V 5 N. 67 A Two Week Hiatus

Wow,  two whole weeks without a single posting.   Been on 'vacation' in Southwest Ohio, seeing family and some old track buddies.  With all that free time not working on this blog, I managed to stay out of trouble and find some nice old journals and magazines at Steve Price's house in Piqua, Ohio.  Steve's 'stuff ' goes back to the 1960s and included his 1965 Boston Marathon program and  race number.   He finished in the top hundred that year after hitchhiking from Miami University of Ohio to Boston to run the race.

Steve and George

Below, the 444 listed entries for Boston in 1965.

Were you there?  To see the listings more clearly, place cursor over picture and click on it.

The new picture that appears can then be clearly enlarged by pressing down on 'control button' and

scrolling to enlarge it.  To return to article click on picture and then reopen the article when the website reappears.

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                                Below: Top Ten Runners for the Ten Previous Years  1955-64.
                     Note: One of our regular readers, Canadian, Orville Atkins place 5th in 1962.
                   After going to Tokyo to see the Olympics in 1964, Orville emigrated to L.A.
                    and trained and ran for the L.A. Track Club under Coach Igloi.

Steve went into coaching shortly after graduation while he was teaching in Kettering, OH public schools.  He started the Kettering Striders club for girls in age group track.  Boys shortly after became part of the club which travelled around the country competing in AAU junior meets.   In that period, Steve would serve as coach on three US National teams.  One was at the US Russia dual meet in Moscow where Mary Decker threw the baton at a Russian who had bumped her off the track in a relay.  The Russian press queried Steve after the meet about what he would do to Mary for her misdeed.  His reply was classic.  "We're due to leave Moscow tomorrow, and she'll be on the plane."  Steve also coached the US women in the 1977 World Cross Country championships in Dusseldorf, West Germany and coached the women's race walking team in the World Championships held in Syracuse, NY.

   

USA Women's Team  Members
Julie Brown, Eryn Forbes, Doris Heritage, Sue Kinsey,
Kathy Mills, Peg Neppel,
Reserves Mikki Gorman, Carol Cook,  Coach Stephen Price 

Course Map

As girls track became part of the regular high school programs, the club system faded.  At that point, Steve became the first men's cross country coach at the University of Dayton about 1980.  That team was started so that Dayton could meet NCAA Div. 1 requirements of providing multiple sports so that the university could continue to  field its nationally ranked men's basketball program.  The cross country team was one step above a club with an $800 budget.  Steve, coached,  drove the bus, washed the jockstraps,  and kept the beer in a cooler for the trip home.   From there he went to Bahrain in the Persian Gulf to coach their men's distance runners through the US Sports Academy.  After that two year gig he went back to Kettering Schools, before taking on the women's cross country and track programs at Bowling Green State University and after retiring from that position began coaching hurdlers  part time with Findlay University twenty miles down the pike from Bowling Green.  He is still active on that job.

This is enough for one posting but there will be more things from the old mags and programs I found and photographed at Steve's place.  Oh yes, and one other picture I found of Steve.