ties to Baton Rouge and to LSU.

When Neal Box, brother of Sam and Ben and Alex Box, died at age 72 in Baton Rouge in 1996, the nephew Alex felt like he lost his connection to the Capital City, he said. He developed an online friendship with Don Long, whose DandyDon.com Web site had become the most popular Internet destination for recruiting news about LSU athletics.

That relationship became such an anchor for Alex that he and Pat drove 700 miles to be at Dandy Don’s 50th wedding anniversary last summer in Lafayette. On the way there, they stopped at The Box and took pictures.

Then they walked to the bridge where they crossed from going steady to engaged. Yes, Alex proposed to Pat on LSU's campus in 1970, before a Mississippi State-LSU football game.

In July 2007, I visited again with Sam Box in Mobile, a few days before his 90th birthday.

I became introduced to other family members, some of whom live in Baton Rouge. The results of these interviews and more are in today's editions of The Advocate.

What follows are parts of the stories you didn't see in the newspaper, and things I remember about the process that I wanted to share with you in some way. It's a lot of stuff, and I doubt everyone who starts reading it will get through the whole thing, but if you're interested in the Box family, I think you'll appreciate the bonus coverage. The good news is all of these notes and quotes will be here whenever you want to read them, so if you want to read a few at a time, they'll be waiting for you when you get back.

Every family member has a different story to tell. Most don't remember Alex. They weren't yet born when he was killed in World War II. I chose to focus on his namesake, and on Sam, because the younger Alex has lived with the name all of his life, and in the pretty big shadow of the legend. Sam has lived since 1943 without his younger brother Alex and since 1945 without his first wife, the woman who gave birth to his first son.

That's a long time to grieve.

The story behind the story, what you'll find below, just touches the surface on an amazing person and the family members who will never forget him. I hope all of you, including a generation or two who don't know the Alex Box story, find it as interesting to read as I did working on the stories in today's paper.

As I told LSU superfan Chris Guillot a couple of nights ago, in words he had to help me form, at a certain point in researching the story of Alex Box I realized I had made some transition from reporter to being just a person touched by a family's history, and it all moved me. I think the moment I realized that was when I went to unfasten the clip-on microphone from Sam Box's shirt during an interview at Murray House in Mobile, Ala. The 90-year-old brother of Alex Box took my hand and patted it softly, thanking me for coming and letting him talk about Alex.

It has been an honor and a privilege meeting the family and having them allow me inside for a glimpse of their story and Alex's.

Alex, the nephew, is a huge LSU fan. I cannot emphasize this enough. For a person with degrees from Ole Miss and Mississippi State, he's got more purple and gold running through him than you could possibly imagine. He regularly e-mails me before big football games or baseball series, and he really wanted Les Miles and the Tigers to beat a certain coach last November. I'll bet you can guess the game I'm talking about.

He keeps up with LSU, and his connection to the school runs deep.

LSU invited him to attend this weekend and be part of the countdown, but he was unable to make arrangements. Like the story in today's paper says, he really wants to be there for the opening of the new Alex Box Stadium.

Did I say he's got purple and gold running through him? It runs in the family. Alex has seen the letters his uncle wrote to friends from North Africa in World War II, "and almost every letter had some reference to LSU. This was a guy that loved LSU from the bottom of his heart."

In his memory I present the rest of the stories and notes I wanted to share with you about Alex Box and his family.

Sam Box

Sam, who moved to Mobile after a stroke in 2001, became a civic leader (mayor, even) in Mississippi after leaving the Merchant Marine and the Texas oilfields and the 1940s behind. Himself a survivor of torpedo attacks on two different supply ships during the war, he played a major role in having the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Laurel named for Alex, his deceased brother.

One of the first things Sam told me about Alex, the younger brother he lost during World War II, was how Alex loved to eat ice cream. Growing up in Mississippi, they delivered newspapers -- Alex threw The Commercial Appeal of Memphis, Tenn., and Sam threw The Meridian Star -- and Alex would duck inside for ice cream when they'd stop for the papers.

Sam said Alex would eat ice cream until his head hurt, and he'd sit there rubbing it.

"I believe ice cream was colder then than it is now," Sam said.

