We sometimes like to recognize people who have passed away and have competed in track and field in their lives although they made their names in other fields. This is the case with Gordon Lightfoot, Canadian singer and songwriter who passed away recently. I had heard for years that he had jumped 12 feet on steel back in the day. Wikipedia gives some indication of that although not his specific height.
Lightfoot performed extensively throughout high school, Orillia District Collegiate & Vocational Institute (ODCVI), and taught himself to play folk guitar. A formative influence on his music at this time was 19th-century master American songwriter Stephen Foster.[19] He was also an accomplished high school track-and-field competitor and set school records for shot-put and pole vault, as well as playing the starting nose tackle on his school's Georgian Bay championship-winning football team. His athletic and scholarly aptitude earned him scholarships at McGill University's Schulich School of Music and the University of Toronto, Faculty of Music. Wikipedia
The Canadian Encyclopedia also makes note of his athletic career....At 14, Lightfoot began working at his father’s dry cleaning plant, where he worked throughout high school. In his teens, he was a star track and field athlete and played on the school football team.
Others we have noted in the past with similar stories are Robin Williams, Woody Allen, Robert Culp, Garth Brooks... and doing a quick search these additional names came up. Bruce Dern (1:55 HS), Dennis Weaver (decathlon, XC) , Alice Cooper (4:30 mile), Dana Carvey (4:26 mile) Jackie Robinson, Wilt Chamberlain, Dick Gregory, Senator Alan Simpson, George Steinbrenner, Cheryl Crow and on and on....
From Geoff Pietsch:
As a big fan of Gordon Lightfoot I was intrigued to learn in your obit that he was strongly influenced by Stephen Foster. For at least a century after Foster's death virtually all Americans new his songs. When I was a youngster in the 1940s kids sang his songs in school. And in that pre-social media, heck pre-TV era, families occasionally sang songs around the piano and Foster's Americana was standard.
In the 1940s Bernard DeVoto, the great historian of the early West wrote in "Year of Decision, 1846" about the Mexican War and the Oregon Trail and California gold rush and other events of that time of Manifest Destiny. In it he included a few paragraphs about Stephen Foster which perfectly summarize his significance.
"Stephen Collins Foster himself need not occupy us very long. He was different from fifty contemporaries, and his songs were different from theirs, only in that the obscure chemistry of genius concentrated an era and a society in him. He took no thought of the morrow, could not make a marriage work, lived precariously, accepted the tinsel of the cheapest theater, came to the proper end of pathetic artists — and said perfectly what his people felt. He wrote well over two hundred songs, most of them quite dead now. He took what pleased him, from his friends if research was too troublesome. He repeated himself and his rivals monotonously. And the difference between him and everyone else was that he made a final music. A hundred years after him you need only play the opening bars of "My Old Kentucky Home" or "The Old Folks at Home" [Suwanee River] to stir in any American the full nostalgia of things past, to bind any audience in the unity of a nation that knows itself. Art is the unpredictable, the miraculous and undefined, but if that be art which a people take most closely to their bosoms and hold there most tenderly and longest, then Stephen Foster is incomparably the greatest American artist.
He made Americans members of one another."
I forwarded this article to a cousin in Ireland.
He and his wife timed a trip to the United States to visit us relatives in conjunction with a concert by Lightfoot to be held in Canada.
It was a successful trip all around. We had a great visit and Noel and Geraldine got to meet Lightfoot and get a souvenir of the concert from him.
Take care,
Tom Coyne
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