Bill Webb

That’s the late Bill Webb (center, displaying “The Grip”), his wife Mary Jo (right) and son Mike (ballcap, in background). Daughter Erica is not pictured.

By John Murphy

Back in the 1970s, when I was in college, I was a recreation leader at John Muir School in San Bruno. The kids from the other playgrounds around town called us “John Manure.”

I coached a playground basketball team and a kid at John Muir I had my eye on was Mike Webb. He was a shy, left-handed boy with light brown hair who could shoot. I needed him.

That’s probably how I met the late Bill Webb. I recruited his son. Bill and I became fast friends. I coached Mike in flag football, hoops, soccer, floor hockey and all the other crazy games we played. And Bill rooted for the 49ers, Giants and Stanford – same as me.

Mike also played Pee Wee Baseball for the Kiwanis and Bill was the coach. I assisted him. There was a “Bad News Bears” quality to our team, but Bill whipped it into shape. He organized practices into three stations where kids always hit, played “pepper” or shagged flies. Bill was smart, as one would expect of a St. Ignatius High graduate. He took us all the way to the championship game.  

Chris Cocoles was the “Engelberg” (I’m referencing “The Bad News Bears” again) of the Kiwanis. He was chubby and Webb was constantly on him to hike up his pants. “Cocoles – pull up your pants!” he’d yell, but not in a mean way. Bill had a way with kids.     

We had a tremendous playground hoops team with Joey Serafini, Tim Bowler, Matt Coates and two kids from St. Robert’s, Mike Cochrane and Sean O’Reilly. Serafini was a very nice but mischievous kid who occasionally irked Bill by tossing clumps of mud at the window of his house on Alcott Road.

Ah, Alcott. Those were fun times in the Webb living room with Bill holding court, watching TV sports, drinking Coors beer and making his famous “half-pound” cheeseburgers. If I desired a beverage, I had to show him “The Grip” — a technique for tightly holding a can that I mastered.

Entire afternoons melted away as we watched games and Bill spoke of his high school days and how St. Ignatius’ legendary but star-crossed Fred LaCour used to “eat the lunch” of Lowell’s Tom Meschery. Or how he gave the Giants’ Orlando Cepeda an earful out at The Stick. Not sure what Bill’s issue was with Cepeda — it was just one of his quirks.

Bill loved his son Mike, as well as his lovely and patient wife Mary Jo (whom he called MJ) and his daughter Erica, who I only knew at “The Big E”. He really enjoyed watching Mike play sports and he leaped hedges and small fences on his postal route to get to our tournament games on time.  

Bill Webb died in 2003 at age 63 of a long illness. By that point he’d been a stockbroker for 10 years and I had lost touch with them. That happens in life and I feel a little bad about it. But if Webb were here now, I’d show him “The Grip” and he’d hand me a cold one and it’d be just like old times.   

          

Me, Oberjuerge and Warren Zevon

By John Murphy

This week I reported that Gary Libby has resigned as baseball coach at Chino High. He will seek a job in the High Desert where he has lived for 31 years.

I hadn’t spoken to Libby since he coached at Pacific back when I was at the San Bernardino Sun (2000 to 2009). He told me a funny story Saturday about Paul Oberjuerge, me and Warren Zevon – an odd trio if ever this was one.

Oberjuerge, the former San Bernardino Sun sports editor, sat next to me at the old downtown building. His desk was right across a partition from mine.

This was 15-20 years ago, remember, and I worked alone in the sports department for much of the day. So I had a small boom box in there and played mostly rock n roll, including the late Warren Zevon. I didn’t wear headphones, so everyone listened to my selections. Fortunately, I have impeccable taste.

Anyway, Oberjuerge in a sports column used the phrase “splendid isolation,”prompting Libby to call or email Paul and ask if he is a Warren Zevon fan … since Zevon had a song with that title.

“No,” Paul said, “But John Murphy listens to him. He sits right next to me.”

Well, Libby got a kick out of that and surmised that Paul acquired the phrase by osmosis while overhearing my old cassette tape. I’m not sure about that, but stranger things have happened.

And here are the great Mr. Zevon’s lines:

I want to live alone in the desert
I want to be like Georgia O’Keefe
I want to live on the Upper East Side
And never go down in the street

Splendid Isolation
I don’t need no one
Splendid Isolation

Michael Jackson in Disneyland
Don’t have to share it with nobody else
Lock the gates, Goofy, take my hand
And lead me through the World of Self

Splendid Isolation
I don’t need no one
Splendid Isolation

There’s more, but you get the idea. Those were fun times at the old Sun.