Alex's spirit

Alex, Sam told me, was playful and energetic and did everything at full speed.

"Get out of his way if he was swimming," Sam said.

Then: "He might come and pull your hair. He was one of the boys."

Sam remembered another thing about his brother.

"If you'd go camping, you'd better tie up your bacon somewhere real high," he said, "because he'd get it."

Brothers Box

Sam was born Samuel Eugene Box on July 30, 1917. Alex was born Simeon Alexander Box on Aug. 5, 1920. Their names are rooted in family tradition that continues today, with nephews who bear their names and used some version of their names for some of their children. Friends did the same.

Sam and Alex began their lives in Quitman, Miss., and the family moved to Laurel around 1933.

"Growing up, they were pretty much inseparable," said Alex, Sam's son and Alex's nephew.

Their father, also named Sam Box, was a machinist who worked in a lumber mill and moved the family because of the Depression. They were living in Laurel when LSU offered Alex a football scholarship in 1938.

Boxing brothers

Sam recalled coming home from school nearly every day, when the boys reached a certain age, arguing about which one could whip the other in a fight at tournament days at school. Finally, he said, their mother had enough of the debate, and she said, "Let's find out."

She made them have a "knock-down, drag-out" battle in their big farm-house kitchen, which he said was about 20 feet by 20 feet. Later, they fought on the porch.

"Today, they'd throw her in jail for something like that," Alex the nephew said. "It was just a different time."

After both took a pretty good beating, Sam said, their mother told them to clean up and get back to school. Neither liked the idea of going back to their classrooms and letting students and teachers see them all beat up.

Sam made it sound like a pretty even fight. His son Alex added a footnote.

"By the time they were grown men," he said, "I think Alex could have handled him pretty good."

Sam said the fight his mother arranged was the last time he fought Alex.

"He'd pick out a place on you, like on your heart, and he'd just pound that place," Sam said. "I got to where I couldn't hardly breathe. I got down and choked him."

Someone watching the fight said it looked like they were going to kill each other, he said.

"I had to do something," Sam said. "After that, I never tried to show him anything. He never showed me. Boy, he skinned everything on me."

Jumping into the ring

That fight was actually inspired by events that ended with Alex defending Sam, I later learned.

Sam told me he was at school one day, and it became his turn to climb into the ring for a bout. He said he told his coach he didn't have boxing shorts, just the clothes he was wearing and a jockstrap.

"He said, 'Well, you've got your short underwear, right?', and I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'Well, put that on. You're not going to do nothing but spar.' We got in that ring, and that boy didn't even know how to spell 'spar' much less spar.

"Man, he started hitting me, and he hit me down in the shorts, and it busted the button and everything, and my shorts dropped down, and I was trying to pull them up with my gloves, and he started beating me."

As Sam struggled to pull his shorts back up, his opponent kept punching him mercilessly.

"Alex jumped in the ring and whooped his butt," Sam said, laughing hysterically.

After telling the story to their mother, the boys began their argument over who could whip the other in a fight.

In 1942, Sam was working for Humble Oil at King Ranch in Texas. Alex was in the Army, and Sam was exempt from the draft. Sam, who saw many oil-field workers killed, decided to join the war effort as a part of the United States Merchant Marine.

In his way, he would again fight with Alex.

"I told my wife I had to go," he said. "I knew that I had to go, because Alex was going. I couldn't let Alex fight alone."

Merchant Marine

Sam's son Alex said his father told stories of twice being on supply ships that were torpedoed by German submarines. Sam told me one such story, saying his ship brought supplies to Liverpool, then headed back to Nova Scotia.

"We were torpedoed in the No. 3 hold, about three days from Nova Scotia," he said.

"That water was cold," he said, leaning on the last word and sustaining it until I felt it.

Sam said there were broken legs and arms, men trying to get back into the boat and find a way to go ashore. He said he knew he would die if he stayed in the water.

A group of men "fired up two boilers that were out of the water," Sam said, using furniture from the ship's offices to fire them up.

"We pumped out the engine room, and we headed to Halifax," he said.

Remembering Alex

During my most recent visit with Sam, he said Alex was someone who could do anything he wanted.

