It gives us great pleasure to announce an upcoming author reading and book launch by Bruce Yerman son of 1960 Olympic Gold medallist Jack Yerman. You are all invited. As some of you know, Jack and his wife have been through a lot in recent times, losing their house in the Camp fire in Paradise, CA. See the Zoom link below. And be sure to order a copy of the book.
George Brose
Inviting you to join us at the unveiling and an author read from the VICTORY LAP, and to wish a Happy Birthday to Jack!
· When: Sunday, Feb 6 @ 6 p.m. PST
· Where: ZOOM https://us02web.zoom.us/
j/5307202304?pwd= ZkFGUDBWYkNHakM0QzU4OHpkOFYrdz 09 o Meeting ID: 530 720 2304 - Computer Passcode: Gold
o Dial by your location +1 669 900 9128 US (San Jose)
o Meeting ID: 530 720 2304
o Phone Passcode: 726016
Enjoy book info and video @ https://bhyerman.wixsite.com/
books
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We hope to see you!
Below is an article from the Ukiah Daily News that we posted a few years ago about the Yerman's and the fire.
By Sharon Martin |
PUBLISHED: November 8, 2019 at 1:46 am | UPDATED: November 8, 2019 at 8:22 am
CHICO — Jack Yerman sits in the living room of his apartment, clutching a framed black and white photo.
“I’m lucky to have had this reprinted,” Yerman says while staring at the picture of him with his son Bruce as a baby, sitting in a trophy cup that he’d won in Philadelphia.
He stands up, walks to the front of the room and proudly places the photo on the TV stand.
It’s one of the few photos that Yerman has been able to reclaim — he purchased the photo from a newspaper — after his home was clenched within the grasp of the deadly Camp Fire.
Yerman’s home was a 2,600 square-foot haven nestled within the towering woods of Paradise. It featured a trout stream, a large swimming pool and a completely remodeled interior.
But the most important belongings inside the home of the 1960 Olympic gold medalist was the USA Olympic tracksuit and baby pictures of his children. All of them gone after the house burned in the Camp Fire on Nov. 8, 2018.
“We didn’t get to save much — like all the goodies you save over the years and the memorabilia,” Yerman said from his apartment living room in Chico. “The things that we all keep inside a secret box. It’s gone. But that’s life.”
Yerman, who was part of the gold medalist 1,600-meter relay team, has endured anything but a simple life. At 80, the longtime Paradise resident is left to piece back together his life following the Camp Fire.
On Nov. 8, Yerman and his wife, Carol Mattern-Yerman, weren’t even in the country. The couple took a nine-day trip to Puerto Rico to visit a family friend and were left helplessly watching what was unfolding in their hometown.
“We took a chance to have a good time,” Yerman said. “We watched (the Camp Fire) on TV.”
Mattern-Yerman’s daughter, Emily Vail, who was in Paradise, was the first to call Jack and Carol in Puerto Rico to alert them about the fire.
“At first my daughter called … she goes ‘It’s looking really bad mom. We’re leaving,’” Mattern-Yerman said. “The last call I got from her she called to say goodbye. She said ‘It’s a firestorm. I love you. Goodbye.’ She made it. But at the time she didn’t think she was going to make it.”
Jack and Carol were only married for about four months when the Camp Fire broke out. The two were living in separate homes at the time. Jack’s home was burned and nothing was saved, but Carol had arranged for someone to watch her small, white rescue dog named Brady while they were in Puerto Rico. Thankfully, Yerman had stored his gold medal at Carol’s home.
“(Carol) called the dog watcher and said ‘Hey get out of town, take the dog and take the gold medal too,’” Yerman said. “The dog and the gold medal were all we saved.”
The gold medal was won when the foursome of Yerman, Earl Young, Glenn Davis and Otis Davis finished with a world record time of 3 minutes, 2.37 seconds to win the 1,600-meter relay race at 1960 Olympics in Rome. Yerman ran an opening leg of 46.2 seconds.
“Guys like to keep their Olympic running outfits and pins … but I lost my donkey derby trophy. That’s about as good as a gold medal,” Yerman joked. “Those were some nice memories up there.”
He never lived in Oroville since his mother and father divorced when he was born. He and his mother moved to Woodland where he grew up and went to high school.
His father, an alcoholic and drug addict, ended up dying of an overdose in Sacramento at the age of 55.
His family never owned a car, meaning he either had to walk, run or ride a bike to get around town. That’s when he grew fond of running and just being outside.
“It was a great place to be a kid,” Yerman said. “We were kind of on the poor side. I never went on vacations so I had to make my own fun. The way I did was to go down to the park and play. It was a natural thing. I enjoyed physical activity.”
