Paws!

There's ol' Frank at the press conference after a loss at Duke. "Turning point?" he says. "Damn, buddy, the turning point was three years ago when I didn't get me no halfbacks."

There's ol' Frank on the practice field, kicking rears and taking (or giving) names. "Good God almighty, Dum-Dum! You're so dumb, you're dumb enough for two dumb names!"

There's ol' Frank holding a squad meeting in the late 1940s, announcing that the next player who gets married will lose his scholarship. Shortly afterward, Clemson's star tailback of that era, Bobby Gage, is betrothed. At the very next squad meeting, ol' Frank says, "Dammit, men. I really mean it this time."

There's ol' Frank at the Clemson Hall of Fame ceremony, seeing Wallace Roy, an old Tiger track man, for the first time in ages. "Hellfire, Wallace," ol' Frank bellows. "The last time I saw you, I thought you was dead."

There's ol' Frank asking Clemson tennis coach Chuck Kriese how a match is going. Kriese says, "Great. We're still playing, but we've already won." Ol' Frank doesn't skip a beat. "Damn," he says, "all those years I was coaching the wrong sport."

And there's ol' Frank driving comedian Bob Hope through Clemson.

"Frank, I thought you were going to show me the town," says Hope.

"Buddy, you want me to back up and show you again?" says Howard.

Did Rockne or Wilkinson or Parseghian or Schembechler ever make a straight man out of Bob Hope?

At least ol' Ski Nose managed to find Clemson. And in the last couple of years, so have some other celebrities, such as Beverly Sills, William F. Buckley Jr. and the two most recent vice-presidents of the United States, George Bush and Dan Quayle, not to mention Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, who were invited to play beach music atop 120 tons of sand trucked into an abandoned filling station during the Life Is a Beach spring weekend at Clemson's famous Esso Club.