"I always wondered what he'd be doing in life," he said. "Would he be a coach? Would he be at LSU? I wonder.

"He'd be 87 now. There seems to be a good many people who know who he was and want to honor him."

Sam later became a V.F.W. commander and mayor in Quitman, and he undertook a project to arrange for permanent care for a Confederate cemetery and for other memorials to veterans and fallen soldiers. He helped name the V.F.W. post in Laurel for Alex and had a memorial service for Alex in Quitman.

Sam said he knows of others who visited Alex's grave in Africa. Sam's ship passed near there, but he could never stop to see it. That was one of the reasons he worked so hard to commemorate Alex when he got back to Mississippi.

Sam on Sam

Sam spent 2 hours talking about Alex when I visited in 2006. When I returned a year later, he spoke a lot more about himself and his role in the war effort.

He wondered if people would remember him after he's gone.

He was less than a week from his 90th birthday, and he knew there were about 150 people invited to attend a party for him that weekend.

"I never thought I'd make 90," he said.

More than once, he volunteered stories about his World War II days.

Sam said he felt abandoned by Congress, saying the government didn't hold Merchant Mariners in the kind of esteem and respect reserved for those in the Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard. Without the supplies he and others continually brought to those in the fight, he said, the war couldn't have been won.

"Congress never figured us for anything," Sam said. "There wasn't too many of us. I remember when (Brigadier General Theodore) Roosevelt asked for some volunteers. Most all of them were in the Coast Guard, and the Coast Guard wasn't going to have anything, so they figured if we volunteered, if they lost us it wouldn't make any difference, you know.

"We lost the biggest percentage for the number of men we had in the entire war. I lost 12 friends at one time off of Italy. It could have happened to me."

I found out later the House of Representatives passed the "Belated Thank You to the Merchant Mariners of World War II Act of 2007," which would direct the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to pay a tax-exempt monthly benefit of $1,000 to certain honorably discharged veterans (or their survivors) of the U.S. Merchant Marine who served between December 7, 1941, and December 31, 1946. The act passed in the House as H.R. 23 on July 30, 2007.

That was Sam's 90th birthday, six days after my last visit with him in Mobile.

The Senate version of the bill, S. 961, was referred to the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee on March 22, 2007. A group of Merchant Mariners and their survivors is keeping up the fight, hoping to prevent the bill from dying in committee.

War survivor

Sam said he had no regrets.

"We had to make sure England had enough to stay in the war," he said of supply runs to Liverpool.

Near the point of one invasion at Sicily, he said, he received a telegram saying the draft board wanted him to return home, so he told his captain about it.

"He said, 'Boy, you get your butt back in that engine room. It's a lot of us that's gonna go home today.'"

Sam laughed at that memory, but he turned serious as he remembered how much fire they drew. He said he was grateful he survived, but many of the others were "like shooting ducks on a pond," he said.

The last time

The last time Sam saw Alex, Sam was caked in grime from oilfield work he had done and didn't have a place to take a bath. He met up with Alex, who was still in college, so he could clean up and be on his way.

"Alex was in a room with about, I'd say, 12 to 15 young men who were trying to pledge him to a fraternity,"

Sam said, laughing. "He didn't want to recognize me because, man, I was nasty, you know?

"Finally, I said to him, I said, 'Elec, you're not going to recognize your brother?' You can imagine. Boy, they were all cleaned up and everything. There wasn't but about three years' difference between me and all of those boys there."

The other boys asked if Sam was in a fraternity. He said yes, and they asked for its name. Sam gave them a name, a made-up, salty, oilfield approximation of what I suppose was his stab at creating a blue-collar version of a frat name, and the part I will share with you is that it ended with "Delta Dig" as the last two words.

"Boy, he didn't want to recognize me after that," Sam said, choking on his laughter.

IOU

Sam said his mother never got over losing Alex.

"She never did want to give him up," he said.

Many years later, she showed Sam a black book in which Alex had written, "I owe Sam 90 dollars."

He explained.

After the frat boys cleared out of the room, Alex asked Sam for $100. Sam told Alex he wouldn't want the dirty money he had on him, but Alex asked again. Sam said he could give him $90, leaving himself enough to get back to Houston.

