Bowerman and the Men of Oregon Read online

  At fifteen, Bill was as wild as his mountain-man great-grandfather had been at that age, as ungovernable, he would say later, as most of us are when the threat-assessment part of our brain is a few neurons short of a connection. But he was worse. Circumstance had conspired to keep him from confronting his inner demons, and as he grew closer to becoming a man, a species his mother had taught him to distrust, his furies began to intensify. He sometimes fought with such ascending rage that he seemed not to care if he was killed in the process. In his sophomore year, his brawling got him suspended from Medford High. Barbara, who wouldn’t meet him for another two years, suggests that he may have been overly aggressive. “Not a bully, but it’s the responder who gets caught.”

  Lizzie couldn’t do anything with him. A teacher herself, she would have thrown him out of her own classes as summarily as his own teachers had. Beyond that, she was at a loss, because she recoiled from asking any man to intervene.

  Finally, Dan did what his mother would not. He sat Bill down one day and told him he had an appointment at eight o’clock Monday morning with the superintendent of schools, one Ercel H. Hedrick. Bill, having no choice, nodded.

  At the appointed hour, he was welcomed by Hedrick’s secretary, given a chair, and told to wait. He sat and was ignored. By noon he was squirming. Barbara could imagine him in agony: “That energy all balled up, going over and over what they might do to him. Paddled or whipped? He could take that. Thrown out of school? He could live with that. Military school? He’d run away . . . ”

  Then, as Bowerman himself would always remember, “the voice emanates from the inner sanctum . . . ‘Is that hell-raising son of a bitch still out there?’”

  Bill had barely crossed the threshold when Hedrick began hitting him with a profane list of his sins, delivered in a command voice that made his scalp crawl. Ercel H. Hedrick was then thirty. He had graduated from Oregon in 1916 and been a World War I Marine mule skinner and artillery officer. Standing above a stack of Bill’s teacher reports, he said, “This is ridiculous. You’re good in band, good in journalism, so you’re not stupid, just a hell-raising son of a bitch.”

  Bill, by his muteness, could only agree. Hedrick studied the skinny, jug-eared creature. “Bowerman,” Hedrick went on, “here’s how life is going to go for you. You’ll keep up this goddamned fighting and you’ll not only be out of Medford, you’ll be out of goddamn everywhere. Grants Pass, Ashland, nobody is going to stand for this shit. And that’s the way it should be. You’ll fight and I’ll be rid of you. You’ll fight and everybody else will be rid of you. Fight here, fight there, die in prison or on some barroom floor, I could give a royal, oozing shit. That’s justice. That’s just dying by your own goddamn sword.”

  Bill reddened, as if he could feel all those fights in his blood.

  “The only thing wrong with that,” said Hedrick, “is that you’ll dishonor a goddamn worthwhile human being.”

  Bill’s head came up. “Who?”

  “Elizabeth Hoover Bowerman.” Bill stopped breathing.

  “You will bring eternal shame upon the name of your mother,” intoned Hedrick. Bill’s pallor became not of sickness but death.

  “What . . . What should I do?” he finally croaked. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Control yourself!” roared Hedrick. “Cut the crap and channel that goddamn energy! Go back to that school and be of use! Make your mother proud. Because I swear to you, Bowerman, I never want to hear your goddamn name again.”

  Bill stumbled across town, his system raging against itself. He thought of running away forever. He thought of killing himself. Neither would exactly thrill his mother. At school, he was escorted to class by a grimly silent principal, took his seat, and opened a book. The pages boiled before his eyes, but he willed the words into focus.

  Like his great-grandfather, he learned to accept something short of perfect freedom. He began to channel. Systematically, he threw himself into his studies, sports, the band, drama, and the school paper. Hedrick’s two-by-four between his eyes would be the lesson of his life. “Where would I be if they’d categorized me at age ten?” Bowerman would say fifty years later. “In jail or worse.” Instead, he got nothing lower than a single B in his last two years of high school. “Hedrick got my attention.”

  Whether Bill swore to himself that he would never lose control again isn’t known. But this was the beginning of the self-possession that would strike anyone who met him thereafter. Bill’s turnaround was so dramatic that Hedrick would, in fact, hear his goddamn name again.

