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By Bob Burns If Brutus Hamilton had one regret, it was that he never wrote a book. A prolific letter writer and diarist, the legendary Cal track coach even had a title picked out: "These I Shall Remember." It would have been a tribute to the airmen he served alongside in World War II. But he never got around to writing it. Instead, he feared (as he put it in a letter to his daughter) that he'd only be remembered for the "little things." "On campus I shall be referred to, if at all, as the kindly old gentleman who used to feed the birds and squirrels." He sold himself short. A member of the National Track and Field Hall of Fame, Hamilton is the only man to win an Olympic medal and to serve as head coach of the U.S. Olympic track team. He coached numerous Olympic champions and world record holders at Kansas University and Cal, including one of the greatest milers in U.S. history, Glenn Cunningham, and one of the best sprinters, Hal Davis. And, as Cal's athletic director in the late 1940s and early '50s, Hamilton hired two of the school's most successful coaches: Pappy Waldorf in football and Pete Newell in basketball. From his proper appearance--coat, tie, and hat--to his love of Shakespeare and Byron, Hamilton looked and sounded more like an English professor than a track coach. Don Bowden '58, a Cal middle-distance star and the first American runner to break four minutes in the mile, likened Hamilton to Albert Schweitzer, the German philosopher and humanitarian. "Anybody who had a chance to be around Brutus was ennobled by the experience," said Payton Jordan, himself a U.S. Olympic coach and a longtime rival of Hamilton's at Stanford. "No other coach had his wisdom or depth. There was warmth, a kindness. When he talked, it was almost spiritual." It's true that Hamilton become known in the 1960s as the campus figure who fed the squirrels each day in Faculty Glade. "One of the squirrels would come up and tug on his pantleg," said Dave Maggard '62, an Olympic shot-putter who followed in Hamilton's footsteps as Cal's track coach and athletic director. "They knew an easy mark when they saw one." Such "little things" were very much a part of Hamilton's character. But so were two of the most profound actions of his life. For the would-be author, they formed his own version of War and Peace. Shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hamilton volunteered at age 41, to serve in World War II. He left behind a wife and teenage daughter, as well as one of his strongest Cal teams. And, in 1952, during the tenuous peace of the Cold War, Hamilton served as the head U.S. track coach at the Olympics in Helsinki, Finland. The 1952 Games pitted the United States against the Soviet Union for the first time. With many fearing the worst, Scandinavian fans and the world's best athletes instead combined to stage perhaps the most uplifting Olympics in history. "I had a ray of hope following the Olympic Games of 1952 in Helsinki," Hamilton wrote. "Here for one brief fortnight nobleness walked our way again.... I concluded that the young men of the world were a pretty fine lot." In both 1940 and 1941, a few years after Hamilton arrived at Cal, the Bears finished second in the NCAA track championships. Led by Davis, a sprinter with incomparable closing speed, Cal was on the verge of bringing their coach his first national championship. But after December 7, 1941, all bets were off. Hamilton, a U.S. assistant coach at the Berlin Olympics of 1936, wasn't terribly surprised by this turn of events. He had returned from Hitler's propaganda show to tell his wife, Rowena, that war was imminent. But Rowena was shocked when, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, her husband told her he was enlisting. "Mother was hysterical," said Hamilton's daughter, Jean Runyon '49, a public relations executive in Sacramento. "But he was a patriot, and his track boys were all going off to war. He felt he had to join them." Years later, describing his experiences to a Lions Club gathering, Hamilton said: "I went into the service without any illusions. It was a grim job and I hoped to do my bit. There were no romantic urgings which prompted me. So many of my track boys had already gone before I was called up, and I wanted to get out of the grandstands and down on the field with them." While overseas, Hamilton wrote Rowena daily. In one letter, he asked her to send some popcorn to help boost morale. When Rowena sent five pounds, explaining that postal regulations wouldn't allow her to send more, Hamilton protested to the Berkeley postmaster. The Berkeley Gazette got wind of the incident and published the "Popcorn Letter." In the winter of 1944, Hamilton received over 1,000 pounds of popcorn. Hamilton served as an intelligence officer in the Army Air Corps. He was assigned to the 93rd Bomb Group, famous for its successful but extraordinarily costly raids on the Ploesti oil fields in Romania. Over the course of the war, the 93rd Bomb Group flew 393 missions, losing 1,500 men. "His hair was white when he came back from the war," Runyon said. "He was a very changed man. There was a sadness in him after that." "We had 1,500 men killed in action, and I knew most of them almost as well as I know the boys on my track teams," Hamilton later recalled. "It was a sad thing and a searing experience, and perhaps it is well that I don't have time to think about it too often. I have seen more than my share of death and destruction, but I never got inured to it like some professional soldiers. I never hear Taps but what I choke up, for I always