Author: Ronald Guenther
Written: August 6th, 2014

After telling about the failure of our family in trying to set up a produce business, the Tri-City Produce, I thought it might be well to tell about a more uplifting part of pop’s life, a real success. Actually, we were lucky that the business did not go. By the 1980-s, the mom and pop grocery stores had all faded from the scene and they were our main customers.

When I was in the sixth grade, in the fall of 1948, during a noon hour, we would get together and play touch football. The 7th and 8th grade boys had their own field and the 5th and 6th grade boys had our field. Of course, the girls had their own parts of the play ground as well, things were all divided up and so we were playing, when much to my surprise, my own father walked out onto the field where the 5th and 6th graders were playing, he had a football under his arm and he threw it to me, gathered the boys together and organized a real game. I remember he was the quarterback and we started to play. The 7th and 8th grade boys looked over at what was going on and they headed on over to our field led by the leader of the group, George Koch and followed by Kenny Howard, both excellent athletes. 

Well, pop gathered them altogether and had a meeting and asked if they would be interested in forming a football team and playing other schools. Would they ever! So, he said, they would have to set up a real practice schedule. What none of us knew was that pop had already talked to the priest, Father Greene, and the Sister Superior, Sister Agnese and already had their blessing for all this. So, he said, they should get the blessing of their folks and starting tomorrow after school, practice would start. Of course, we needed football uniforms and so he got together with Sonny Brown who was working for Stewart’s Sports Shop in downtown Coos Bay, they got out a Monkey Ward catalogue, and decided on the Johnny Lujack suits.

Each boy was supposed to pay for his own suit and those suits would then stay with the school afterwards and so build up a backlog of suits for the future. Some of the boys could not afford suits and for those boys, some of the parents like the Flaxels and the Keizers bought two and even three suits. For some reason, Mrs. Frances keizer was a soft touch and any time pop needed money, he headed over to her and she would come through. So, we had the suits. I can tell you that those helmets were really jarring. You got hit in the head wearing one of those things and you saw stars. Well, we played the schools and came close to beating every one of the schools, we gave them all a good game. It was a lot of fun. We lost every game. The next year, we lost every football game, too.

We were slaughtered in basketball but did win a few games there, track was amazing. The schools were divided into A and B schools. We were annihilated in track and also soft ball. But in all cases, we gave the people a run for their money. Each year got better. When I was in the 8th grade, we won our first football game against Marshfield Junior High, it was the only game we won, but we did take the soft ball title winning the first trophy for Saint Monica’s School.

Later, the school dominated the B schools and after it became Coos Catholic, it started beating the A schools as well. Pop was a good coach and he made the game fun. That first year, the girls set up a rally group and it was organized by Mary Ann and all the girls of the 7th and 8th grades were involved. In those years, there were no athletic programs for girls and in fact, a (flawed) study by a medical group found that girls should not get too involved in those kinds of sports as it was bad for their health. It is incredible to me know that that study had any credence at all, but so it goes. I think when the Soviet Women routinely creamed us at the olympics and they were still able to have children, we took another look at that, but in the meantime, that was the situation.

So many of the boys who participated in that program said afterwards that playing for pop was the last time they really had fun in athletics. That was true for me as well. I always enjoyed playing, but somehow, there was an air of work involved whereas playing for pop was fun. We gave it our best, but it was still fun. As it turns out, among my own brothers, I was probably the worst athlete, the others were far better than I ever was. The girls were also good athletes but the times were against them.

Pop made an impressive figure at the time. He had been an excellent athlete himself playing for Marshfield High School and people still recalled that. But to give you an example about how he was looked at, let me tell this little story. The boy who was really smart, we called him Doc Sutton, was supposed to be the valedictorian of his class, the class just ahead of him. He was academically neck and neck with another friend of mine, John Flaxel, both fantastically brilliant. 

Well, the English teacher at the time gave an assignment to the class that each of them should interview a community leader and Doc Sutton was given pop to interview. He stood in such awe of pop, that he could not bring himself to carry out the interview and so took an F. It cost him being the valedictorian, that went to John, he was not even the salutatorian, that went to Mary Jo Fourier. He was third in the class. Later he got a Ph.D. in oceanography, took a job in Brazil, made a million dollars and retired early. He told me later that he just could not bring himself to interview pop. He said he later got to know him and he never knew a more approachable fellow, but this was too much.
To be continued.