Gil was a Marine. Seems like he would have been Korean War era, though I don’t believe he ever spoke of seeing combat.
The football storyline in 2000 included an offensive lineman named Steve Boone who assumed he wasn’t capable of college until he was set straight by the two main, Yale-bound characters, Von Haney and Nick Zollar.
We learned in a later summer storyline that after college, Boone had joined the Army, and came home minus one arm — lost not in combat, but when his vehicle was struck by a drunk driver on a military base. Gil helped bring Boone out of a funk by introducing him to golf, and he later became Milford’s offensive line coach.
“Playdowns,” for reasons lost to hazy history, applies only to basketball. In the Rubin era, it seems that only league champions go to the plays, be they -down or -off.
From what I’ve read in the anthologies, Jack Berrill never dealt with football playoffs, even in the years when mighty Milford steamrolled all the mopes from the Valley Conference.
Unless Rubin and Whigham own GoComics.com, I don’t think we can credit them with claiming they created “Gil Thorp.” The descriptions are pretty clearly written by the site and not the cartoonists.
WHCC, I do believe, is the TV station (in Central City) where Marty used to do his Prep Spotlight show until he was overthrown in a coup by two Milford High students at the end of last football season.
An error by the writer. Gil was a Marine — and if he were real, he’d have been aghast.
The boxer was Bill Ritter. He was friends, and I think tree-trimming partners, with Stormy Hicks, who wound up at the Naval Academy.