  CHAPTER 4

  Barbara

  LIZZIE EXPECTED ALL HER CHILDREN TO BECOME MUSICALLY COMPETENT, SO AT Medford Bill went with the clarinet and joined the marching band. But he kept casting a covetous eye toward the gridiron, the one place he could hit and no one would complain. When he tried out during his freshman year, however, coach Prince (“Prink”) Callison, noting his 105 pounds and clarinet case, said, “To the band!” The next fall he went out again. Callison took another look and said, “Back to the clarinet! Back to the band!”

  Bill grew as if he willed it. Before his junior year he was nearing six feet and weighed 170 pounds.

  There was a story he loved to tell: “End of summer I worked in the packing plant with a guy named Woody Archer. He was a sophomore at Oregon, and had played end for Medford. One of my friends and I were playing tennis on one court and using his balls and Woody was playing someone else using my balls.

  “I got done and wanted to leave, so I said, ‘How long are you going to be playing, Woody?’

  “‘What difference does it make?’

  “‘You’re using my balls and I’d like to have them when you’re through.’

  “He walked over and said, ‘These aren’t your tennis balls.’

  “‘Well, that WJB doesn’t stand for Woody Archer.’

  “He made a fake like he was going to hit me, and I hit him right in the mouth. His feet flew out from under him, but he jumped right up again. We fought there for a half-hour. He never hit me any place except the top of my head. He was throwing roundhouse rights, and every time I’d crouch and uppercut him. Had him bleeding like a pig. The police came and we got taken down to the station to explain why we were fighting. There was no explanation. So they said, ‘Don’t fight in the neighborhood,’ and let us go, and we had another one. And Woody didn’t learn a damn thing. We got arrested again. And when school started, someone brought a message. ‘Callison wants to know if you want to turn out for football now.’ I’d beaten up the guy who’d been his starting end for two years.”

  Bill had jumped on a moving freight. Medford under young Callison had gone undefeated for four years. Bill began as a guard because that’s where the depth chart was thinnest, and he played every minute of offense and defense. Later he would loathe platoon football, saying one can’t understand the game without partaking of both sides.

  When Callison asked if he could learn an injured center’s plays, Bill said he’d already memorized everyone’s assignment on every play in the book. Callison moved him to end, where he became the favorite target of a curly-haired quarterback named Al Melvin. The 1927 and 1928 Medford teams went undefeated and twice won the state championship by lopsided scores. In 1927, after Bill had kneed and hacked through Ashland for the winning touchdown, the losing coach asked Callison where this wildcat had come from.

  “Got him off the band,” Callison said.

  Watching from the Medford bleachers in Bill’s senior year was a fourteen-year-old sophomore, Barbara Young, who had just transferred from a cultured, all-girls prep school in Chicago. “I’d never even been in a school with men teachers,” she would say. “Or boys running around loose.” Back East her father had taken her to University of Chicago games, where she’d cared more about the fur coats and chrysanthemums. “But in Medford, I got to see these great big creatures in action, and I confess I exulted!”

  She was not alone. “My Aunt Margaret and my folks were i
n the ‘orchard crowd’—doctors and professional people who had pear ranches. Several had girls of my age, so after one football game, there was a dinner party. The Roberts girls gave it, at the Colony Club, where only the upper echelon belonged.”

  In her trepidation, Barbara skipped the football game to get a private dance lesson: “I’d hated dance school in Chicago—all white gloves and the boys and girls standing across a vast room, and the fear of not being chosen, and the fear of being chosen.”

  The Medford party dined at elegantly chic tables, each seating four. Maids distributed plates weighty with prime rib, baked potatoes, Waldorf salad.

  “Just behind me, at another table,” Barbara remembered years later, “was this football player. What caught my eye was that every time a maid would bring him a dinner, he’d thank her, and when she’d gone, he’d slip it onto his knee. Then he’d smile a beatific smile at another and get another dinner.”

  The boy, a tall senior named Bowerman, ended up with a meal on each knee and one on the table, all three of which he wolfed down by dessert, neatly stacking the plates before him.

