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Courtesy Stanford University Archives |
When Bob Mathias
represented part of California’s Central Valley
in Congress, a woman from the southern part of his district
called his office one day to complain that she hadn’t
received her Social Security check. Mathias’s
friend and aide Bob Jennings suggested they mail the
check to the woman, but the congressman decided to guarantee
its delivery instead. When he walked up to Hattie Crawford’s
small wood-frame house with check in hand, she was delighted.
“Lord, have mercy,” she cried out. “You’re
Bob Mathias.”
Crawford’s reaction was not uncommon. Her congressman’s
face had once graced the covers of both Time
and Life magazines after he became a national
hero at 17, winning the decathlon at the 1948 London
Games. Throughout Mathias’s life, people were
thrilled to meet the modest, smiling All-American boy
who garnered Olympic gold—and 200 offers of marriage—just
three months after competing in his first decathlon.
A two-time Olympic champion and four-term congressman,
Mathias, ’53, died of cancer on September 2 at
his home in Fresno, Calif. He was 75 years old.
Mathias was Tulare High School’s football and
track star in 1948 when his coach first suggested he
try the decathlon. Mathias had never thrown a javelin
before, but two competitions later, the prep standout
qualified for that summer’s Olympics. When he
left for London, Mathias thought of it as “a nice
trip,” says his older brother, Eugene, who accompanied
him to the Games. “When he won the trials, he
thought that was a freak thing.” But “everything
he did, he just did better every time.”
Tulare, Calif., is a small Central Valley farm town,
north of Bakersfield and south of Fresno along State
Route 99. While Mathias competed for 12 hours in a rainy
London, on a soggy track and a dark field that had officials
struggling to make out the distance of javelin throws,
the people of Tulare waited for the radio reports. After
news reached town that Mathias had pulled off the victory,
becoming the youngest man ever to win an Olympic track
and field event, Tulare’s then-12,000 residents
celebrated, sounding car horns, screaming in the streets,
and pulling the town’s fire whistle. In London,
reporters asked Mathias what he would do to celebrate.
The teenager replied, much to their delight, that he’d
start shaving, he guessed.
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GOING THE DISTANCE: Mathias became the first man to win the Olympic decathlon twice, then served four terms in Congress.
Courtesy Jim Rutter (top, middle);
Associated Press (bottom) |
Mathias returned to the United States a celebrity.
After first arriving by ship in New York, then flying
to California, Mathias was greeted at the Visalia Airport
by a brass band and more than 2,000 fans. His picture
was plastered on store windows; flags and pennants covered
the streets; and a parade took him through Tulare. A
month later, he posed for pictures with President Truman.
Mathias’s father, a doctor and former college
football player at the University of Oklahoma, frequently
had driven his sons to Palo Alto to watch Stanford football
games. By the time of Mathias’s Olympic feat,
his brother Eugene played football for Stanford. In
1949, Mathias followed his brother to the Farm. “They
didn’t have to do much recruiting,” says
Eugene, ’49, MA ’51, MD ’57.
On campus, Mathias was a celebrity, not only for winning
Olympic gold, but also for leading Stanford over USC
as a running back, scoring two fourth-quarter touchdowns
to take the school to the 1952 Rose Bowl. Despite Mathias’s
national fame, his Phi Gamma Delta fraternity brothers
don’t recall him acting any way but gracious and
humble. Even when the house received unexpected visitors.
“One day, I heard the doorbell ring,”
classmate Kirk Evans recalls. “I answered the
door and a few little young boys asked if Bob Mathias
lived there. I took them upstairs and Bob sat and talked
with them for half an hour.”
Mathias continued with his athletic achievements—competing
on Stanford’s track team alongside future Los
Angeles Times publisher Otis Chandler, ’50;
winning the 1952 Olympic decathlon to become the first
repeat champion in the event—but at 21 years old,
he still had several different careers left in him.
“John Wayne talked him into trying to make a
movie,” Eugene says. “I think he enjoyed
that [but] I don’t think he ever thought he was
much of an actor.” Mathias played himself in The
Bob Mathias Story (1954) and had parts in a handful
of other movies and in the television series Troubleshooters
(1959). But acting wasn’t his calling. “He
was always genuine. He couldn’t be anybody else,”
his former Tulare High and Stanford classmate Bob Hoegh
says.
After profiting from The Bob Mathias Story,
Mathias was deemed a professional and declared ineligible
to participate in future Olympic Games. Thus he went
undefeated in the grueling decathlon. In the early 1960s,
he served as the director of the Bob Mathias Sierra
Boys and Girls Camp, a summer camp in Kings Canyon National
Park.
In 1966, Tulare’s favorite son was elected to
the U.S. House of Representatives, having become interested
in politics while answering questions about the United
States during goodwill tours to other countries. A Republican,
he represented part of the San Joaquin Valley for four
terms, serving on the House agriculture committee in
his first year. He lost his bid for election to a fifth
term in 1974, during the fallout of Watergate and after
his once-conservative rural district was redrawn to
include more urban Democrats.
Three years later, Mathias became the director of the
U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colo.
He eventually would move back to the Central Valley,
where it was well known that his number was listed in
the phone book. For decades he got together with his
Stanford fraternity brothers, meeting many of them periodically
in Tucson to take in Stanford-Arizona football games.
When Mathias visited his friends, he usually carried
something he had made in his home shop for them—a
doorstop made out of a pinecone, a footstool shaped
from driftwood. “He never came to your house without
trinkets. He always had time for people,” Hoegh
says. “He was never impressed with himself.”
It was everybody else who was.
Mathias is survived by his wife, Gwen; five children,
Romel, Megan, Marissa, Alyse and Reiner; 10 grandchildren;
two brothers, Eugene and Jim; and a sister, Patricia
Guerrero. As his funeral procession passed through the
streets of Tulare this summer, the Tulare Union High
School marching band played by the side of the road—one
last salute to its national hero.
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