Sam's mother thought about it after reading the entry in the book years later.

"She said, 'Well, I don't know whether you'll ever collect it or not.' I said, 'Well, momma, you're collecting insurance, and $90 over about 25 years at 8 percent is going to be a gooooooood (sum),' and she said, 'You'll play hell getting it.'

"Yeah," Sam said quietly to me after he stopped laughing.

Big brother

Sam's children said Sam helped Alex financially when he could, and they recall seeing a letter written before an LSU game in Houston, where Sam planned to meet Alex at a hotel near Rice and give him some spending money.

"It was that old thing where the older brother did what he could to help the rest of the family," said Sam Box, Sam's 57-year-old son, who also lives in Mobile. "He was helping Alex with spending money through school."

War

Sam said he estimated there were about 20 cousins in the war at one time.

"Some of them had it pretty rough," he said. "They were invading all of the islands in the South Pacific. I had a couple of first cousins that never were right after the war. He was a doctor's son, and he'd never had it rough. It had always been handed to him."

Sam said his mother was tough on the four boys -- Sam, Alex, Neal and Ben -- when they were growing up, because the Depression made her realize things would be hard on them when they got out into the world as adults.

"We were farm boys, and we lucky we had the farm to grow up on," Sam said. "Elec and myself worked together, played together, fought together."

Four boys, four plots

At one point, Sam said his mother thought the two oldest boys should drop out of school to help their father make ends meet. Their father said no and wanted them to finish school because he didn't.

"He was one of seven brothers and had to stay on the farm and help his daddy," Sam said.

When they were young, a boy they knew died playing football. Their mother urged their father to talk to Sam and Alex and ask them to stop playing.

Sam said, "Pop, I can't see no difference playing football or working, because people get killed either way."

Their father went out and bought four cemetery plots, Sam said. Their mother later asked if he'd had a talk with the boys, and he said yes, they're going to keep playing football.

She asked the father what he planned to do about that.

"I took out some insurance," he told her.

"We never had to use those plots," Sam said.

Years later, with Alex's remains buried at the North Africa American Cemetery in Carthage, Tunisia, Sam finally arranged for a memorial marker for Alex in Quitman.

"I looked at the sky and I said, 'Alex, you can lay down now. I've got you a place.' "

Alex, Alec, Elec

You'll notice on the blog I have 'Alex' and 'Elec' in quotes from Sam. The spellings represent how the name sounds on my recording of the interviews.

There's a story in today's paper about the different pronunciations of Alex Box.

All-around athlete

Sam described Alex as a natural athlete. Before attending LSU, Alex played on a semi-pro baseball team put together by the Laurel sawmills of the Masonite company.

"He could do anything, and they tried to get him to help with this and help with that down at the university (LSU), and he never turned them down," Sam said. "We were poor as hell, and there was a haberdasher down in Baton Rouge that used to furnish his clothes for him because he could wear ready-to-wear clothes."

Alex the nephew

Sam's first wife, Joyce McBride, died after giving birth to their son two years after Alex Box died in the war. The Red Cross brought Sam home.

Sam's friends, one of whom attended his 90th birthday party last summer, took care of matters until he could return to Texas.

He named his son Simeon Alexander Box, after his deceased brother. Years later, after remarrying and having another son, Sam went to Joyce's gravesite in Kingsville, Texas.

"I told her about Alex, our son, and I thanked her for the 5 years I had with her," Sam said. "I told her Alex had two boys."

He told her about their lives, and he thought about his life and that of his brother, Alex.

"The only thing I've got is memories," he said in his room in Murray House, surrounded by photos, flags and other family keepsakes.

He has since moved into a nursing home for more regular attention.

No excuses

Alex, the nephew, said the shoulder injury that ended the football career of Alex Box at LSU and changed the way he threw a baseball could have kept him from having to fight in the war.

"But that wasn't him," the younger Alex said. "He wouldn't have done that."

Bumping into Cannon

The younger Alex Box went to Jones Junior College in Ellisville, Miss., for two years after following in his uncle's footsteps in Laurel schools. Billy Cannon went there to take refresher courses in chemistry before enrolling in dental school, and young Alex met him.

