by Kenny Moore
Bowerman absorbed the tactical lesson that in a race among equals the pacesetter seldom wins. But he went home without seeing a second Australian miler, because James J. Bailey had broken bones in his foot between the preliminary heat and the final. A gregarious spirit, Bailey would recall that a couple of Canadians took pity on him. “They said, ‘Come on, you have to see Oregon, where we go to school.’”
So half-miler Doug Clement and pole-vaulter Bob Reed brought Bailey to Eugene and presented the hobbling Aussie to Bowerman’s appraising eye. Bowerman heard that Bailey’s fastest mile was 4:12 and that he was a five-time Australian 880 champion with a best of 1:51. Bailey’s first impression of the Oregon coach was that he was “really strange,” full of awkward pauses “where everything stopped and you didn’t know what to say.”
Still, Bowerman was a major college track coach and Bailey had never had a coach of any kind. The Aussie felt obliged to level with him: “Bill, I’m banged up. I’m twenty-five years of age. I’ve had more disappointments than successes in life as well as in running. I don’t even know whether I want to run anymore after these bones knit.”
Again, a pause. Bowerman seemed to be studying Bailey’s muscular shoulders, hardly those of a gazelle. But Bailey’s honesty had touched him. “We’re prepared,” said Bowerman at last, “to give you a foreign student scholarship. It would be entirely up to you whether you want to run again or not.” Bailey accepted, figuring he could do it for a year and see.
At Oregon that fall. Bowerman made Bailey run with Dellinger and two-miler Ken Reiser. The workouts, Bailey would say, were “an absolutely shocking distance. Forty-five minutes! Continuous running! It would about kill me.” Only his Aussie pride kept him going. “To stay with them, I’d say to myself, ‘No Aussie man is going to be left by college boys.’”
The next spring, Bailey had the stamina to respond well to Bowerman’s intervals. “I didn’t think they were anything special,” he would say. “Ten 440s, that kind of thing. I just ran with Dellinger and the team.” The interval training also took effect almost without his noticing. His rainy, early season races against Oregon State and Washington were won in slow times. In the Pacific Coast Conference meet in Eugene he raced only the 880, which he won.
So when he and Dellinger lined up for the start of the 1955 NCAA mile in the Los Angeles Coliseum, they were scarcely noticed. The favorite was UCLA’s Bob Seaman, who had run 4:01 as a sophomore and had both a kick and the ability to pace himself. Mid-race, Seaman set out to run away from the field. Dellinger and Bailey easily hung with and swept past him on the final turn, with Bailey winning in 4:05.6 and Dellinger right behind him in 4:06.4.
“I’d never broken 4:12,” Bailey would remember. “And to go one-two, it put the school on the map. And then Ken Reiser won the two-mile! All of a sudden people were asking, ‘Where were these guys coming from?’” As the world would soon learn, Bowerman hadn’t developed a solitary prodigy. He was shaping a succession of them.
CHAPTER 10
A Friend, a Son, a Community
ONE DAY IN THE EARLY 1950S, AS BILL AND BARBARA WERE SETTLING INTO THEIR house, John and Robin Jaqua hiked up the next pasture to the east of the Bowerman acreage. Below them spread 1,400 acres of fields and row crops embraced on three sides by the river and dotted with a little town’s worth of old buildings, buckling under blackberry. A sound between a voice and a squawk reached them. “Private . . . private . . . property!” To their left, a woman in jeans and plaid shirt had come out of the tree line and was advancing across the dusty hillside. John, a young lawyer who’d been farming about twenty miles south of Eugene, raised a hand in greeting. The woman raised a gun in answer.
The Jaquas bowed and retreated. They made their way down the hill, passed an old cemetery, and came upon the Bowerman driveway, with Bill in it. John Jaqua had met him in passing at the Oregon Club, the athletic department’s Monday coaches’ lunches for boosters, but this would be the first conversation that gave them a sense of each other.
Bill led the visitors onto the deck and Barbara told them about the farm that had caught their eye. It belonged to Alex Seavey, the profligate son of James Seavey, who had begun the J. V. Seavey Hop Company around the turn of the twentieth century. Hops, used to flavor beer, are the flowers of vines and grown on wires twenty feet high. Picking them takes a crew, so for forty years, summer laborers had pitched tents, built huts, and stayed the season. The dilapidated barns, store, and dance hall were remnants of those times. Then artificial flavorings cut the demand for hops. When Alex took the place over, he mortgaged it to the hilt and drained it of value. But the bleaker things grew, the more the Seaveys dug in. Anyone ignoring no-trespassing signs was turned away by one or another vocal Seavey, often armed.
