Al as a Athlete Extraordinaire

Al was a tremendous athlete when younger, and I love these images of Al swinging that bat in one of his life's great lifelong passions: baseball!






Tennis was (and is) a lesser game, but he still loved playing, and I remember when Al sent me to tennis lessons at the country club, and was thrilled for years when the instructor called me a natural. Sorry Al, in the end that was the only lesson we could squeeze into the summer, and I never got to learn the game to be competitive with my much more advanced cousins, uncles and aunts. To this day Ted, Sara, Larry, Jeff and Susan all sneer at my tennis abilities. But hey, I got to spend many lovely moments sitting courtside with Al--he loved watching his younger family members compete--and I loved listening to his stories and comments as much as I do any opportunity to trash my own family members in athletic competitions (right La?).


In his middle-age years and into retirement, Al enjoyed the game of golf (though he admitted to me numerous times was a struggle it was for him!), playing frequently at clubs throughout New England, but especially at his favorite home course the Rhode Island country club in Barrington, RI. As Marcie notes, "Father loved his golf game and won many member guests with Freddy!"


Of course, Al's long membership in the Rhode Island country club leads to another batch of shared memories--generations of Al's grandchildren spending many summer afternoons at the Country Club Pool! Heck, I think Ted still remembers the number of Al's account you would use at the Country Club snack bar to order hamburgers and sodas and ice cream! But we'll save those Grandchild country club memories for another time and place.

But of course Al's favorite sport required little physical conditioning, but a life long commitment to mental conditioning: Bridge.

Dad The Athlete…………Jeff

I always thought of Dad as a super athlete in spite of his tendency to carry a lot of weight and his love of all the wrong foods like frappes, donuts and the like. When I was about 12, I remember going to the Barrington High School field with a bunch of friend to play a pick up game of touch football with him and how fast he could run. By all accounts, his Dad, also a great football player, was even faster. Some of my earliest memories of him were his teaching Rich and me the fundamentals of baseball, basketball and football in our backyard. He really knew what he was talking about and we admired him greatly.

In the lower grades, middle school years, Dad boxed, played soccer, basketball and baseball and in high school he was captain of his football and basketball teams for two years straight. Somewhere, probably in high school from his friends Chauncey and Fred Steele, he picked up the game of tennis and he was quite good at it. Larry and I had the great privilege of playing tennis on a weekly basis with he and his insurance salesmen/bridge partner, Dan Moran, at the Mt Hope racquet club for a few years in the late 1970's and early 1980's. Dad was in his late 60's, but he still could really wallop the ball. He also enjoyed playing golf with his friends at the Rhode Island Country Club, but I always got the sense that tennis was his favorite sport.

When he went to college, football was his specialty and by all accounts he could have been a star. He was fast with good hands and switched between running back and end on the offense and defensive back on defense. Players went both ways in those days. Dad's academics, or lack of them, led him to apply to college late and when he went to William and Mary in the fall of 1936 he had to try out for the Freshman team. The College had just brought in a new head football coach, Branch Bocock, and they had started to recruit heavily. In the next few years, they would become one of the stronger teams in Southern Conference which was one of the largest conferences in the country at that time. Dad made the freshman team roster and by the second game of the year against North Carolina which they lost by two touchdowns, he had made some good play and was on the coaches radar. So to speak that is because I don't think radar had been developed yet! By the end of the season he was offered a spot on the varsity and a scholarship for the following year, but through bad luck and decisions he later regretted, he did not pursue it aggressively, reported to school late for preseason practice, and was kept out of the first game of the year against Navy. By his account, he played only two varsity games for W&M, playing most of the second game of the season as a sophomore, then breaking Into the starting line up in the third game against Virginia Tech. His career ended when he injured his back making a tackle against a Tech opponent and he spent the next six weeks in the college infirmary recovering. The head coach wanted him to drop out of school and return the next season offering him a full scholarship for the rest of his college years, but Dad did not pursue it. He fell way behind in his studies, failed his mid-term exams and was asked to leave the college in January 1938 for poor grades and never returned. There is no doubt in my mind that Dad could have had a great football career at the College, but he showed no interest in academics and he wanted to get on with his life. Years later, in the fall of 1958, I remember Dad taking me and my friend Steve Barrett down to William and Mary for an interview with the Dean of Men, Dean Lambert. After the interview we dropped by the football stadium and there were still coaches there that knew him and they talked fondly of his time there.