Franklin County Texas has an awesome museum with a Don Meredith Exhibit and the rarest of rare Bird Egg display!
The museum curator was most informative and gave Dave and I some excellent information on the exhibits!
I am a football fan, but my interest involve the Green Bay Packers, Not the Dallas Cowboys! With that being said, I was shocked how interested I was in the history of this small town sports star Don Meredith.
I have crap for brains when it comes to memory and details, but I will share with you to the best of my knowledge some of the stories the curator shared with us. Proof in point, I was told the curators name once, then asked two other times because I kept forgetting.
Anyhow he told us that the Principal of the school asked permission to take him out of School to play catch with him when he was in the third grade, because the principal saw potential in him. He was a good student and nobody objected to this.
Also an interesting tidbit was the fact that Don was more interested in basketball than football. He play basketball and as you can see, these young men use to wear very short shorts!
If I remember correctly, Mr. Meredith suffered from childhood polio and had to wear special braces on his legs, to strengthen in his legs.
Instead of being ostracized by others for being different, the leg braces were sought after in in high demand by other young athletes! How cool is that!
Don was into golfing as well and played with some of the all time great golf professionals.
He played football at SMU 
and later for of course the Dallas Cowboys. While he played football in high school (I think), anyhow he apparently had gotten injured and they needed to cut open his jersey. According to the story the curator told, Don was much more worried about the jersey than the injury!
He said as an after thought, how shocked they were when they realized that the jersey they had on display was the actual jersey that Don’s mom had sewn back together and Don continued to wear!
There are some great stories and items in this exhibit. Please look for my next entry when I talk about Birds, Bird Eggs, Butterflies and more!
A sneak preview… It will include the Rarest of them all… 3 Extinct Bird Eggs:
Carolina Parakeet, Passenger Pigeon and the Heath Hen.
Click here for a photo album of our visit to the museum.
What small town outside of Mt Vernon did Don also live?
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