Burlingame Rec

That’s Mike Ciardella (center) with one of his state championship Sacred Heart Prep girls basketball teams. But I knew him when he was just known as “Chubby.”

By John Murphy

Faithful readers of this blog may recall that I majored in Recreation and not Journalism. It was a curious decision on my part, but I stand by it.  

So I attended San Francisco State University and played with the Earth Ball and learned to whittle and gave a demonstration speech to a class on how to make a gin fizz. Once the haze had lifted, I had a diploma.   

Before graduation, though, I had to serve an internship. That’s how I wound up at the Burlingame Recreation Department in 1977-78 with an odd cast of characters.

Everyone had nicknames. They were supplied by either rec supervisor Mike Ciardella, better known as a crack prep basketball coach; or the late Carl Reyna, a colorful neighborhood character with a cognitive disability.

Ciardella achieved fame for coaching the Sacred Heart Prep girls basketball team of Atherton to five state titles. But in 1977 he was simply known as “Chubby” – the nickname Carl Reyna bestowed upon him.

There was also rec director Ray Wagner (“Daddy Wags”), supervisor Brock Riddle (“The Brockster), Steve Picchi (“The Picch-ster) and Clay Rice (“Clayton”). The Brock-ster was sometimes known as “Brock Riddle, Male Model” because he was unusually handsome.

I was given a tiny desk outside of Ciardella’s office. When Mike came in, I strived to waste as much time as I possibly could chatting with him about basketball.

At some point Ciardella would kick me out of his office so he could get some work done. Then I would wait for mid-morning when King Carl and rec leaders Picchi and Rice would come in and we’d all have donuts together.  Carl, bald and rocking his trademark Capuchino High letterman’s jacket, usually had the San Francisco Chronicle Sporting Green. Occasionally he’d emit a loud “Ohhhhhh, yeaaahhhhh!” – his trademark saying.

Gotta say, the internship wasn’t strenuous. I wrote press releases for “Art in the Park.” I trimmed trees for the parks department. And I ran a softball contest for little girls called the “Throw, Hit and Run.”

In the end, I chose newspapers. I landed my first full-time job, in Watsonville, in December of 1978. But I couldn’t completely escape the vaunted Burlingame Rec Department.

That spring I trekked up to Candlestick Park with a few of my buds to watch a Giants’ game. All went well until the trip home when I got a flat tire on the 101 freeway.  

Well, I had “Tom Sawyered” the task of changing the tire to my pals.  So I was standing by my car waiting for them to finish when a vehicle pulled up close and a bald man in a  green letterman’s jacket stuck his head out and yelled,  “HEY MURPHY, GET A HORSE!”

He, of course, was the legendary Carl Reyna. All I could do was laugh.

Bill Larsen

By John Murphy

I follow many coaches on Twitter. A topic one week was “Who’s the best coach you ever had?”

Easy one for me – Bill Larsen. My eighth-grade basketball coach. But let me backtrack.

I was in fourth grade at St. Robert’s School in San Bruno. Our class got a transfer named Keith Larsen, who’s now the basketball coach at Menlo School in Atherton. Hyperactive kid with a mop of black hair and as thin as a reed. We became fast friends.

He’d visit my house and I’d go to his. I met his three siblings, his mom Rose, his grandma “Noni” and, of course, his dad Bill Larsen.

Bill was this burly guy with sandy brown hair, eyeglasses and a tattoo on his forearm that said “Swede.” I’m not into body ink, but the tattoo was cool.

So was Bill. He started coaching our team in eighth grade. He inherited it from a high school kid named Hank McLaughlin and his pal Frank Schaukowitch. Don’t get me started on that pair – they’re a separate blog.  

Keith’s dad – or “Mr. Larsen” as we called him — was super-charged during games, clapping his hands and exhorting us on. He was upbeat.   

We played our games at the San Bruno Rec where the Golden State Warriors practiced. Then on Mondays Bill did his post-mortem and read our stats.  

“Keith Larsen, you made 3-of-18 shots from the field and 8-of-9 from the line and scored 14 points,” Bill would say.

“Nice job, Keith!” I’d say, slapping my pal on the back.

Bill Larsen: “Murph, you made 2-of-11 shots from the field and 4-of-6 from the line and scored eight points.”

“Eight points!!!” Keith would marvel. “All right, Murph!”  

Field-goal percentage? We didn’t know about that.  