John Jaqua made discreet inquiries and soon learned the extent of Alex Seavey’s debts. To an intermediary, a state policeman whom the Seaveys called daily to report trespassers, Jaqua said, “When he goes broke, bring him in to the office.” It took a year, but Seavey showed up. Were the Jaquas serious?
Were they? Robin visited Barbara and asked, since they had small children, whether it was true that the area was crawling with rattlesnakes. “Oh no, don’t worry! Don’t worry at all!” said Barbara.
So the Jaquas closed the deal in 1953. One of Robin’s brothers, Chuck Robinson, visited the property and wrote the rest of the family, “John and Robin have finally found a place that makes Tobacco Road look like Park Avenue.”
But the neighbors were generous. “Bill Bowerman helped me set up my water system,” John Jaqua would remember. “That’s when I realized how strong he was. He picked up this huge roll of plastic pipe and carried it out from the culvert like it was nothing. I said to myself, ‘This is not someone I’d choose to be on the wrong side of.’”
It was a great joy that the swimming hole had passed into friendly hands. Both families took their kids there for a celebratory dip. Barbara arrived in a bathing suit and heavy rubber boots.
“Why the boots?” asked Robin.
“Snakes,” Barbara said.
“I thought you said not to worry.”
“You don’t have to worry! Just wear boots!”
In fact, because the hills held caves and the fields supported many mice, the area was a natural for snakes. In 1961, John Jaqua was driving home one summer evening and saw Bill’s car stopped at the Bowerman driveway, dust rising. Bowerman had a thick-bodied, hissing, writhing diamondback pressed to the gravel with a clipboard.
“Need any help?” asked Jaqua.
“Nope,” said Bowerman. “Just taking him a while to quit.”
In the Register-Guard that week there was a photo of the clipboard and the seven-foot snake, the largest ever killed in Lane County. Bill’s achievement was not universally acclaimed in the family. Had he let the monster live, budding biologist Jay, then seventeen, could have milked it for four times the venom of any of the other rattlers he kept in a cage, sending their venom to antivenin labs.
Bowerman and Jaqua both contained elements of the citizen-farmer, loving the land but not letting it isolate them from the wider world. Each admired the other for a quality they shared. Bowerman would describe Jaqua as “the greatest sizer-upper of a situation I ever knew.” Jaqua sized up Bowerman thusly: “He knew you very well before you ever knew him.”
As Otto Frohnmayer would declare of Bowerman, “He can be very cold about people he doesn’t respect, but if he picks you as a friend, he is a friend.” And Bowerman would have good reason to respect his new neighbor. Bill was staggered by it when he grasped what John had done and survived in the war.
As a Marine pilot, Jaqua had shipped out to New Caledonia in the spring of 1943, along with his good friend Jim Boyden, to fly dive-bombers and torpedo planes called TBM Avengers. After surviving three six-week combat tours on Guadalcanal, they began an assault on Rabaul in late fall. This major Japanese staging base—five airfields and a port—was surrounded by towering volcanoes riddled wit
h tunnels and antiaircraft batteries.
Every raid on Rabaul resulted in allied losses; Jaqua’s craft was hit several times. At length, the US high command decided that Marine fliers should lay mines at the entrance to Rabaul’s harbor. “This was a night operation and we had to fly down the channel in a single file at 200-feet altitude and 200-knot airspeed,” Jaqua would recount in Navy Wings of Gold, written by F. Willard Robinson, another of Robin’s brothers. “We had to fly through an alley of fire, right between those fortified volcanoes.” With all the searchlights on them, they were blasted from every direction.
The squadron’s last mission took place on Valentine’s Day, 1944. From Jaqua’s point of view, the assignment served no purpose: “We had already destroyed the base and all the ships that hadn’t been sunk were gone.” But orders were orders; the planes took off. That was the last time Jaqua saw his friend Jim Boyden. The searchlights were blinding, the enemy firestorm horrific. Boyden didn’t make it back. “To lose my best friend on the last mission we flew, after three tours of combat, in a useless attack, was devastating,” Jaqua would say. “A terrible experience I will never forget.” Only ten pilots, Jaqua among them, returned to San Francisco in the spring of 1944.