remember the fine lads I helped bury in North Africa and England." When Hamilton returned to Berkeley in late 1945, Cal president Robert Gordon Sproul asked him to serve as athletic director while continuing on as track coach. Hamilton agreed, and his hiring record in that role was impeccable. Waldorf took Cal's football team to three straight Rose Bowls. Newell coached the Bears to an NCAA basketball championship in 1959 and led the U.S. to an Olympic title in 1960. Hamilton's prowess as a track coach continued, and his guidance helped his athletes both on and off the field. Proverb Jacobs '58, Ed.D. '74, a talented but troubled football player and shot-putter from Oakland, was one who benefited from Hamilton's attention. The 1950s were not an easy time for the handful of black athletes on the Berkeley campus, and Jacobs remembers being mad "every single day" he attended Cal. He was tossed off the football team for punching out a teammate and ejected from a Cal track meet for going berserk when a shot-put official called a foul on one of his throws. Sportswriters asked Hamilton whether Jacobs was finished once and for all. "Obviously, Proverb is a troubled young man," Hamilton replied thoughtfully. "If I kick him off the team, how can I help him?" Hamilton saw the potential in this brooding giant. "Brutus gave me faith that there was someone who cared," said Jacobs, who played professional football before becoming a respected teacher and coach at Laney College. "In your formative years, you need someone in your corner. He was the only guy on campus who ever stood up for me. I used to drop by his office because just being in his presence made me feel better." Though he would never win a conference or national track championship at Cal--those belonged almost exclusively to USC in that era--Hamilton enjoyed some of his greatest coaching successes in the 1950s. Bowden broke four minutes in the mile in 1957. And the Bears broke the world record in the two-mile relay on a couple of occasions. But the high point came in 1952, when he was named the head U.S. Olympic coach. The choice made sense. Hamilton had served as an Olympic assistant in 1932 and 1936, and he himself had competed in the Olympics in 1920 and 1924. In 1920, he finished a very close second in the decathlon to a Norwegian, Helge Lovlund. It took several days for officials to tabulate the final results. When Hamilton learned that he was second, he wired his mother a concise summation: "Did my best, but lost by four points. Good time. Well. Home soon. Brutus." In 1952, when the Soviet athletes arrived in Helsinki, they refused to stay in the Olympic Village. And their government wouldn't let the torch relay cross their border, forcing the Finns to plan a new route up and over the Arctic Circle. But from the moment Finnish distance legend Paavo Nurmi carried the torch into Olympic Stadium, the atmosphere transcended politics. An Olympic coach is in many respects a figurehead, but Hamilton is remembered for fostering a brotherhood that extended beyond U.S. quarters. In writing about his Helsinki experience, Hamilton went out of his way to praise the Jamaican team that upset the United States to win the 1,600-meter relay. Mal Whitfield, a tail-gunner in the Korean War prior to winning his second straight Olympic 800-meter title in Helsinki, remembers the kindly gentleman from California as the perfect ambassador. "He gave us little pep talks," Whitfield remembers. "He'd say: 'We're here to do our best for our country and make a few friends. All I expect is for you to do your best in a gentlemanly manner.' There's a difference between a coach and a gentleman. Brutus Hamilton was a classic gentleman." Shortly before Hamilton's retirement, the Berkeley Gazette ran a photo of the "kindly track coach and assistant dean [of students] at the University of California" feeding a grateful squirrel. According to his daughter Jean, Hamilton began feeding the squirrels and birds around Faculty Glade after his dog died. He took the money he'd been spending on dog food and spread it among the smaller creatures. University regulations forced Hamilton to step down as track coach at the age of 65, in 1965. He threw himself a retirement party at Fenton's, a popular Oakland ice-cream parlor. "He entertained from 10 a.m. to something like 6 p.m.," said Bob Steiner '61, a former Cal publicist who now works for Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss. "I can't imagine what his milkshake bill was." Hamilton, a heavy smoker with a history of heart problems, had a short retirement. He suffered an aneurysm and died on December 28, 1970. He is buried in his hometown of Peculiar, Missouri. Today, beneath three towering redwoods in Faculty Glade, there's a small plate set in a boulder. It reads simply: "Brutus K. Hamilton Grove, 1900-1970." The Brutus Hamilton Invitational track meet is held each April at Edwards Stadium in the coach's honor. Those are nice tributes, but Hamilton would most appreciate the words that continue to flow from the aging men he once called "my boys." Men such as Jerry Siebert '61, a two-time Olympian in the 800 meters who became a noted physicist. "Brutus was so good at one-on-one relationships--that was his greatest gift," Siebert said. "From the first day I met him up to now, whenever I face an important decision, the same thing crosses my mind: Am I making Brutus proud?" Bob Burns '79 covered sports for the Sacramento Bee for 15 years and is now a public information officer for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. |
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