Not until years later did he realize Alex Box and Billy Cannon both wore No. 20.

"I never even thought about it," he said.

Then he saw the photo of Alex on Sam's wall in Mobile and said he had to have a copy of it. I've made several copies for myself, thanks to Alex. It's a keeper.

Box & Box

Sam played offensive line in high school and attended junior college for two years before going to work in Texas. Mississippi State tried to get him to return to Mississippi from the Texas oilfields and get Alex to join him on the football team, but Sam turned it down.

Alex went to LSU. He did so mainly because of the petroleum engineering program. He and Sam planned to go into business together in Texas, where the oil and opportunity were creating excitement, and where Sam already had experience.

"I believe what their vision was," said Sam's 57-year-old son, Sam Box, "was that Alex would graduate in petroleum engineering, and that they would go into oilfield services contracting. My father knew everything about drilling and the derricks and what it was to actually work out there, and they were just going to be like Box & Box."

The complete package

The younger Sam Box perked up when talking about the uncle he never knew.

"In our family, you'd have to say that Alex was the complete package," he said. "The Boxes are a talented group of people. We tend toward the technical side. We've got doctors, and my father ended up as a marine engineer. My degree's in geology.

"Alex was the complete package. Not only was he basically a people person, but he had the technical ability to do the petroleum engineering, but he was the athlete. I mean, it's almost like he was the perfect collegiate athlete. He was a true student-athlete. He was a good student, and he was a good athlete. He was a good person."

Flying Box brothers

The younger Sam Box told me a story about a partnership of sorts between his dad and Alex when they were growing up together in Mississippi.

"They got it in their minds that they were going to build an airplane," he said. "My father, like I think everybody in the period of Lindbergh, was fascinated by the fact of the barnstorming pilots that were flying around, so they decided that they were going to build an airplane. So, they made this thing out of chicken wire and paper mache, and they got this fan blade off of this old truck, and they got inner tubes and used them like rubber bands, and they wound this fan blade up.

"They had built it on top of a shed with a ladder as a runway. They were going to slide down the ladder, and then it was going to take off and fly. So, my dad put his younger brother Alex into the plane with instructions, 'Now, when I cut it loose, when you get down to the end, you pull back on the stick, and it's going to fly.' So, he cut it loose, and of course the plane went down to the end of the ladder and fell off.

You can imagine that the fan blade was probably spinning around, and their mother ran out there, and Alex was in the middle of this thing.

"Daddy was madder than hell at Alex, screaming at him because he didn't pull back on the stick, and Alex was crying because he just nearly got decapitated by this spinning fan blade, and my grandmother's screaming about what fools they both are, but that Alex was the bigger fool for letting Daddy talk him into getting in the thing to begin with.

"Daddy said it would have flown if Alex had just pulled back on the stick."

Alex later got his airplane ride. In 1939 he and the LSU football team played Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., and in "The Fighting Tigers" by Peter Finney, those Tigers are described as the South's first football team to travel by air.

Alex Box was one of the 37 players on the trip. Ken Kavanaugh scored four touchdowns, three on pass receptions and another after intercepting a lateral. LSU won 26-7.

Alex reinjured a shoulder he hurt against Ole Miss, and his football career was essentially over before he and the rest of the team flew back to Baton Rouge.

Ah, brothers

There's another great story from the younger Sam Box. (I hope you can keep all the Alex Boxes and Sam Boxes straight.)

The younger Sam, 57, is Alex Box's nephew and lives in Mobile. His dad is the Sam Box, 90, who is Alex Box's older brother.

"Alex was just generally a nice person," the younger Sam Box said. "The train would come through, and they would have the hooks that they would hang the mailbags out on, and they had the apparatus that would grab the mailbag so the train wouldn't have to stop. So, my uncle Alex would hang a bag up there, and he would have apples or oranges or something like that for the crew, so they would swing out there, and they would grab the bag, and they would be looking for the little boy that would give them stuff.

"They would wave at Alex, and they would blow the whistle for him. So, my father watched this a couple of times, and he hung a big out there full of water, and the guy came buy and grabbed it, and of course it busted all over him, and he was shaking his fist, and Alex looked at Daddy and said, 'Those were my friends. Why did you do that?'

