My dad never talked much about his life as a young man, and a lot of what little I know came from snooping through his personal papers during the nearly two years he spent in a nursing home before his death.

I spent an hour or two Sunday afternoon browing Newspapers.com for more information, and found bits and pieces that help answer at least a couple of my questions. Nothing big, but little things that fill out my picture of this time in his life.

I know that my dad attended Wilson High School in Long Beach, California, but when did he graduate? Did he ever attend college? I have a vague memory of being told that he had, but I never heard him talk about it. It would have been during the Great Depression, and college would have been a luxury, I think.

I found his photo Wilson’s 1932 yearbook.

Notice that none of the entries for him were dated in 1932, only 1931 and earlier.

I’ve written here before about his success on his high school track team.

In August 1931, he and a friend, Fred Rathburn, participated in a 1-1/4 mile marathon swim in the city’s Colorago Street Lagoon. Rathburn won with a time of 21 minutes, and my dad was second with no time reported.

Newspaper clips then show my dad was a promising and well-regarded member of the Long Beach Junior College (later known as Long Beach City College) track team during the spring of 1932, with several articles looking ahead to his potential role in boosting the school’s team during upcoming meets. He was slated to run along with his older brother, Bill, in a four-member team entered in the 2-mile relay during the first scheduled track meet of the year. So both brothers were enrolled at LB Junior College at least for this period.

Putting this together, I think that my dad had graduated from high school a semester behind his class, getting his degree at the end of 1931 and appearing in the 1932 yearbook. He then spent a few months at Long Beach Junior College before dropping out and taking a job on a freighter for a voyage through the Panama Canal and up the east coast of the U.S.

But my dad’s track career ended with an unusual injury, according to a clipping from the Long Beach Press-Telegram in March 1932.

March 25, 1932

This information was a surprise. I had heard him talk about blood poisoning, but had wrongly assumed it was something that happened while he was very quite young. Bad things happened in those days. His younger sister, Grace, had died in 1919 at age 3 or 4 when an epidemic of flu and diphtheria hit Berkeley, California, where the family lived at that time.

So I had an interesting time on a quiet Sunday afternoon.