Everyone knows that Wally was "into" golf. He not only loved to play golf, but he watched it religiously on TV and spent considerable time and effort "making" golf clubs (from kits he bought on-line while living in Tucson). I recall a visit to mom and dad's Del Webb patio home in Tucson where he showed me all of his tools for creating custom golf clubs from shafts, metal heads, and grips. He was a tinkerer and loved making things.
That experience reminded me that he bought me a really nice set of "used" woods when I was about 14. We golfed a LOT when I was in high school, despite the fact that I was never on the golf team at Glenbard. Those used woods (all four of them) were refurnished by a local club pro at the course we frequented outside Glen Ellyn. It was really cool to have what seemed to me to be brand new woods, and by today's standards, actually made of wood (not metal). I held onto those four woods for over 50 years until we moved to Northampton in 2017.
On the second anniversary of Dad's passing, I have another story to share. When I was in 8th grade, I had to decide where to attend high school. The three options were the local junior high in Wauwatosa (grades 7-9), Marquette High School in downtown Milwaukee, and Pius High School (the latter two were Catholic). I chose Pius, in part because it was less than a mile from our house in Ravenswood (in Wauwatosa). As registration for high school drew near, I was faced with a dilemma about whether to go out for a sport. I had played football, basketball, and baseball in grade school (St. Jude's Catholic school), but didn't really excel in anything. In football I was a defensive end (5'8" and 120 lbs) and hated it. In basketball I was a bench rider (terrible jump shot). And in baseball I was a semi-successful side-arm pitcher. But I heard that Dad was a hurdler in high school and my mother's father was a cross-country runner. And a close friend of mine, Tom Flynn, encouraged me to go out for cross-country because his older brother ran track at Pius and said it was a good way to train in the Fall for track in the Spring.
So, I signed up and began training with the team at Pius a week before classes began. It was terrible. I remember leaving the parking lot at the high school and jogging down to Honey Creek parkway about 1/2 a mile away where we did stretching exercises and then ran two 1-mile runs on the grassy path along the creek. I was so sore the next day I could barely walk, but I persisted that entire week and competed in a couple of freshman races over the next few weeks. By mid-season I was running with the sophomores and by the end of the season we won the sophomore regional school championship and I was the second man on the team. Late that fall, we moved to Naperville, Illinois and I continued running track that Winter and Spring, with indoor meets at North Central College on their 11 laps-to-the-mile track. I was a 1/4 miler and never managed to break 60 sec on that small track, but Dad was there to cheer me on. In the summer we moved again to Glen Ellyn (about 5 miles away) and now cross-country became a pretty serious passtime as the Hilltoppers had been contenders for state titles in the recent past. My senior year we beat the best team in the State (York High School) by taking the first 4 places (I finished first). Although York beat us at the State meet, we finished a respectible 6th.
Anyway, back to Dad, there was a photo of me leading the pack of runners around Lake Ellyn during a cross-country meet in 1966 and, ironically, Dad was in the photo, clapping as we ran by him. It was cool because shortly thereafter, Dad took up jogging (he must have been about 45 years old). This was the era of the "running boom" and Dad was smitten with it. He became a steady jogger, lost about 25 pounds, and continued to run for the next 20 years before his knees and back made it impossible. I will never forget meeting up with Dad at the Boston marathon in 1980 and 1984, the latter in the Lenox hotel lobby after my best Boston time of 2:54 during a light rain and 40 deg temps. He loved the spectacle and enjoyed driving to several checkpoints along the course to watch me run by. It was a memorable experience.
On the 1st anniversary of Dad's passing, I'm prompted to recall one of our more memorable vacations. I believe it was August of 1958 (the song "Volare" was playing on the radio the whole trip, and I checked when that song was released). We rented a family camper-trailer (one of those bullet-shaped silver ones) and towed it behind our '54 Oldsmobile. To top it off we had the canoe clamped on top of the car. Why we brought the canoe along escapes me. Maybe Dad thought it would be a fun diversion along the way. Our plan was to drive to Chicago and then head South through Indiana and Kentucky to the Smokey Mountains.
The first day was pretty eventful. In that era, the main road from Milwaukee to Chicago was called Hwy 100 and consisted of 3 lanes (a "shared" passing lane -- not exactly safe by today's standards). As we approached the Northern suburbs it started to rain and rain and rain. The Eden's Expressway ended on Lake Shore Drive and it was flooded. Some of the underpasses were completely impassable. This is when I thought Dad was brilliant for bringing along the canoe, but of course we didn't use it (in fact, I don't think we used it on the entire trip). I believe it took us 2 hours to get to the Eden's Expressway and another 4 hours to get to Gary, Indiana. What a mess.
The main road in Indiana at that time was Hwy 41 which goes straight South to Evansville (and still does). I'm not sure how we got to Kentucky, but I recall vividly that the nice 2-lane Hwy 41 became a bunch of back-country roads, paved but not capable of being driven more than 45 mph. I know we missed Nashville and ended up in Chattanooga and then parked our Silver trailer in Gatlinburg because it was a pain to pull it up the hills and around the hairpin turns. I remember visiting two of the dams built in the 1930s for the Tennesee Valley Authority to bring electricity into rural areas in the South. And I remember driving by (but I don't think touring) the atom bomb factory at Oak Ridge. And I remember it being very, very hot and humid. A/C was completely absent from the South in those days and sleeping outside rather than inside the Silver trailer was a clear option.
Life was simpler then. Families traveled on the cheap. But every summer we had a week-long vacation, and that one in 1958 was pretty memorable.
