Vol. 1 No. 60 Long live the Past

We've all been enjoying reading Roy Mason's reviews of old T&FN issues, and he in turn has enjoyed reading your comments. I try to post those comments on the blog as well. If there are things you want to add, just write to me at irathermediate@gmail.com   . I'll copy and paste them as they come in. I think when reading these entries they might well serve as a platform from which any of you may wish to add your comments and memories of certain events. A recent addition to our list of readers is Dixon Farmer who many of you will remember as 1963 NCAA 440 hurdles champion, a US team member, coach at Michigan and Washington, and an AD at Occidental. Welcome aboard.

Jerry McFadden whose picture appears with Bob Schul and myself ran at U. of Missouri, graduating in 1963. Jerry and I competed against each other in a triangular meet in Norman, OK and then in the Big 8 Meet where he placed second in the mile with a PR 4:05. He went on to serve in the Peace Corps in Morocco and coached a number of up and coming runners in that country. He also wrote a series of articles in a new running journal Runner's World back in the early 70's. After my graduation from Oklahoma, I too went into the Peace Corps and served in Tanzania. Jerry and I both met and married French women whom we met overseas. So we have a number of common threads in our backgrounds.

Several of Jerry's Moroccan athletes emigrated to Canada where I was living in the mid 70's, and I met them in coaching circles in Montreal. They always asked me if I knew Jerry McFadden, and I could only say , that I had run against him a long time ago. About two years ago, one of them, Jose Sant, now a national coach in Canada, repeated his request for me to find Jerry. That happened this Spring, and Jerry and I began a correspondence that led to our getting together last week in Dayton, OH. I invited Bob Schul to come over and meet Jerry as well and we shared a lot of stories about the good old days. An interesting and little known bit of track trivia is that Bob also was in the Peace Corps. How many Olympians ever served in the Peace Corps? He was in Maylasia as their national coach in 1973. He and Jerry compared notes on running the Hash House in Maylasia. George