After graduating from Woodland High School, Yerman ended up attending college at UC Berkeley, where he ran track and played fullback for the football team.
“It wasn’t easy going to college,” Yerman said. “If you don’t make it, you’re a failure in your mind.”
Like everything else in his life, Yerman’s journey to the Olympics didn’t come with ease.
“Making the Olympics was a miracle for me — even getting there,” Yerman said.
In order to qualify for the Olympic Trials held at Stanford, Yerman had to finish in the top seven at the NCAA championships. Yerman was competing in the 400-meter race with the hopes of winning an individual gold medal.
“There are eight guys in the race. I’m in last place watching them run away. It’s over,” Yerman recalled. “As we’re coming around the last turn, a kid from Iowa falls down. I qualified.”
“Two weeks later, I didn’t have time to rest. So I was at Stanford, and I win. I was just lucky.”
In Rome, Yerman’s quest for an individual gold medal would end in the 400 semifinals, as described in the book “Your Time Will Come” by Jack’s son Bruce Yerman.
Yerman was able to still win gold as part of the 1,600-meter relay team.
The two first tried living in Santa Clara, but it wasn’t quite what they were looking for.
“We probably could have stayed there and done well, but we both just grew up in small towns,” Yerman said. “We said we want our kids to go to a town with one high school. Out in the country where the kids could run around a little bit.”
They started looking in Northern California, then Yerman landed a job teaching at Chico High.
“We drove around and liked Paradise,” Yerman said. “It fit our mold better.”
They rented for their first three years in Paradise before purchasing their home where they would raise their four children.
Margo Yerman died in May 2014 while holding Jack’s hand in their home.
Yerman, who had played for Cal in the 1959 Rose Bowl, had his Rose Bowl ring left behind in Paradise. When Paradise was opened back up to the public following the Camp Fire, Jack and Carol hesitated to go back to their properties and sift through the debris.
“We didn’t personally do much sifting. It was just overwhelming,” Yerman said. “Most of the things I lost were un-siftable. They were consumed.”
But Yerman’s son, Bruce, decided to look through the debris of his childhood home. Within the rubble, he found the Rose Bowl ring, charred with the center jewel gone and melted. The twinkle of the diamonds placed in the shape of a football had been diminished but they still remain intact.
Yerman wanted the ring restored so he sent it to Jostens, the company that made it. About six weeks passed and the new, restored ring had arrived. It looked identical to the original, but the original, burned ring had yet to arrive at Yerman’s home.
However, the original wound up in the possession of Tony Borders, a 31-yard old manager at Napa Auto Parts in Durham.
An unassuming white package arrived at Borders’ apartment. The packaging had Jack Yerman’s name with Borders’ address and no return address stamped on it.
“It was just a little white bag with his name and my address,” Borders said. “It was super weird.”
Often receiving junk mail, Borders didn’t think too much about the package. He placed the unopened bag on his coffee table, where it sat for two weeks.
One afternoon, Borders was tidying up his mail stack and decided to go ahead and open the package. There he found the burned Rose Bowl ring.
“I opened it up and went ‘Whoa,’” Borders recalled. “I didn’t want to take a brush to clean it up. I didn’t want to destroy it.”
Borders stored the ring in his safe, and then started doing some research. He searched the name ‘Yerman’ online and discovered he played in the Rose Bowl in 1959.
“I thought maybe the family was getting it restored as a memento,” Borders said. “If this belongs to somebody’s family, that motivated me even more to try to find out who it belongs to.”
Borders said he didn’t want to broadcast the ring everywhere for fear of an impostor trying to claim it. Instead, he reached out to Bruce Yerman on Facebook to try and get it back to his father. Borders and Bruce Yerman met up in Chico to give back the ring, a possession that Jack is thankful to have back in his life.
“I called (Borders) up and thanked him,” Jack Yerman said.
“What are the odds of somebody bringing it back?” said Mattern-Yerman.
“I’ve got mixed emotions. Sometimes we’re thankful, we really are. But sometimes we wished we were there and what we would have done,” Yerman said. “A lot of mixed emotions.”
Yerman, at one point, was actually on the missing persons list. He had received a few calls from friends asking if he was alive. Since then, the couple has listened to some speakers and done some counseling to deal with the situation.
Yerman still tries to see the silver lining within the situation. His granddaughter, Tori MacKay, a sophomore at Chico High, wrote a song about Paradise that Yerman happily likes to boast about. And at their temporary home, Yerman has grown fond of his neighbors.
“There’s some very nice people here. Nice tenants,” Yerman said.