I kept in contact with Bill in later years after Keith and I went our separate ways. Then early in the 1990s something happened to me – I lost something important — and I went into a deep funk. It seemed like the end of the world.   

So I left SoCal and went back to San Bruno and looked up my old coach, Bill Larsen. We went for a drive, through San Bruno, past the rec center and all the old haunts. Then up the 280 freeway and down into Pacifica along the ocean. I spilled my guts to Bill about my problem, fretted about the future.

Bill didn’t say much at first, just listened. Then he took a deep breath and said, “You know Murph, you’ve got something that not everyone has, and you need to remember that.” Then he paused and added, “I wish I had something like that.”

Maybe he meant bad breath – I don’t know. But his kind words resonated. I thought it over. Then I thought it over some more. And before long I was OK, putting one foot in front of the other again.   

That, folks, is what a coach is. Upbeat when he’s coaching you and kicking your butt when necessary. And who you can go to 20 years later with a problem and he’ll say the exact right thing. Lift you up all over again.  

That’s why Bill Larsen, now 88, is the best coach I ever had. Plus, he gave us Gatorade at halftime. I liked the Gatorade.

Harvey Cohen: A closer look

Every day was Casual Friday for Harvey Cohen, rocking a Hawaiian shirt here.

By John Murphy

Twenty-four years ago I moved to San Bernardino and bought a house near 40th Avenue. A few blocks away, on Sierra Avenue, was a row of businesses that included a tamale shop, a tattoo parlor, a barbershop and Harvey Wallhanger’s Thrift Store.

That’s where I met Harvey Cohen, the owner of the thrift store and beloved Inland journalist who died April 24 at age 70 of kidney failure. Harvey was my bud. He called me “coach” because I used to wear those cheesy polyester coaching shorts that were popular for a time. Our personalities meshed and we spent hours in his store talking about sports, music and newspapers.

That was even 3-4 years before I arrived at the San Bernardino Sun. Harvey freelanced at The Sun, so we also became colleagues.   

Harvey Cohen as a San Bernardino High student.

Friday nights during football season at the old Sun building downtown were wild. Sports editor Paul Oberjuerge, liter of Diet 7-Up in hand, presided as a rogues’ gallery of writers descended upon the old building. The cast included such unique characters as James Curran, Nick Johnson, Vinny Fazio, Danny Summers and, of course, Harvey.

Harvey didn’t have a key to the building, so he’d sometimes throw pebbles at the second-story window in front of my work station. Then he’d enter, often rocking a Hawaiian shirt and uttering a funny quip. Former Sun sports reporter Mirjam Swanson typically set Harvey up on the computer.

“He was the nicest, sweetest sportswriter I’ve ever come across, period,” Swanson said.

Nobody is arguing. Not Harvey’s siblings – Candi, Larry and Gary. Not girlfriend Jeannette Roostai, who Harvey met in 1994 and with whom he was living at the time of his death. Not the readers in Yucaipa where Harvey was a sports reporter for the Yucaipa-Calimesa News Mirror. And not the friends Harvey knew from childhood in North San Bernardino.

Harvey “grew up rough” in the 1960s, as his brother Larry put it, and wasn’t averse to settling disputes with his fists.   

Harvey Cohen (right) and teammate Larry Gable during their Newmark Dodger LL days.

“In his high school years, he was tough,” Gary Cohen said. “He didn’t pick fights, but he didn’t walk away from any either.”

One day several members of a motorcycle club hassled Harvey. He responded by pummeling them all. Later, Harvey ran into the club’s leader who was known as “Sloopy.”

Recalled Harvey’s old friend Tom Wilson: “Sloopy said ‘Hi Harvey’ and Harvey said ‘Hi Sloopy.’ Then Sloopy asked Harvey what happened. Harvey said, ‘You know, I don’t think you want those guys under you – they can’t fight.”  

Classic Harvey.  

In later years the 1967 San Bernardino High grad worked an array of jobs in far-flung locales. But eventually he returned to San Bernardino and opened his succession of thrift stores and began freelance writing. That and his move to Yucaipa to live with marathon runner Jeannette led to his final job.

In Yucaipa, Harvey was omnipresent, covering everything from Little League baseball, to martial arts, to high school sports.

“If you were an athlete in Yucaipa, you knew who Harvey Cohen was,” Yucaipa High football coach Justin Price said. “He came to practices and lower-level games and interviewed us after games. He even came by my house a few times. All the players were excited when they heard Harvey was coming to practice.”  