"And of course, it ruined Alex's reputation, because they didn't trust anytime that they went by there that they could grab a bag, because it used to be fruit, and then somebody put a bag of water out there for them."

The new Box

The younger Sam and his family plan to be at the new Alex Box Stadium when it opens in February.

"My son (10-year-old Sherard Box) was running around with his LSU shirt on yesterday," he said last week, "and I just was thinking about that."

Yes, I'm Alex Box

Alex the nephew has been asked about his famous uncle all of his life, and the naming of the V.F.W. post in Laurel and the baseball stadium at LSU extended the scope of his name recognition.

"That's been a part of my life from the time I understood who I was named after," he said.

He's pulled out his driver's license to prove he's really Alex Box.

The weekend of the LSU-Virginia Tech football game in 2002, he met some LSU fans and friends at Boudreaux's in Blacksburg, Va. He said someone was skeptical of his name, so he showed his I.D.

The guy looked at it and said he thought Box was spelled with an additional 'x' on the end.

"I said, 'How long have you been over here drinking this afternoon?' "

Alex said he never gets tired of people asking about his connection to Alex Box Stadium.

"It's been a big part of my life, and a very positive part of it," he said.

LSU is everywhere

The younger Alex Box went into the Air Force in 1968, but because of a kidney problem, he was honorably discharged about 6 weeks later.

The doctor he saw in San Antonio was an LSU graduate with LSU stuff all over his walls, and they had a good conversation about the school and about Alex Box.

"The world is a small place sometimes," he said.

Growing up as an Alex Box

Alex the nephew grew up in Laurel and attended schools where his uncle made a name for himself with almost straight A’s and countless sports achievements.

"I was definitely not an All-American in the classroom,” Alex the nephew said, “and I wasn’t an athlete. I got through school.

“Let’s just leave it at that,” he said, chuckling. “It took me awhile to figure out what it was all about.”

After college and graduate school, he went to teach in 1971 in the city school system at Laurel, where Alex Box grew up, and married Pat in May 1971. Then he went to work at R.H. Watkins High School, where his uncle graduated before going to LSU in 1938.

The younger Alex Box taught marketing education from 1972-79 and was a counselor in vocational education from 1979-86.

He moved to Georgia in the summer of 1986, taught four years of marketing education and worked in middle and high schools in Columbia County for 16 years as a counselor.

At The Box

Before walking around The Box last summer with Pat, the last time Alex the nephew had been inside the stadium was in 1991. His son Stephen attended Skip Bertman's baseball camp.

That year, he and other family members drove to Baton Rouge for the ceremony at which the Box family presented a shadow box of memorabilia, including the Distinguished Service Cross and the Purple Heart awarded to Alex Box during World War II.

Heavy rain canceled the Saturday doubleheader between LSU and Mississippi State, and more rain canceled the Sunday schedule. Alex and Sam never got to see a game at The Box.

History on the page

Looking at scrapbooks with newspaper articles on Alex Box from the 1930s and 1940s, I experienced that sense of history you get looking at clippings that have turned brown or yellow -- or both -- over decades.

It makes me wonder if people 50 and 100 years from now will get that experience. You get a more tangible sense of history from faded newspaper clips than from a 1996 story from the internet that essentially looks the same as one from 2008.

By hand

One of the most powerful moments for me in working on the story was reading handwritten letters Alex wrote from the war. There is something about seeing the shape of the letters and the signature that brings the war and the person closer to you than the typed versions of the letters ever could.

Red Evans

In 1988, State Times sportswriter George Morris, who now works as a feature writer for The Advocate, wrote a column that probably requires no set-up here. A later column lets a State Times reader tell you everything you need to know.

The date of this column is Aug. 6, 1988.

Headline: Letter a reminder of what a great hero Alex Box was
Byline: GEORGE MORRIS
Publication: THE BATON ROUGE STATE TIMES

In the writing business, they're called throwaway lines -- attempts to be cute or funny without really trying to make a point. The term is appropriate in this case, because I wish I'd thrown away some of the ones I've written.

