The late Dawson lost Super Bowl I to Bart Starr and the Packers at the Los Angeles Coliseum 35-10 wearing their bland, road uniforms...but soon enough made up for it at Super Bowl IV in New Orleans at the Sugar Bowl at Tulane University in the Chiefs' red jerseys by flattening the rough-and-tumble Joe Kapp and his Minnesota Vikings 23-7.

Dawson, who was blessed with a terrific smile, expired today in Kansas City Kansas, NOT Missouri.

AND, oddly enough, according to Wikipedia, Dawson was an utter familial rarety--one of just a handful of public figures* who satisfied the circumstances which medieval European folklore imputes with supposedly special, even magical abilities**: the seventh son of a seventh son !

BRYAN STYBLE/Florida
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* Along with Perry Como--and NO ONE ELSE of whom I am aware.
** Which he certainly demonstrated for many AFL seasons.

Methinks my headline was a bit misleading*: Dawson wasn't merely in the Chiefs' Hall of Fame, but WAY more important, also in the Pro Football HoF in Canton.

STYBLE/Florida
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* As are so many of the headlines written by those semi-literate young folks** at Yahoo!, et al.
** I'm awaiting any day a headline which includes one of the disturbingly-frequent, verbally-sloppy employments of their favorite superfluous, extremely UNgrammatical filler word "like"...er...y'know, like, uh, what I mean?

CLARION CALL to all you fine folk of the alt-obits variety:

Does anyone know of ANY other notable seventh-sons-of-seventh-sons out there? When I first researched this a good while ago, Wiki editors listed Perry Como, and the newly-deceased Len Dawson, and that's IT.

But there must be a few others, no? (As I understand the European folklore behind it--and I DON'T claim to understand it much--it's not necessary that the two generations in question produce ONLY sons and thus no daughters, nor need to have ONLY seven sons, but rather AT LEAST seven.)

ON THE OTHER HAND: It seems to me that it would be even MORE nifty--and rare--for the Seventh Son of the Seventh Son to have had BOTH of those families producing seven and only seven sons, with no daughters anywhere in either mix. I gather that neither Como nor Dawson satisfied those stipulations.

Feel free to correct me on any of the above, should you be better informed on all this!

STYBLE/Florida