Harvey Cohen and Jeannette Roostai after the Oklahoma City Marathon.

A child of the 1960s, Harvey also had a social conscience. That and his penchant for speaking his mind and low tolerance for BS, sometimes made him the bane of City Hall and other agencies.  

One of those groups was the Yucaipa Valley Water Board. Harvey had an issue with it, his brother Gary said, and argued so loud and long at a meeting that he was “escorted out.”

Deep down, though, Harvey was a kind soul. Certainly, he was to Jeannette, rising early in the morning to follow her on her long training runs. Jeannette ran an amazing 102 marathons, a feat Harvey wrote about in The Sun.

“We also loved to take walks,” said Jeannette, a native Costa Rican. “Long ones, and short ones lately. One week before he died, we went walking to the park, and he was telling me, ‘Please be patient, I am very slow now.’”

Considerate to the end, Harvey asked that his organs be donated to science.

“Harvey didn’t want anyone to worry,” Larry Cohen said. “He just wanted to be cremated. Maybe we’ll spread his ashes on a baseball field, but that’s in limbo now.”

Reach John Murphy at berdooman@gmail.com and follow on Twitter at @PrepCat  

Harvey Cohen (right) and Larry Gable six decades after they played Little League together.

Papa Jess

Serra coach Jesse Freitas chats with son Jim during romp over Sacred Heart in 1973.

By John Murphy

Saw an email from my brother Jim on Monday night and it said, “Remembering Legendary Ex-Serra Football Coach Jesse Freitas.

I knew Papa Jess, an original San Francisco 49er and Serra icon, had died.  

Freitas, 99, passed at his San Diego home on Monday morning of cancer. The news froze me.

As the little brother of a Serra High player, I saw and heard a lot from that golden era. Here are five memorable games from 1967 through ’69 when Freitas led Serra to victory:   

1967

SERRA 34, BELLARMINE 27

The Bells powered for two early scores and it was 14-0.  “Here we go again,” Serra fans said. Then Tom Scott started running wild. His two long kick returns turned the tide.

Said a still-spry Freitas to me five years ago at his son Jesse’s memorial service: “The start of the second half Tom Scott ran back a kickoff for a touchdown. It didn’t look like we were going to do it until Tom’s return. Bellarmine up until that time was kicking our (rears) every year and then it kind of turned around.”

1968

SERRA 57, SAN MATEO 33

Burlingame High was packed. The Padre bus broke down en route. Stars like Lynn Swann, Scott and Freitas were spotted hitch-hiking, with Jesse Jr. running onto the field shortly before kickoff.

The teams gained more than 800 yards combined and scored 90 points. A highlight (of sorts) was Serra’s Steve Morello weaving for a long TD and then puking on the sideline.  

Scoop Wynkoop’s headline in the San Bruno Herald: “Serra Out of Sight for San Mateo – Padres Simply Too Much.”

1969

SERRA 13, ST. IGNATIUS 10

Our uncle,  JB Murphy, was a teacher at SI for 50 years. The SI field is named after him. Few nights before the game I was awakened by a loud crash. My brother in his sleep had broken a lamp with a forearm shiver. He was ready.

Brutal defensive slugfest at Kezar Stadium. Video of the game can be seen here. SI led late. Then Swann took a kickoff at the 10 and ran 90 yards up the middle for the score. No bedroom lamps were harmed that night.  

SERRA 33, RIORDAN 14

Halloween night at Kezar. The Padres vs. Riordan’s “Unholy 11.”.  

Tight game until a Crusader dropped a sure TD pass. Then Serra’s power-I took over with Bob Buerger, Mike Rocchi and Pete Jordan dominating.  

My brother had the flu but played. After he was hunched over in the locker room, in bad shape.

“Somebody get Murphy some aspirin,” Papa Jess said.

SERRA 30, ST. FRANCIS 6

Last game. A second straight title on the line.  

Serra players had a victory party planned afterward and Papa Jess knew it. But the plucky Lancers hung in there.

“You guys better get your (butts) in gear or there’s not going to be any damned victory party,” Freitas said at halftime.  

Swann listened. He scored every point in the victory, including a QB sneak 60 yards up the middle to clinch it. Party time.  

EPILOGUE

As a kid watching these games, it all seemed so magical. The team in blue and gold ran on the field, the fight song played, and the good guys won. Every game.

Then 1970 happened. Bellarmine pounded the Padres 39-0 in the league opener. Whew. Lesson learned: You don’t always win. But for a while, with Jesse Freitas as coach, Serra did.