This column is about one such line. I'd say more, but as will be made clear from the following letter, hand-delivered on Friday, I've said enough already.

Dear Mr. Morris:

Your column in the July 14 edition of the State-Times was apparently an effort to justify renaming the Assembly Center. What justification did you find for including such a facetious and unnecessary remark about Alex Box?

You raised the question like this:"Who is Alex Box? The guy who invented the Box Score?" I have waited three weeks to cool down. I'll tell you who Alex Box was.

Alex Box was the closest friend I ever had. We were classmates and roommates at LSU. Both of my sons are named after him. In our family he is a legend.

Alex was one of those rare gifted athletes who had the natural talent to excel in almost any sport. Football, baseball, basketball,track, tennis, bowling, ping-pong -- he could do it all. In high school at Laurel, Mississippi, he was all-state in football, and state champion in the 100- and 200-yard dashes and the discus throw. Out of high school, he passed up a major league baseball offer from Cincinnati.

He came to LSU on a football scholarship in the fall of 1938. I guess I met him that first week, because we were assigned to the same ROTC company. In his sophomore year he made the team as a wingback in the single wing formation used by the Tigers in those days. Unfortunately, his shoulder was dislocated in the 1939 game with Holy Cross. That was the game in which Ken Kavanaugh scored four touchdowns and the Tigers pulled a major upset. It was also the first time an LSU football team traveled to a road game by air.

His football career ended, he turned to baseball. For him it was easy, a fun sport. Majoring in petroleum engineering, with a heavy schedule of classes and afternoon labs, he had little time for baseball practice.

The coaches seemed to understand, and took whatever time he could give. In his sophomore and senior years he played right field and batted in the cleanup position. He did not play in his junior year because of his academic schedule. Watching him play was sometimes heartbreaking. Often his bum shoulder would dislocate on his throw from the outfield. The infielders would go out and pull it back in place,and he would stay in the game.

He was a good student, a member of student honor societies, and was almost elected student body vice president. Petroleum engineering students were required to attend the LSU geology camp in Colorado during the summer before their senior year. ROTC was big on the campus,and also required attendance at a summer training camp. He planned ahead and went to the geology camp in the summer of 1940. That enabled him to go with the rest of our class to ROTC summer camp at Fort Benning in the summer of 1941. There, with no conditioning other than daily military training, he won the 220 and the discus in the camp track meet. When we graduated from LSU in 1942, he was the only petroleum engineering graduate to receive both his academic degree and his officer's commission at the same time.

All of us reported for military duty about two weeks after graduation. Most of us stayed stateside for a while at least. But not Alex. His first assignment, in June, 1942, was to the combat engineers of the First Infantry Division, the "Big Red One." The division was already in England and preparing for the invasion of North Africa. As a new second lieutenant, he was immediately made a combat engineer platoon leader. I cherish the letters I received from him during that period.

His division led the assault on the beaches of North Africa on November 8, 1942. On the second night ashore, November 9, his platoon was attached to an infantry battalion that was pinned down by heavy machine gun fire outside a village. Alex volunteered to take a halftrack through the village and locate the guns by drawing their fire. He ran into point-blank machine gun fire, a 27-mm cannon, and numerous riflemen. He knocked out some of them and returned unscathed. Having located the guns, his unit sent out patrols in a pincers movement.

He again went through the town and back. This time his company commander accompanied him to drive the halftrack. He described it in his letter to me...

"Gave patrols 40 minutes, and set out again. Drew enemy fire and came back through the town, throwing hand grenades right into machine gun nests. Then let the patrols do the rest. Cleaned out the town in thirty minutes with hand grenades. We moved on through and, an hour after we moved, our previous position was under intense artillery fire."

For this action, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest decoration our nation can give for bravery.

The division moved across North Africa and into Tunisia, where the Germans under Rommel mounted an all-out attack on the American lines. At Kasserine Pass, on the night of February 19, 1943, Alex's platoon was preparing a road block and mine field to intercept the attack. A mine accidentally exploded, killing Alex and four of his men and seriously wounding three others.

