Today’s second and concluding part of “Friday Night Lights,” the Press-Telegram’s flashback to the brief and stormy impact of long-ago Long Beach newspaperman Art Cohn is even better than the first—just as quirky, but much more insightful. Plus, some of the shock of Tuesday’s first installment – I mean, stuff this off-the-wall inspired simply doesn’t show up in the P-T very often, anymore – has worn off, allowing the storytelling to really take you away.

That story, presented in plainspoken language by Cal Poly Pomona Professor Ralph Shaffer, tells of a longtime Long Beach journalist who returns from fighting in World War II in 1945 to become the sports editor of the Long Beach Independent (an ancestor of the Press-Telegram) – and to immediately use his daily column to fight seemingly everybody and everything … but mostly, to fight the increasingly popular idea of playing high school football games at night.

Cohn fears that night games – which necessitate night driving by teenagers to then-far-flung outposts like Whittier and Redondo Beach – will tempt the youngsters with opportunities for drinking and sex, not to mention put them at risk for traffic accidents. The public opposes Cohn with a vehemence that reveals many things about life in the 1940s—the significance of newspapers in daily life before TV, the unstoppable forces of moral and technological change in post-war America, and how the anti-Semitism the U.S. had fought on the battlefield still flourished at home. Don’t miss this story.

Tags: anti-Semitism, Art Cohn, Friday night football, Long Beach Independent, Long Beach sports editor