Out of town Mass turns up old hero

Pat, our daughter Jenny and I attended Mass Sunday at Moses Lake's Our Lady of Fatima Church during a break between fun and games at my sister Jenny's house.

I was little more tired than I thought and spent the first half hour fighting sleep. At one point I fell asleep on page 102 of the missal and woke up on page 4.

Fortunately, neither Pat nor Jenny caught my occasional 5-second naps. However, it seemed that every time I looked up, the priest was locked in on me.

At the end of the Mass, looking right at us, the priest asked first-time visitors to stand and say hello. A lady stood in front of us.

The lady turned out to be a resident of Florence, Arizona. My mother, Juanita Franco, was born there in 1915. My grandmother, Francisca Lara, was buried there in 1922.

I rushed to the vestibule after Mass to greet the priest and then started looking for that woman. I saw Jenny near the door and started to ask about the woman, but she stopped me and said the man standing next to her wanted to see me.

“I'm Clyde Carpenter,” he said.

You sure are, I responded, as I gazed upon his father Clyde Sr.'s face.

Clyde had stopped Jenny and asked our family name.

The last time I'd seen Clyde was in 1957, and I really wanted to visit with  him, but I begged him to stand by as I saw the woman out of the corner of my eye leaving the building.

Turned out the woman had moved to Florence in 2000. So there was no family history to be gained, and I rushed back to see Clyde.

It felt like old times, but it really wasn't. Clyde and I had never talked when we were growing up in Granger.

Clyde, 18 at the time, was six years older. He knew my father, Ted Sr., who'd worked for Clyde Sr.

I knew Clyde's dad because I picked rocks on cold, windy, dusty February weekends on a farm that was being carved out of the recently-opened Roza Irrigation District. In March I hand-planted mint on the same ground.

“I picked rocks out there too,” Clyde Jr. said.

But Clyde and I never ran into each other. That was sad for me because I was a budding sports buff, and Clyde was a star of the first order.  

Fifty-five years later I got the chance to fill in a few holes in the story I knew. Clyde was willing and gracious.

What I knew about Clyde in 1957 was that he brought the state high school mile championship to little old Granger against all competition, big schools too.

Clyde clocked a time of 4:27, which is still the school record. It may not seem like much today but, back then, high schoolers were running five-minute miles. There is a picture of him at the finish line with the pack back at the curve.

What made that run special to me was that in 1954 British runner Roger Bannister, 28 at the time, ran the first sub-4 minute mile. Clyde was my Roger Bannister.

Ironically, I learned during our visit, that Clyde nearly missed his long-distance calling. He'd played football and basketball as a freshman, and his father said: “You're going to be on that tractor this spring.”

That was no problem for Clyde. He knew his place. But track coach Ernie McKinnon, a fishing buddy, talked Clyde Sr. into letting Clyde Jr. run.

Clyde showed up at his first track meet with basketball shoes and sweat pants. McKinnon told him his first race would be the 880.

“What's that?” Clyde asked.

“That's two laps,” McKinnon responded.

“Okay.”

Clyde flew around the track and left the field in his wake, clocking 2:34. Before the end of the freshman year he set a school record 880 time of 1:58 that still stands.

Clyde never ran the 880 again, concentrating on the mile the rest of his prep career. He went on to Eastern Washington University and was fifth in the nation among collegiate runners three years in a row.

Clyde never broke four minutes. But he got his time down to 4:05.

And he remembered my name 55 years after those dirty rock picking days.