Today, August 5, 1988, is his birthday. If he had lived, he would be 68 years old. Maybe he would have been a great and famous professional athlete. I doubt it. His whole being was laden with character, personality, integrity, intelligence and loyalty. He was a leader, and stories about him would have been on the front page rather than the sports page.    Mr. Morris, Simeon Alexander Box lived and died, as did a million others, to preserve for you and me the freedom to say _ and write _what we please. We do not have the privilege to take that freedom lightly.

Yours very truly, W.J. "Red" Evans

As I said before, there are words to be kept and words to be thrown away. I'll keep this letter.


The last line is George's. I've kept a copy too.

The story in today's paper (May 11, 2008) includes some of the same excerpts from Alex Box's letters to Red Evans, who is no longer with us. Some of the wording and punctuation in my story differs from what you see above, but I wanted them to read as much as possible like they appeared on the handwritten letters the Box family shared with me. There were minor changes -- mostly for readability, I suppose -- in Mr. Evans' version above.

One thing that struck me from the letters was the language of the times. Alex Box used the term "ballyhoo" to describe the attention he got in winning the Distinguished Service Cross. You just don't hear people use that word much anymore.

Mr. Evans referred to Alex Box as a wingback. LSU listed him as both a halfback and wingback, and in my story today I refer to him as a halfback. It was simply a matter of choosing one over the other, and the listing on the roster said halfback.

I would have loved to see the offense with wingbacks and halfbacks and Alex Box and Ken Kavanaugh in the same backfield.

Youngest brother

Ben Box, 78, lives in Meridian, Miss. He is the youngest of the four Box brothers. He and Sam are the two surviving brothers of Alex Box.

Alex was 9 years older than Ben, and Ben said he doesn't have a lot of memories of Alex. One he treasures came shortly before Alex went into the service. Alex gave Ben a ride on the handlebars of his bike as they went to a municipal swimming pool near their home.

Alex also signed a baseball for Ben and drew a box on it. Ben, who assumed the box was a play off the family name, said he later gave the ball to LSU.

"I don't have too many close recollections of our early times together, unfortunately," Ben Box said. "I wish I had more memories of Alex, but I just don't.

"He was certainly a well-liked and all-around good person. I idolized him since he was at LSU and played all the sports."

Family members say legend has it Alex Box could do anything, including bowling, and earned his spending money in college at the bowling alley.

Ben was part of the family entourage that went to LSU in 1991 for the ceremony that was rained out. Neal Box later presented the Box keepsakes to LSU.

"The heavens dropped open that day and didn't stop," he said.

The telegram

"I remember vividly when the day of Alex's death was reported to us, I believe on the 3rd of March," Ben said, "and he was killed on the 19th of February. My mom got a telegram, a standard type thing in those days. My next-door neighbor came to the junior high school to take me home to that disaster.

"I don't think my mother ever recovered from it, really. Two years later, my oldest brother's wife died in childbirth, and that's how we wound up raising my nephew Alex. She went to Texas and got him and brought him back. Some tragic times back in those days, I tell you."

Ben thought about how times have changed.

"Now, they actually have military come to your house and notify you if a relative's been killed, but back in those days so many were dying that they couldn't do all that," he said. "So, just a telegram was delivered to your door.

"Interestingly enough, I became a Western Union boy myself and delivered telegrams, but I always made sure I got a neighbor next door, somebody that could come with me, if I had to deliver one of those telegrams. If I
remember, you had a gold star on it, which indicated a death."

The name

Ben Box said he's glad to know the new Alex Box Stadium will have his brother's name on it.

"That's good, because I know that there was a move afoot some time back to rename the stadium, I believe," he said. "I'm glad he's got his name on it.

"I'd rather have him here instead of having the name after the stadium, though."

Alex Box

Simeon Alexander Box
First Lieutenant, U.S. Army.
ID number: 0-472796.
1st Engineer Combat Battalion, 1st Infantry Division.
Died: Friday, Feb. 19, 1943.
Buried at: Plot I Row 5 Grave 1, North Africa American Cemetery, Carthage, Tunisia.
Awards: Distinguished Service Cross, Purple Heart.

 

Got a comment or question for Carl? E-mail him at cdubois@theadvocate.com.