RIP, Papa Jess.

Glory days

By John Murphy

Late December 1978 I climbed into my father’s Oldsmobile and drove south. Destination: Santa Cruz.

I interviewed for a sports reporter job at the Santa Cruz Sentinel at like 8 a.m. Three hours later, I tried for Watsonville’s sports editor job.

Luck and youth were with me, as I got both jobs. I chose Watsonville since it made me the boss. The boss of one guy that is, Greg Lathrop. Lathrop is a story for another day as I — ahem — can’t fit all his antics into this piece.

Never had so much fun as those early days at the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian. The paper won a Pulitzer Prize for community service in 1956 (the year I was born). Three of its main players then — photographer Sam Vestal, editor Frank Orr and managing editor Ward Bushee — were still there.  

The place was classic. We were housed in an old supermarket building on the north end of town. An old guy, Bill Akers, sat across from me, banging out columns on an Underwood and smoking. Bill did crossword puzzles too and learned obscure words like reprobate and ne-er-do-well. Lathrop and I filched those gems and used them to insult each other. Mature stuff.  

There were no computers yet. Instead, high school girls rolled tapes from the United Press International wire that were fed into a machine that spit out copy. Wire photos came out of a machine too. We judged their size with a measuring wheel. And we used pica polls to gauge copy — I won’t even explain those.

Me and Lathrop? We cracked wise all morning and wrote too many headlines with rock ‘n’ roll references. Our antics occasionally irked Bushee who would tell us to “knock off the jollity.” We’d clam up and grab a dictionary to look up jollity.

We wrote a lot of local copy, but also ran New York Times sports columns by Red Smith and Dave Anderson. Those were typeset in back by a chronically hung-over guy who set pristine copy. But if we told him the wrong column measure it screwed up the works. Then there’d be Hell to pay.

Bill Brazil, a burly Portuguese guy would burst out of the back and accost us. It was scary. But Bill mellowed over the years and became only sort of terrifying.

One day former Watsonville sports editor Glenn Dickey came to town to give a speech. Glenn was big-time now, writing a sports column for the San Francisco Chronicle. He infamously ripped Willie Mays back when nobody did that. His fame grew.

I wrote a column about Dickey’s return and somebody sent it to him. It was nothing special — just a local guy makes good piece. But a few days later a letter post-marked San Francisco got dropped on my desk. It was from Glenn, praising my work and offering words of encouragement. Classy move.

I learned from that and have tried to do the same with younger writers … which for me these days is everyone.  

Watsonville. I remember it fondly.

East Fern Ave.

By John Murphy

Now that COVID-19 has made me a “non-essential employee” at my school I have nothing to do all day.

So every afternoon I head for Redlands and go for a long walk. Thursday’s destination: East Fern Avenue.

I affixed my airbuds just right and pressed play. A sucky song by the Imagine Dragons came on. I winced. Switching channels, I got Jimi Hendrix belting out “All Along the Watchtower.” That was more like it.  

East Fern is the high-rent district. There are no abandoned couches on this street and no indoor furniture on porches — always a tacky look. American flags adorn many of the vintage houses. Yards are clean and well-manicured.

It’s an old-money area and I don’t even see many children’s toys in front yards. But there are lots of copies of folded-up newspapers sitting unread in driveways. Not a good omen.

Neil Young is singing “Heart of Gold” now as I pass cross streets named Buena Vista, Bond, Center and Nanette. A woman in a bright turquoise medical outfit is pushing her trash bin back into place. Unlike me, she didn’t have the day off.

Redlands is a Republican town and one ranch house actually has a “Trump — Keep America Great” sign in front. But there’s also a Nissan pickup parked there and the contradiction makes me laugh.

The source of much of Redlands’ wealth in the 1900s was citrus. Redlands became a fruit-packing center by the late 1930s, with more than 15,000 acres of citrus groves.

Subdivisions have largely replaced oranges now, but one grove that remains is at the Beverly Ranch at 923 East Fern. The plaque outside says the grove was planted in 1887 for a young widow, Elizabeth Eddy. Later, Elizabeth married John Fisk and a cottage was built. The grove and Queen Anne house in 2004 were listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

My curiosity sated, I forged ahead … and took a left on Buena Vista to head back to my car parked on East Olive. The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” serenaded me.

It was just another pleasant day in Redlands, Calif.