  When the dancing began, the boy came over. Standing there, he wordlessly offered Barbara his hand. She took it. Nothing at dance school had prepared her for what came next: “He was strong and sensitive. At first it was wonderful. But it was dead silence. Sepulchral silence. Now I know he grew up in a silent home. I was shy, but at least we talked in my family.” Finally she couldn’t stand it any more. “You must have been hungry,” she whispered.

  “Oh, no,” he said. “Ate dinner before I came.”

  They danced on without another word. “He was always a great dancer,” Barbara would remember, “always musical, always a graceful athlete.” Barbara’s nerves melted away and were replaced by a feeling new to her experience. “More than anything in high school I wanted acceptance. On that floor, with his hand at my back guiding me, I’d never felt so relaxed. I felt unconditionally accepted.” When the music stopped, the two youngsters parted with awkward nods and rejoined their tables.

  In the beginning, Barbara would say, she and Bill shared a similar sort of yearning: “At that age, we had absolutely no self-esteem. Both of us had been raised by stern parents. My mother had been brought up a hard-shell Baptist, all hell and damnation. Bill revered his mother, but she was full of expectations, and all Fossil had urged him never to let her down, because she’d had it so hard. I had seen him in classes, in the halls, and I remember that hungry look in his eye, that lonely look.”

  That first meeting did foretell a small part of their future. Bill and Barbara would love each other wholly, even as they remained mystified by each other. Their dance would often be as wordless as its first steps, each wondering what the other could possibly be thinking. But Barbara’s uncommon gift was to be aware. It was just like her to notice the shenanigans of some guy sitting with his back to her. It was also like her to find the phrases to engrave an experience in memory, to name, to clarify. She would be the perfect balance to Bill’s tactical taciturnity.

  Barbara Young was born May 4, 1914. Her father, Ernest Hamilton Young, had been in the Signal Corps in World War I and taught flying in Texas. His oldest brother bought land in Chicago, made money, and started a family real estate company. As the youngest Young brother, Ernest didn’t go to college, but simply joined the business. “He was a great salesman,” his daughter would say, “for whom all things weren’t just possible, but visible.”

  Barbara’s parents were enfolded in the Young family prosperity: “We lived in different apartments on the South Shore, close in,” she would say. “After we left the South, it turned to slums. I spent summers in a big old house on a lake in northern Illinois.” Barbara attended the austere Mrs. Faulkner’s Day School, run by three unmarried sisters. The school taught 200 girls from kindergarten through high school, preparing them for the Eastern women’s colleges that would later be known as the Seven Sisters.

  The family’s religion was Christian Science, a creed that Barbara would almost surely have discovered even if she hadn’t been born to it. Christian Scientists read and study the Bible with purpose, to strengthen a surpassing ideal. “Why are we here?” Barbara would ask years later. “To live in intelligence, to express intelligence. This is the force in us.”

  In the mid-1920s, Ernest Young was pouring all his energy and capital into developing a golf-course community called Valparaiso in the Florida panhandle. “For three winters we were down there,” Barbara would remember, “with palms, and warm water. The adjoining town on the Gulf Coast was called Niceville. Wild pigs in the palmetto. Cows sauntered into our garden.”

  A cold wind shook this idyll to pieces. The venture failed and the Youngs headed west, to Medford, Oregon, where Ernest’s sister lived.

  In the Rogue and Applegate river valleys of southern Oregon, the clay soils and hot summers produce succulent tree fruits, especially pears. By the 1930s, 400 growers were picking 43,000 tons of Bartlett, Bosc, and Comice from 11,000 acres of orchards around Medford. The Medford pear boom attracted retired Midwesterners who ran what they called “ranches,” as if they were always rounding up, branding, and driving to market herds of lowing pears. Barbara’s Aunt Marg and Uncle Rupert named their ranch Sunny Cliff Orchard for the sandstone cliff above it. When the nation’s economy plummeted, the orchard crowd offered a haven to needy relatives.

