Here is the ninth installment of recollections from D. Bruce Lockerbie.

---

By the spring of 1922–95 years ago–Frank E. Gaebelein had crisscrossed the continent in search of the 100 students he hoped to enroll at the new school being founded on the campus of the Stony Brook Assembly. He had already hired most of the eventual faculty of nine, including Clyde Mellinger, a versatile coach from Grove City College. When only 27 youths showed up by September 13, 1922, the neophyte headmaster of The Stony Brook School faced a financially challenging 3:1 ratio of students to teacher. Nonetheless, Coach Mellinger managed to field a football team that first year.

In a few weeks my wife Lory and I will mark the 60th year since the April 1957 evening we spent with Dr. Gaebelein at a steak house on North Avenue, just outside of Wheaton, Illinois. There he presented us with the opportunity to invest our lives with teenage boys, preparing them for university and life. He assured me that–as first among equals–my most important asset in joining the faculty was my own athletic experience as both competitor and coach. This would help me relate to the boys. My limitations in teaching English and directing music were less important.

We arrived just after the School had marked its 35th anniversary, and I retired in 1991, after 34 years, just before the 70th anniversary. Thus throughout these essays of recollection, my perspective is narrowed to the middle third of that history, although the fact that we are now the only couple to have remained in the immediate community adds another quarter-century to our longevity and its observations, but from a different vantage.

Whenever you attended The Stony Brook School–before or after female students were admitted–and  whether or not you boarded or were a day student, whether or not you lettered in a sport–you will agree that athletics dominated the campus. Yes, there were authentic “masters” in the classroom whose intellect and instruction seemed legendary, but no student I knew ever made sure to return next year so as not to miss Mr. So-‘n’-So’s teaching; instead, athletes came back to run at the Penn Relays or beat Poly Prep! In our early years, for most of us–men and boys–sports were the great magnet unifying this campus.

Remember the oar now displayed in the entrance to Swanson Gymnasium? It is a ceremonial reminder of the School’s most distinguished honor, the Bruce Vanderveer Award, given in memory of the 1931 alumnus who had gone to Harvard. He qualified for the freshman crew, competed in international yachting races, then died in an automobile collision–“in which he was a passenger,” as FEG never failed to inform the audience. The speech presenting the Vanderveer Trophy always seemed to me like a sacramental rite bringing to life the motto, “Character Before Career.”

Of course, the award went to a football player. There was no question about which sport ruled the campus. FEG had been a runner and had become an Alpine mountaineer, but the special chapel speakers who were athletes tended to be football stars like Donn Moomaw, a former UCLA linebacker and pastor of Bel Air Presbyterian Church (President Reagan’s house of worship), or Billy Wade, quarterback for the 1963 NFL champion Chicago Bears. Stony Brook had an inside lane to obtaining these Christian athletes because board member David Swanson ’45, was one of the founders of the professional teams’ Sunday chapel services and knew those players personally. And there was never any doubt about where our athletic director Oscar Floyd Johnson’s preferences lay. He was a football fan through and through.

Stony Brook was then a member of the Ivy Preparatory School League, competing against schools as far away as Hackley in Westchester, Riverdale and Horace Mann in the upper reaches of the Bronx, Trinity in Manhattan, St. Paul’s in Garden City, Adelphi Academy and Poly Prep, both in Brooklyn near what is now the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. The three seasons offered football and cross country in the fall, basketball and wrestling in winter, then baseball, track and field, tennis, and golf in spring. Soccer, swimming, sailing, lacrosse, field hockey, and volleyball came later.

Each member-school seemed to excel in one or two sports, but Poly Prep was the mortal foe in every event. What a rivalry! Never mind the Yankees/Dodgers or Giants/Eagles or any other contest of wills. Our vendetta was against the boys from Brooklyn Polytechnic Country Day School in Bay Ridge. Competition was fierce in every sport. For instance, when they came to wrestle, the Old Gym was never large enough to hold the crowd, and so the mats were lugged up to Carson Auditorium, whose rafters shook. By the mid-1960s, the cadre of faculty sons–a group of eight-to-ten year old “fac brats” named Gaebelein, Haile, Dodd, Soderstrom, Harrison, Graf, and Lockerbie–could envision themselves some day as victors over Poly Prep.