The couple now lives in Chico off of The Esplanade, in an apartment complex owned by Yerman.
Weeks before the Camp Fire broke out, Yerman was renovating one of the units.
The previous tenants had trashed the place, leaving behind soiled couches and black stains in the bathroom.
“It was disgusting,” Mattern-Yerman said.
After the fire, Jack and Carol lived in a trailer for about six weeks before making the decision to move into the renovated apartment.
“I’m lucky to have had this reprinted,” Yerman says while staring at the picture of him with his son Bruce as a baby, sitting in a trophy cup that he’d won in Philadelphia.
He stands up, walks to the front of the room and proudly places the photo on the TV stand.
It’s one of the few photos that Yerman has been able to reclaim — he purchased the photo from a newspaper — after his home was clenched within the grasp of the deadly Camp Fire.
Yerman’s home was a 2,600 square-foot haven nestled within the towering woods of Paradise. It featured a trout stream, a large swimming pool and a completely remodeled interior.
But the most important belongings inside the home of the 1960 Olympic gold medalist was the USA Olympic tracksuit and baby pictures of his children. All of them gone after the house burned in the Camp Fire on Nov. 8, 2018.
“We didn’t get to save much — like all the goodies you save over the years and the memorabilia,” Yerman said from his apartment living room in Chico. “The things that we all keep inside a secret box. It’s gone. But that’s life.”
Yerman, who was part of the gold medalist 1,600-meter relay team, has endured anything but a simple life. At 80, the longtime Paradise resident is left to piece back together his life following the Camp Fire.
On Nov. 8, Yerman and his wife, Carol Mattern-Yerman, weren’t even in the country. The couple took a nine-day trip to Puerto Rico to visit a family friend and were left helplessly watching what was unfolding in their hometown.
“We took a chance to have a good time,” Yerman said. “We watched (the Camp Fire) on TV.”
Mattern-Yerman’s daughter, Emily Vail, who was in Paradise, was the first to call Jack and Carol in Puerto Rico to alert them about the fire.
“At first my daughter called … she goes ‘It’s looking really bad mom. We’re leaving,’” Mattern-Yerman said. “The last call I got from her she called to say goodbye. She said ‘It’s a firestorm. I love you. Goodbye.’ She made it. But at the time she didn’t think she was going to make it.”
Jack and Carol were only married for about four months when the Camp Fire broke out. The two were living in separate homes at the time. Jack’s home was burned and nothing was saved, but Carol had arranged for someone to watch her small, white rescue dog named Brady while they were in Puerto Rico. Thankfully, Yerman had stored his gold medal at Carol’s home.
“(Carol) called the dog watcher and said ‘Hey get out of town, take the dog and take the gold medal too,’” Yerman said. “The dog and the gold medal were all we saved.”
The gold medal was won when the foursome of Yerman, Earl Young, Glenn Davis and Otis Davis finished with a world record time of 3 minutes, 2.37 seconds to win the 1,600-meter relay race at 1960 Olympics in Rome. Yerman ran an opening leg of 46.2 seconds.
“Guys like to keep their Olympic running outfits and pins … but I lost my donkey derby trophy. That’s about as good as a gold medal,” Yerman joked. “Those were some nice memories up there.”
Life before Paradise
Yerman had lived in Paradise since 1968, but was originally born in Oroville.He never lived in Oroville since his mother and father divorced when he was born. He and his mother moved to Woodland where he grew up and went to high school.
His father, an alcoholic and drug addict, ended up dying of an overdose in Sacramento at the age of 55.
His family never owned a car, meaning he either had to walk, run or ride a bike to get around town. That’s when he grew fond of running and just being outside.
“It was a great place to be a kid,” Yerman said. “We were kind of on the poor side. I never went on vacations so I had to make my own fun. The way I did was to go down to the park and play. It was a natural thing. I enjoyed physical activity.”
After graduating from Woodland High School, Yerman ended up attending college at UC Berkeley, where he ran track and played fullback for the football team.
“It wasn’t easy going to college,” Yerman said. “If you don’t make it, you’re a failure in your mind.”
Like everything else in his life, Yerman’s journey to the Olympics didn’t come with ease.
“Making the Olympics was a miracle for me — even getting there,” Yerman said.
In order to qualify for the Olympic Trials held at Stanford, Yerman had to finish in the top seven at the NCAA championships. Yerman was competing in the 400-meter race with the hopes of winning an individual gold medal.
“There are eight guys in the race. I’m in last place watching them run away. It’s over,” Yerman recalled. “As we’re coming around the last turn, a kid from Iowa falls down. I qualified.”
“Two weeks later, I didn’t have time to rest. So I was at Stanford, and I win. I was just lucky.”
