Once Upon a Time in the Vest

Sunday, June 6, 2021

V 11 N. 35 Conversation with an Old Friend Leads Us to Bud Houser

 


Lemuel Clarence 'Bud' Houser



In the past 11 years working on this blog, I've met many, many people.  Easily one of the best is Pete Brown of Plano, Texas.  He is one of those guys who every time you talk to him you learn something, if fact you learn a lot of things.  We had a conversation yesterday and talked a bit about the invasion at Anzio, a subject I'd recently read about in the book  "Liberator" by Alex Kershaw.  It's about a poor child of the Depression, Felix Sparks, who rose from the ranks to become a lieutenant colonel and lead his unit to the liberation of Dachau.  Pete for years ran a business operating tours to all the battlefield sites that US forces had ever been involved in during our long history of war both at home and abroad.  He filled me in on some of the details of Anzio.

But then Pete turned to his love of track and field history and began telling me how as a 14 year old on his birthday in 1953 rode his bicycle to John Muir H.S. in Southern California and watched Fortune Gordien set a world record in the Discus in front of maybe thirty spectators at an all comers meet.

John Muir HS Pasadena, CA

For those unfamiliar with All Comers meets, those were regularly scheduled track meets, usually in the summer.  They could be any day of the week and they were open to anyone, in those days mainly boys and men, but I'm sure women were eventually brought into them.  They would not run a full schedule of events.  So you had to pick and choose what you wanted to run and  where you went to compete.  In the Los Angeles area they could be found most any day of the week somewhere during the summer.

That day, August 22, 1953, Pete fell in love with track and field.  When he raced home to tell his dad what he had witnessed, his dad told him that he had had the same experience many years before when he was 14 and saw a USC thrower named Bud Houser make a very good throw, perhaps it was a world record.  As a consequence of those events, Pete and his dad saw many track meets together and Pete eventually became a competitor who was good enough to get a scholarship to run at the U. of New Mexico as a half miler.  He even won his conference meet in that event.


Pete Brown with Earl Young
two transplanted Californians in Texas


Pete Brown in Action

Pete had more to tell me, and I was in a listening mood.  He regaled me about Bud Houser of whom I had never heard.  What, I'd never heard of the only man to ever win the Olympics in both the shot and discus?  In 1924 in Paris, the Olympics of the movie "Chariots of Fire", Bud Houser had won both those throwing events.  And in 1928 he won the discus again.  Both those discus wins were Olympic records.

Correction:  Robert Garrett also won the shot and discus for the US in the Athens Games of 1896.  He also got second in both the long jump and high jump in those games.   That's to Russ Reabold for catching that error.  

My mistake and not George’s in any way. Houser the LAST to win the shot-discus double which he did at Paris in 1924. No one has done it since then. Robert Garrett, American, accomplished the feat in 1896 in OG. I did not mention Garrett when I talked to George. Many thanks for catching the error.  Pete

Houser's path to the Olympic Games was not an easy one.  He was orphaned on a farm in Missouri in 1911 at the age of 10.  His older sister who was living in California, arranged to have him stay with her and her husband where he worked on their farm and built up his strength baling hay in the summers.  He was not a big man by today's throwing standards, only 187 pounds but his  6' 5" frame must have given him some leverage advantage.

Pete's recounting of the story began to remind me of Joe Rantz, one of the main characteris in Daniel James Brown's classic Olympics book  "The Boys in the Boat".   Rantz had been abandoned on a farm as a youngster when his  father remarried and left him on his own during the Depression.  

For some unexplained reason Bud Houser did not start high school in Oxnard until he was 18.  But he took up track and won the California HS championships three times (1920-21-22) and won the men's  US shot put championship when he was a senior in high school.   At the national high school championships held in Chicago annually back then he won the shot in a national high school record of  56 feet, won the discus, was third in the hammer, and fifth in the javelin and as a one man team, Oxnard finished third overall.  

At his high school graduation, the athletic fields at Oxnard were named after him.  He also played basketball and baseball and was considering an offer to sign with the Chicago Cubs or go to dental school when he graduated from USC.  Legend has it that Jim Thorpe who had had some difficulties with his amateur status, because he had played semi-pro baseball was encouraged to talk to Houser about going to dental school instead of playing baseball.  Supposedly Houser's future father-in-law had set up the meeting with Thorpe.

One book about Bud Houser has been written  "Houser, Pride of America" by Robert Dunn which Pete Brown possesses. He also gets a 15-page chapter in a book called "Tales of the Gods".   Most of Pete's very large collection of track and field items has been donated to his alma mater where Rich Ceronie is working on an extensive history of that university's track program.  

Here is a brief passage from Wikipedia about Houser's dental career. 

Houser became a dentist to many movie stars with a practice in Hollywood, California before moving to Palm Desert, California. The stadium at Oxnard High School (the original location and now the new location) is named in his honor, the announcement a surprise at his graduation. 

A much more in depth account of Bud Houser's life can be seen that the California Interscholastic Federation Southern Section website.  I promise you this link is worth the time you take to download and read it.  And thanks to Pete Brown for bringing Bud Houser's story to us.   George Brose

CIFFSS website Bud Houser  Link   written by Dr. John Dahlem

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V 14 N. 71 Dallas Long R.I.P. 1940-2024

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