Although hospitalized with an ulcer, Jaqua’s reprieve from war was temporary. He was next ordered to join the staff of Admiral Harry W. Hill, then based in Coronado, California. One bright note was that Robin was able to join him for the several months that he remained stateside. The following February, Robin gave birth to their first son. They named him James Boyden Jaqua.
In early 1945, John sailed on the admiral’s flagship as an air support officer, coordinating fighters, bombers, and air-to-ground rockets during the invasion of Okinawa, the largest and most costly operation of the war in the Pacific. “Coordinating” meant going ashore and calling in planes to release rocket fire during the cave-to-cave assaults on the Japanese. “Marines moved right into the face of the caves and fired the caverns with napalm,” Jaqua would recall many years later, his lawyerly choice of words no mask for the horror. “It was terrible to see a Japanese soldier running from a cave, his whole body on fire, only to collapse and die on the rocks.”
After Okinawa fell, at the cost of 12,500 American lives and 100,000 Japanese, Jaqua was put on the staff planning the invasion of the Japanese island of Kyushu. In August, when Japan surrendered, he sailed home a major with seven Air Medals, the Battle Campaign Medal with five stars, and the Distinguished Flying Cross, “for undue bravery in pressing his attacks through intense enemy fire.”
After graduating from Oregon Law School in 1950, Jaqua took over the Eugene law firm of a deceased uncle, bought a beautiful farm, and began a neighbor-to-neighbor partnership for the ages. Neither Bowerman nor Jaqua spoke of all they had witnessed in the war. Both exuded an almost tangible sense of good fortune.
Both also were not always contained by the bounds of civil propriety. Jaqua, like Otto Frohnmayer, loved the humor of the barracks and the barnyard. He would often appear on the Hayward Field infield after work, where Bowerman would be timing someone’s workout, and he’d whisper some sophomoric, grotesque joke. (A mild example: “Kid’s sitting in an outhouse, but there’s no paper, just a hole with a sign, ‘To clean fingers, put here.’ So he wipes with his fingers and sticks ’em in the hole and a kid outside with a hammer hits ’em and the sitter pulls ’em in and sucks on ’em.”) Bowerman would laugh so hard he’d double over and drop his stopwatch.
Robin Jaqua was more than equal to the tenor of McKenzie View Drive. One year, on the eve of the neighborhood’s annual picnic, which the Jaquas hosted, Barbara called in a panic: “We can’t come! Last night a dog came in and killed all our chickens, and we shot the dog, and now we’re afraid someone at the picnic will ask, “Has anyone seen my husky?”’ Robin blanched; they were taking care of their son Stephen’s Norwegian elkhound. “You’ve killed our Stephen’s dog!” she cried. “But never mind. At least now you can come to the picnic!”
When Bill got out of the car, he was solemn. Robin felt awful. “He’d been proud of those chickens. He’d worked days on that coop.” Bill walked up to her and said, “Robin, Robin . . . ” (unendurable silence) “I like your attitude!”
Barbara Bowerman would describe Robin as “a philosopher of nature, half poetry, half metaphor.” That would be the metaphor of Jungian archetypes, the stories and structures common to all traditions and psyches, a discipline in which Robin would earn her doctorate at Oregon and then study further at the Jungian Institute in Switzerland—just the person with whom to discuss child rearing.
Topic A: Jon Bowerman. In his early his teens, Bill’s oldest began to bully the four-years-younger Jay. When Barbara separated them, Jon was contemptuously rude. Barbara asked Bill to talk to his son. Bill merely said, “They’ll outgrow it.” Shocked, she suggested that Jon needed limits and help. Bill replied, “I can’t talk to him unless he asks for help.”
Barbara simply did not understand this; Bill had no qualms about intervening with his athletes. Robin Jaqua suggested that Bill’s enduring anger against his father had inevitably affected his notions of fatherhood. It had not been his own father who scared Bill straight, after all. It had been Ercel Hedrick. Barbara still didn’t see why Bill couldn’t just act like Hedrick and lay down the law to Jon the way he did to the Oregon runners.