  Barbara’s family lived at Sunny Cliff for a month while Ernest looked for work. Then they moved to a nice house on Main. Despite their straitened circumstances, her parents insisted there would be no lowering of standards of respectability. Part of that was Ernest’s adherence to the salesman’s imperative—that when you are poor, you must never look poor. But, as his daughter would remember, “he never found a job appropriate to his . . . talents. My mother did work, to be able to keep up appearances. My aunt fussed so much about the house and keeping her pictures straight that it drove me nuts. I thought one married for freedom!” When Bill laid siege to this fortress, he would find a restless damsel.

  The day after the Colony Club dance, during Sunday dinner at the ranch, the telephone on the wall rang. It was for Barbara. “I said hello and there was a long pause and then a hello back, and then a wait so long I thought the line was dead,” she would recall. “And then, ‘Could I drive out to see you?’ I said, ‘I’ll have to ask my family.’ And I did have to, all eight of them. Parents, uncles, aunts, cousins. They all looked crosswise at each other, and even though he was a senior, because he was a football star, they said they guessed so, if he just came to the house.”

  When Bill appeared at the door, Barbara slipped out and they sat on the porch. Bill said nothing, just looked around, absorbing everything. Then he said, “Want to go for a ride?” So Barbara had to take him in and introduce him to everyone and ask permission. “Finally my father was so impressed with this big Medford football player, he let me go. We got in a coupe that belonged to Bill’s brother, Dan, and drove the orchards, one of which, Hillcrest, is now on the national historic register.”

  Hillcrest Orchard deserves to be stamped into history, if only because Bill and Barbara got to know each other beneath the archways of its pollarded trees. Bowerman opened up, haltingly. He said he’d picked so many boxes of fruit from the passing branches that he didn’t even like pears any more. He said he’d noticed her in the two classes they shared, French and Latin, and asked how it was that she’d parachuted into Medford from the mysterious East. When she told him, he said he was basically a farm boy from a little place called Fossil, across the Cascades. Barbara yelped and said she wanted nothing more than to live on a farm some day.

  When Barbara said she wasn’t so blasé that she didn’t love a big, sweet pear, Bill said some were so juicy you had to take off your shirt before you sank your teeth into one. Barbara blushed.

  “People go crazy over them,” Bill said. “They taste these and never again like any others.”

  I think maybe we’re trying to talk ab
out more than pears here, thought Barbara. She let that sink in, then shouted her reaction: “I can’t wait!”

  “Our secret,” Barbara would say later, “was that we gave each other social confidence. We were so shy. We wanted to belong, to a crowd or to someone. But in a flash I’d learned I could get along with boys, or at least this one remarkable boy, and I never wanted to be alone again!”

  In later years, Bowerman’s associates would snort when Barbara called herself shy. She was reserved, in the sense of not needing to talk or hog the limelight. But once launched, she often spoke in perfect paragraphs, with topic sentences and bravura, unexpected endings.

  But at fourteen, still a truly coy maiden, she was sure her family back at the farmhouse would be frantic that the kids in the orchard were eating too richly of the tree of knowledge. The Youngs’ opinion of boys in their daughter’s life was not as harsh as Lizzie Bowerman’s, but it was strict. When Bill and Barbara returned, however, all were relaxed and welcoming. Barbara always thought Bill’s being a football player had this miraculous effect on her father. It seems equally likely that Bill had been raised by Lizzie to be rigidly respectful. He was simply an engaging, courtly young man. No matter how terse, when he did speak he was funny, and he reflexively shied from anything that might be threatening. All his adult life, he would put women on a pedestal.

  In the following weeks, Barbara tried to take a good, clear look at young Bill. “At first, I really thought he was from the wrong side of the tracks,” she would say. “They lived in a little hovel two blocks from the high school. His mother and sister looked as if they could barely buy clothes. But they had some money because Lizzie bought our old Plymouth from my dad. It turned out she had a $200 alimony from Bill’s father, but she wanted independence, so she taught school and ran the family as a kind of corporate concern, with everyone working when they could. She decided what to spend. So they did not spend.” It didn’t help that the Daily News couldn’t stay afloat. “When the paper failed, and she was too proud to ask for any more money from Jay,” Barbara would say, “it complicated life a good deal.”