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Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011 by Carolyn Christman
Ed and Jean have always been loyal Wake Forest sports fans, especially during basketball season. As students on the old campus, they loved hearing the chimes of the campus bells after big game wins. The idea was to ring the bells loudly enough for the other “Big Four” schools to hear.
In Winston-Salem, and especially as Chaplain, Dad would take us to roll the campus with toilet paper after the biggest wins. Truth be told, he did at times use his master key to find extra toilet tissue in Wingate Hall, but he never ever took the TP from the nursery school bathrooms. He did have principles.
Carolina was the Deacons’ biggest basketball enemy, though Ed and Jean really softened up on UNC after long-time coach Dean Smith made a television commercial for the Nuclear Freeze. He was a good Democrat.
As sports go, however, Dad loved baseball best. He listened on the radio as a child. During the New York years, we rooted for the Yankees and the Mets. (Only an outsider could be so ecumenical!) We were in New York in 1968-1969 and got to see the “Miracle Mets” play; they went on to win the World Series. We were also there to experience a few of the “Broadway” Joe Namath miracles for the New York Jets football team.
After the Braves moved to Atlanta, and when there was local radio coverage,we all became Braves fans. TBS television coverage made it even easier later on to follow “America’s team.”
Dad also enjoyed introducing students to Winston-Salem’s minor league baseball team, a member of the single A Carolina League, which at that time played at Ernie Shore Field. He has a fond memory of taking Eddie Tomeaus (sp?), a blind student, to see some games. Eddie’s pleasure in the game (he later became a big winner on the Jeopardy show) just proved again to Dad how one didn’t have to see to see.
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A Not-so-rusty Runner
Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011 by Carolyn Christman
Carolyn Christman
Dad always loved to run. As a boy, he was a good runner and a fast runner, and he even ran on the track team in high school for a year. As an adult, he picked up running again, this time with a group of friends who called themselves the Rusty Runners. They had matching sweat shirts and pants. Though they sometimes ran on the track, the favorite path was on the cross country trails through the woods around campus.
He wrote later that jogging was like prayer. “It involved getting into a pattern and regularity; is something where a person can lose concentration and regain it, and have a sense of flushing out, clearing the air of any concerns, such as grief. When done with others, jogging, like prayer, benefits from encouragement, by thinking about folks who run. Folks see you on their way back, when you’re starting, and thumbs-up is my sign.” [From "Some Scriptures and Questions," mid-1970s.]
In 1994, after Dad had quadruple bypass surgery, his silver lining was entry into the Wake Forest Cardiac Exercise Program. He would meet with the class three or four mornings a week, walking on the track, and doing some other exercise with the trainers and students in Exercise Science. Dad loved this activity and walking with old and new friends. He found the variety of people in the class, from all walks of life, to be enriching. Being out and about with friends made his heart problems a distant memory. He was a member of the Program for 15 years, until the move to Salemtowne in 2009.
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