Eventually, Adelphi and St. Paul’s dropped out of the Ivy League and were replaced by New York Military Academy, even farther north in Cornwall, New York; so Brookers who played on the 1962 and 1963 football teams lined up against a cadet named Donald J. Trump. In time, as the general population swelled and traffic clogged the highways, a trip home to Stony Brook after a game or match against any of these distant schools became more and more problematic–and dependent for an evening meal upon a new franchise called McDonald’s, rather than a late dinner from the Johnston Hall kitchen. Reluctantly, Stony Brook also withdrew from the Ivy League, although there were some attempts at continuing to compete on occasion with Poly Prep, but that faded. Instead, in 1973-74, The Brook petitioned to join the New York State Public High School Athletic Association (Section XI) in Suffolk County. This move meant competing against teams drawn from gigantic enrollments but reduced travel time and danger, the longest journey becoming the ocean voyage by ferries to Shelter Island. It also raised the level of athletic achievement to a state-wide and even national level of recognition–although those Brookers who played against Calvin Hill at Riverdale had never needed further demonstrations of excellence.

Stony Brook had our own stars. Without benefit of an indoor training facility, Bruce C. Dodd, Jr. ’49, had won the silver medal in the 440 yard race at the National High School Championship meet in Madison Square Garden. Nine years later, Alan Malachuk ’58, excelled in football, basketball, and baseball, earning the title as Long Island’s outstanding high school athlete. His teammates and classmates Richard Skripak, David Skillen, and Toby Walker could have played on any championship team. On cross country courses and tracks throughout the region, Tonnie Coane ’59, and his sophomore teammate Robin Lingle ’60, were leading the way. Lingle was the only schoolboy to win two cross country championship races on the same day: In 1959, at the Van Cortlandt Park course, he won the Eastern States race in the morning, then the Ivy Preparatory School League race a few hours later. Both Coane and Lingle went on to set national and international records as university rivals at Kansas and Missouri.

In those days, the best athletes were always our campus icons. Who could ever forget having seen Reid McLean ’61, pin his larger heavyweight opponent from St. Paul’s–only to be surprised by the boy’s red-haired mother pounding on McLean’s back! She was so disturbed by her son’s loss, she ran out of the Carson bleachers to redeem his defeat herself. Or perhaps an even more memorable pinning by Ernie Wruck ’72 when a former Stony Brook grappler returned representing a local high school and met his match? Or the sight of Lisa Hall ’75, the best athlete among the first female students, driving to the basket in Swanson Gym? Or Earl Wingate ’73 bringing home a come-from-behind victory over Poly Prep–only to be disqualified for waving the relay stick in celebration? Or the soaring home run hit by Jim Kirby ’69 over the center fielder’s head to beat Poly Prep in extra innings? Or the stunning achievements of Laura Whitney ’82 as a champion distance runner, almost overshadowing her equally gifted older brothers Mark ’78, and Andy Whitney ’79. And if you will forgive a proud father, I remember another trio of brothers-and-younger-sister, who never lost a relay race she anchored. Her brothers did rather well too.

These were a few of our heroes, worthy of admiration for their courage and discipline in training and performing in their sports. But academic attainment received far less attention at Stony Brook. True, we had The Cum Laude Society and its formal induction intoned by Marvin W. Goldberg as Director of Studies, and the Class of 1958 distinguished itself by sending several of its members to all eight Ivy League universities; yet those scholars were never given the same degree of respect that adorned the athletes.

In offering this opinion, I’m reminded of the contradictions inherent in the American custom of school and university-based sports. Grantland Rice, the most famous American sports journalist, referred to the sports pages of a newspaper as “the toy department.” Yet he also coined the lasting nickname (“the Four Horsemen”) for the backfield of a University of Notre Dame team and each year compiled the definitive All-America football team; so even the critic caved to the importance of athletics in educational institutions. What would he have written about our School and its passion for sport? Ironically, the best argument I know against such an imbalance is a book called School and Sports: A Christian Critique by the recent interim Headmaster Richard A. Riesen.

Frank E. Gaebelein himself was highly regarded for many accomplishments, some already mentioned: a college runner (remembered by name more than thirty years later by the same man who coached both FEG and me), concert pianist, mountain climber, preacher, editor, author. But he was less often praised for his towering autodidact intellect and knowledge over a broad range of subjects. So too with Pierson Curtis, who possessed only a bachelor’s degree from Princeton and was renowned as a qualified Maine guide and inventor of products sold by L. L. Bean and used at his Friday evening cookouts. Yet it was his intimate knowledge of Shakespeare and Scripture that marked his teaching. Both of them qualified to be known as “a Renaissance man.” The same may be said of my best colleagues. In keeping with the prep school custom, academic teachers were also coaches, and while some of us really aspired to become “masters” of our subjects, we were more often identified by our coaching assignments and our team’s winning record. That’s the way it was 60 years ago.