Warren ‘Scoop’ Wynkoop

By John Murphy

My seventh-grade basketball coach, Hank McLaughlin, used to say Thursday was his favorite day … because he’d get home from school, grab some chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk and read the San Bruno Herald. He wasn’t alone.

The shining star of the weekly San Bruno Herald as far as I was concerned was a dark-haired, energetic, hipster man with the too-good-to-be-true name of Warren “Scoop” Wynkoop.

As sports editor and staff photographer for the Herald, Scoop was everywhere – writing his upbeat pieces about local-boys-made-good like Capuchino High grads Wally Bunker of the Baltimore Orioles and Jim Kauffman of the Stanford Indians, as well as area preps right on down to Midget and Pee Wee League baseball players.

Scoop was not only the local sports editor, but also a family friend. His oldest son, Bob, was a classmate and close bud of my older brother Jim. Same for his second-oldest son Bruce and me. Sometimes Scoop would take us to San Francisco Warriors basketball games or Stanford football games he was covering and bring us hot dogs from the press box. Seemed like a good gig.   

Dude knew some far-out cats, too. One was a San Francisco native named Robert Bootzin who was known simply as “Gypsy Boots.” Bootzin owned this place called the Health Hut in Hollywood which catered to the stars. But he was also this athletic freak of nature who would breeze through San Bruno to visit Scoop and distribute his Gypsy Boots Energy Bars and wow people at San Bruno Park with his ability to throw and kick a football incredible distances. It is said that at age 80 he could still throw a football 40 yards.  

But I digress. Scoop Wynkoop in his heyday from the 1950s to the late 1960s was a journalistic force of nature and an inspiration to me. He took photos all over San Bruno and did a radio show for KCSM and described sporting events by using the hip vernacular of the day like this headline I still remember from 1968: “Serra Out of Sight for San Mateo – Padres Simply Too Much.”

Nothing gold can stay, as Frost wrote. By 1968 profits at the Herald sagged and longtime publisher A.I. Cloud sold the newspaper to the Amphlett Printing Company which cut staff, including Scoop. San Bruno sports coverage was never the same.  

Scoop hung around, doing some public relations work for the city of South San Francisco and writing a sports column for the Millbrae Sun. But, sadly, he became ill and died in 1976 at age 46.

Warren “Scoop” Wynkoop – gone too soon, but never forgotten.   

Aptos’ day in the sun

In 2002 former major league pitcher Mark Eichhorn helped coach the Aptos Little League team to a berth in the LL World Series.

By John Murphy

Took a stroll down memory lane this morning when I googled “Mark Eichhorn.”

That led me to segments of a PBS Documentary, “Small Ball,”  on youtube. It was about the 2002 Aptos Little League baseball team. The team made it all the way to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Penn.

Eichhorn is a former major league baseball pitcher who had a tremendous career. He was an assistant coach for the Aptos team and his son, Kevin, one of the team’s top pitchers. The other players were: Pitcher Kyle Anderson, the son of manager Dave Anderson; Andrew Biancardi; Tyler Raymond; Kevin Farmer; Brian Godoy; Curtis Worden; Mark Lamothe; Justin Burns; Drew McCauley; Cesar Zermeno; and Jarred Bachan.

I knew Mark Eichhorn from when I was the sports editor of the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian. One of the first stories I wrote for the paper, in 1979, was Mark getting drafted out of Cabrillo College by the Toronto Blue Jays.

So it was nice to see him again when the 2002 Aptos team came to San Bernardino to compete in the Little League Western Regionals. I covered the tournament for the San Bernardino Sun and other newspapers, including the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

The Little League tourney was not Mark Eichhorn’s first trip to San Bernardino. He pitched there in 1996 on a rehab assignment from the Angels. In fact, Eichhorn was the losing pitcher for the Lake Elsinore Storm against the San Bernardino Stampede in the first game ever played at what is now called San Manuel Stadium.

Six years later Eichhorn was back, helping guide his son’s team. By day he coached the boys up and by night he entertained them with spooky stories, an array of celebrity impressions and his goofy dance moves — some of which was captured by PBS.

The story had a joyous ending for Aptos, too. The boys won it all, 4-3 against Arizona, in dramatic fashion. The 6-foot Raymond struck the winning blow, hitting a clutch, three-run home run in the bottom of the fifth inning. I recall Raymond leading the team on a victory lap around Houghton Stadium, its championship banner flapping in the warm summer breeze.

There won’t be a repeat this season. Today Little League Inc. canceled the World Series and its regional tournaments due to the COVID-19 pandemic.