In Rome, Yerman’s quest for an individual gold medal would end in the 400 semifinals, as described in the book “Your Time Will Come” by Jack’s son Bruce Yerman.
Yerman was able to still win gold as part of the 1,600-meter relay team.
Finding home in Paradise
After Yerman earned a master’s degree in teaching from Stanford, he and his then-wife Margo, began searching for a place to call home.The two first tried living in Santa Clara, but it wasn’t quite what they were looking for.
“We probably could have stayed there and done well, but we both just grew up in small towns,” Yerman said. “We said we want our kids to go to a town with one high school. Out in the country where the kids could run around a little bit.”
They started looking in Northern California, then Yerman landed a job teaching at Chico High.
“We drove around and liked Paradise,” Yerman said. “It fit our mold better.”
They rented for their first three years in Paradise before purchasing their home where they would raise their four children.
Margo Yerman died in May 2014 while holding Jack’s hand in their home.
The missing ring
When Yerman and Carol returned to California from Puerto Rico, they didn’t have a home to go back to. They stayed in a friend’s fifth-wheel trailer in the meantime while they were figuring out what to do next.Yerman, who had played for Cal in the 1959 Rose Bowl, had his Rose Bowl ring left behind in Paradise. When Paradise was opened back up to the public following the Camp Fire, Jack and Carol hesitated to go back to their properties and sift through the debris.
“We didn’t personally do much sifting. It was just overwhelming,” Yerman said. “Most of the things I lost were un-siftable. They were consumed.”
But Yerman’s son, Bruce, decided to look through the debris of his childhood home. Within the rubble, he found the Rose Bowl ring, charred with the center jewel gone and melted. The twinkle of the diamonds placed in the shape of a football had been diminished but they still remain intact.
Yerman wanted the ring restored so he sent it to Jostens, the company that made it. About six weeks passed and the new, restored ring had arrived. It looked identical to the original, but the original, burned ring had yet to arrive at Yerman’s home.
However, the original wound up in the possession of Tony Borders, a 31-yard old manager at Napa Auto Parts in Durham.
An unassuming white package arrived at Borders’ apartment. The packaging had Jack Yerman’s name with Borders’ address and no return address stamped on it.
“It was just a little white bag with his name and my address,” Borders said. “It was super weird.”
Often receiving junk mail, Borders didn’t think too much about the package. He placed the unopened bag on his coffee table, where it sat for two weeks.
One afternoon, Borders was tidying up his mail stack and decided to go ahead and open the package. There he found the burned Rose Bowl ring.
“I opened it up and went ‘Whoa,’” Borders recalled. “I didn’t want to take a brush to clean it up. I didn’t want to destroy it.”
Borders stored the ring in his safe, and then started doing some research. He searched the name ‘Yerman’ online and discovered he played in the Rose Bowl in 1959.
“I thought maybe the family was getting it restored as a memento,” Borders said. “If this belongs to somebody’s family, that motivated me even more to try to find out who it belongs to.”
Borders said he didn’t want to broadcast the ring everywhere for fear of an impostor trying to claim it. Instead, he reached out to Bruce Yerman on Facebook to try and get it back to his father. Borders and Bruce Yerman met up in Chico to give back the ring, a possession that Jack is thankful to have back in his life.
“I called (Borders) up and thanked him,” Jack Yerman said.
“What are the odds of somebody bringing it back?” said Mattern-Yerman.
Returning home
Both Jack and Carol said they are thankful they were out of town the day of the Camp Fire, but being removed from the situation still leaves them wondering what would have happened had they been at home.“I’ve got mixed emotions. Sometimes we’re thankful, we really are. But sometimes we wished we were there and what we would have done,” Yerman said. “A lot of mixed emotions.”
Yerman, at one point, was actually on the missing persons list. He had received a few calls from friends asking if he was alive. Since then, the couple has listened to some speakers and done some counseling to deal with the situation.
Yerman still tries to see the silver lining within the situation. His granddaughter, Tori MacKay, a sophomore at Chico High, wrote a song about Paradise that Yerman happily likes to boast about. And at their temporary home, Yerman has grown fond of his neighbors.
“There’s some very nice people here. Nice tenants,” Yerman said.
The couple now lives in Chico off of The Esplanade, in an apartment complex owned by Yerman.
Weeks before the Camp Fire broke out, Yerman was renovating one of the units.
The previous tenants had trashed the place, leaving behind soiled couches and black stains in the bathroom.
“It was disgusting,” Mattern-Yerman said.
After the fire, Jack and Carol lived in a trailer for about six weeks before making the decision to move into the renovated apartment.
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