But make no mistake: Those coaches were no slouches, including alumni like Floyd Johnson ’31, who had played at Davidson College, and his brother-in-law John Warren Hershey ’32, at Franklin and Marshall. They went from their mathematics and English classes to the gridiron; Marvin Goldberg from chemistry and physics to the track; Don Marshall from US history to the wrestling mat; Jim Fenton from math to the basketball court and golf course (on occasional weekends, he also played as a partner with Bobby Riggs and “sandbagged” country club duffers). Karl Soderstrom from Bible classes to the basketball court; even as Headmaster, Donn Gaebelein ’45, coached championship baseball teams. In my time, more recent alumni returned to coach and teach: Bruce Dodd (wrestling), Terry Harrison ’50 (tennis), Mark Hanchett, ’62 (football and basketball), Peter Randall ’65 (cross country and track), and Robin Lingle. And before I retired, I remember other teachers-and-coaches who had been varsity players in football, field hockey, soccer, lacrosse, track and field, and baseball at their alma maters–or in Don Fonseca’s case, in the New York Yankees farm system.

Of course, no other Stony Brook coach could match the record of the remarkable Marvin W. Goldberg, whose MWG initials were interpreted to mean “My Way Goes.” He has been well described by his former runner Gordon MacDonald ’57, in a book called A Resilient Life. Marvin was my first friend and mentor at Stony Brook, the primary coach of my own offspring, and a legend in our family. Driving east toward Baiting Hollow, Lory and I never fail to mention that MWG referred to the steep decline on Sound Avenue as the lowest point on Long Island, caused by the glacier’s gouging. He was also a profoundly godly man whose example of endurance in spite of a physical handicap set world records of his own. An avid naturalist, a meteorologist, a model railroad fan, a prolific reader, and a fan of the sport, he produced champions by the score, including three Eastern States cross country winners–Lingle, Randall, and Richie Shay ’70. He dared to challenge the plebes or freshmen at West Point, Cornell, Princeton, New York University, and Long Island colleges–and sometimes beat them with his high school boys. My most joyous moment with Marvin Goldberg came in 1983, when he was named an honorary referee at the Penn Relays in Philadelphia. It is fitting that the 400 meter world class track, designed and constructed by Robin Lingle and Don Lockerbie ’75, is named for Marvin W. Goldberg.

Yes, interscholastic sports at Stony Brook were all-consuming. But there was also “Class Athletics,” to which I was assigned each fall for several years. This was the prescribed afternoon playground for those boys too uninterested, too uncoordinated, or too frightened to engage in either football or cross country. Unofficially, this group was identified as “the sick, lame, and lazy,” although to be fair, there were some genuine athletes who legitimately used the fall exercise program as conditioning for their preferred winter sport. David Hicks ’66, was one of these. Like a Marine Corps drill sergeant proud of his brutality, I made it my business to announce that we would be engaged in running and tackle football without pads: “If you don’t like to run, join the cross country team; if you don’t enjoy being hit, go out for football!” No doubt with a certain measure of disdain for my charges, I oversaw this activity alone until joined in 1961 by Peter Haile, who had competed at Oxford with the Achilles Club, whose teammates included a scrawny youth named Roger Bannister. One afternoon in 1965, I was engaged in a football scrimmage and got hit by Hicks, and so ended up in Mather Hospital with a concussion. Served me right!

And what of the non-athletic faculty members? They also had an afternoon duty called “The 5:30 Honor Roll,” a list of young men notorious for not voluntarily taking a bath or shower. I’m not sure how students got nominated to this intimate fraternity, but to prevent their persistent body odor from spoiling the evening meal, they were required to meet a faculty member, who ensured at least their cleanliness, if not also their godliness.

Looking back over six decades, I now feel a twinge of guilt–perhaps even shame–that I favored athletes over the scholars, and in particular over the lonely and hurting boys (and later, girls) who never found the fellowship and joy of being part of a Stony Brook team. I wish I had been less jock, and more just.

---