Decades later, Barbara would put that question to me. All I could answer—and it was no answer—was that we were not his kids. We were, in that phrase he took from medicine, in his care. And the necessary distance of a doctor was a part of that. He didn’t love us as sons; he cared for us as patients, administering to our needs. He could issue edicts and hammer us as we needed it, but he couldn’t hammer his loved ones. Or at least he couldn’t until he absolutely had to.
Although Barbara may not have thought so, Bill was equally distraught. The only time John Jaqua ever saw Bill Bowerman with tears in his eyes was when he came to say how stumped he was about Jon.
In the mid-1950s, fourteen-year-old Jon mouthed off at school and was suspended from Coburg High. In an echo of J. W. Chambers becoming a mountain man, he ran away to be a trapper on the river.
He didn’t actually stay away for long. But he was out again every morning at four. Getting upriver in a borrowed, old pickup, he’d put the canoe in at Mohawk and float down to the house, setting traps. In the afternoon he’d hitchhike back upstream and collect his catch—beaver, muskrat, an occasional mink. Back then fur buyers would pay $30 for a big beaver pelt, $25 for a mink. “It took three or four hours to scrape a beaver pelt,” Jon would recall. “I was convinced I was gonna make a living as a trapper.”
Bill watched him boiling his traps to rid them of human smell before heading out to set them again. He could only admire his work ethic. Son and father regarded each other, each feeling the other measuring, pushing.
When it came to his athletes, Bill had ways to make sure someone wanted to be on his team. He had a genius for finding the person’s weak spot, hazing and hectoring on some point of the athlete’s training or his classes or his associates until he demonstrated acceptance of Bill as the ultimate judge, the tribal village elder. With no corresponding process to apply to his son, Bill was stymied. Still, he knew about hardheaded men, being one himself. He gave Jon time.
Eventually they began to talk of practical matters. Jon fiercely wanted to be financially independent and to play football. The trapline wasn’t paying enough to cover that. So they arrived at an arrangement. If Jon went back to Coburg High he could play there and work summers in a plywood mill. Jon would in fact earn his way in the world from the time he was sixteen. “We made our peace,” Jon would say. “I came back and finished high school.”
In truth, it wasn’t quite that simple. When Jon was suspended from Coburg a second time, Bill took him into the parental bedroom. “The only time we ever went in there was for discipline,” Jon would remember, “and I was so scared I was afraid, seriously afraid
for my life.” Usually Bill would get out the Bible, turn to Exodus, and read the part about honoring thy mother and thy father. This time, though, he just sat there: “The silence went on so long I actually wanted him to hit me.”
In the end, Bill did have to hammer a loved one. Quietly and calmly, he said to his firstborn son, “I’m going to tell you what Ercel Hedrick told me when the same thing happened to me at Medford: ‘It is never, ever going to happen again.’” And it never did.
Engaging his sons in fatherly heart-to-hearts may not have been Bowerman’s strong suit, but he was a master at engaging the rest of Eugene in his projects. Almost from the moment he took over at Oregon, he’d been amassing loyal contacts and assistants. First, he’d trained a new generation of officials to conduct meets on schedule. One of them, camping buddy Ray Hendrickson, who’d helped him build his house, developed into the finest starter of sprint races in the nation.
Hendrickson’s other job was being principal of North Eugene High School, where his gruff baritone, Norse countenance, and icy eyes beneath haystack brows easily intimidated brash teenagers. Hendrickson’s choice of vice principal delighted Bowerman: It was Bob Newland.
In the ten years since Newland had replaced Bowerman as track coach at Medford High, his teams had won the state championship nine times, been second once, and won eight Hayward Relays titles. At North Eugene, Newland technically would be the guidance counselor, while math teacher Denny Davis was the official track coach. But it was Newland who guided the runners, among whom I was lucky to count myself.
No man could out-organize Bob Newland. When he, wife Carolyn, and fellow Medfordite Tom Ragsdale threw themselves into putting on Bowerman’s summer age-group all-comers meets—the direct descendant of the meets they had organized in Medford—they were soon a Eugene institution. Each week, as many as 600 kids dragged their parents out to Hayward Field, fostering, as it had in Medford, not only a growing pool of young talent but also a rising tide of adult supporters for Oregon track.
