V 5 N. 123 End of Another Year

Roy , Steve , and George
outside the Silver Bar, Franklin, Ohio April, 1998
We're better looking now in 2016

Hello to all of our loyal and first time readers.  It's been a three week dry spell with postings on the blog.  I just hit a streak of laziness, I do confess.  Anyway we hope to pick it up in the New Year which will be the start of our 7th year of this 'hobby'.  It has become a big part of  our lives.  If we were a business we might be feeling a bit worried as our readershp is down by almost 30% from last year at this time when we peaked at 10,000 hits per month to around 7,000 this month.  Heads would be rolling in corporate America.  Some have suggested the average age of our readers may account for this.  They're dieing off or going to nursing homes.   Say it isn't so.  Anyway rest assured we will plod on trying to keep pace with fifty year old issues of Track and Field News.    TF&N doesn't seem to be offended by our use of their works, so we will keep at it, although we think we may stop when we reach 1970 (four years from now).

Roy decides what will be covered in each of those old issues.  We obviously can't review everything.  He writes the synopsis in Ukiah, CA, sends it to be proof read in Piqua, OH by our mutual friend Steve Price, then it is sent to me on Vancouver Island, BC to do photo searches, editing and posting onto the blog.   The photo searches tend to turn up other stories and incidents to add to Roy's and Steve's work and out of it comes Once Upon A Time in the Vest in its various and sundry formats.  This year I see we've posted 123 entries.  In July we were honored by the Track and Field Writers of America as the best Track and Field Blog of 2015.  This was entirely unexpected as were were neither aware of the organization or their annual award, but we will continue to do our best to serve track and field readers who remember those times and those who want to learn something about the period.

Interestingly our troikaesque relationship began about 1984.  Roy and Steve had known each other in the club coaching world of track and field from the late 1970s.  Roy coached a very successful high school runner Debbie Heald who held the national high school indoor mile record in 1972 until it was broken only two years ago by Mary Cain.  Steve had for years coached the Kettering Striders in Ohio and then  went on to the collegiate ranks at U. of Dayton, Bowling Green , and currently University of Findlay, all in Ohio.    In 1984 Steve got a coaching gig in Bahrain in the Persian Gulf and wrote regularly to both Roy and me.  At that time I was teaching in Zimbabwe for a few years when we met in Dayton, OH my hometown.  I had been a so so miler at the U. of Oklahoma.    So Steve started forwarding Roy's letters to me, and we began circulating all our letters between the three of us.  I finally met Roy about 1987 in Montreal after we had returned from Africa, and then once more when my family were on our way to Beijing for a one year teaching contract in 1988.  We continued our correspondences often via cassette recordings which became more popular than letters for several years.

I started a small blog in the 90s about U. of Oklahoma track and field alums of the 1950s and 60s and played with that for several years with the help of a cyber astute cousin living in South Korea.

Then one day in 2008,  Roy sent me his first synopsis of a couple of  TF&Ns from 1952 and 1953

To see this initial posting, go to the right side of your screen and begin scrolling down , down, down, to the first posting  Vol. 1 No. 1.   

The rest is  blog history now on our  494th  posting.

In these six years we've met, written to , or talked to a lot of nice people including three wonderful fellow bloggers, John Cobley, David Baskwill, and Gary Corbitt. The non-bloggers include Pete Brown, who keeps us supplied with missing TF&N issues,   Earl Young, Ernie Cunliffe, Jim Allen, Jeff Allen, Dick Trace, Bruce Kritzler, Steve Price, Geoff Williams,  Les Hegedus, John Lawler, Bill Schnier, Susan Asuaba, Phil Scott, David Rapp, Steve Fisher, Dennis Kavanaugh, Bill Flint, Michael Solomon, Neville Soll, John Lawson, Gail Hodgson, Marti Liquori,  Jerry McFadden, David Costill, Bill Blewett, Bill Fink, Arjan Gelling, Bill Dellinger, Rick Lower, Leif Bugge, Bob Tague, Ray Wyatt, Bill Dotson, John Bork Jr., Paul O'Shea, Grace Butcher, Rene Mathison, Web Laudat, Jim Perry, John Perry, Jim Metcalf, Al Lawrence, Billy Mills,  Tom Murphy,Bill Stone, Bob Roncker, Bob Schul, Bill Jacobs, Walt Mizell, Bruce Yerman, Chuck Frawley, Dan Laquerre, David Bailey, , David Webb, Dick Daymont, Gary Wilson, Dixon Farmer, Eric Tweit, Scott Epperson, J.D. Martin, Jeff Lucas, Jeremy Mosher, Jared Ashmore, Joe Swanson, Jose Sant, Kara Storage, Tara Storage, L.J. Cohen, Lars McGee, Lefty Martin, Matt Farmer, Michael Reneau, Orville Atkins, Pat Moran, Paul Ebert, Preston Davis, Rich Elliot, Rich Davis, Billy and Ras Calhoun, Ray Olfky, John Wilderman, Ricardo Romo, Richard Mach, Sheppard Miers, Stephen Morelock, Sylvia Gleason, John Coyne, Thomas Coyne, Tim Tubb, Tom Trumpler, Lee Smith, Woody Young, and John Mitchell.

All the best for a safe, healthy, and prosperous New Year

George and Roy