Todd Smith speech about Jim Gere on 2/21/09
I’m here to talk for a few minutes about Jim Gere, one of the founders of the Angell Field Ancients.
Jim wasn’t the World Class runner that some of the other founders of the AFA were, but he was no slouch. He held the national over 50 440 title in the 1976 Collegiate Clearinghouse track meet, and he ran the 1973 Boston Marathon in the respectable time of 3:14. But he was passionate about his running and about being organized and about being a good friend and companion to anyone he met.
Speaking about passionate, I want to introduce you to his childhood sweetheart and wife Janice Gere, probably the second nicest wife in the world. Together they produced three fine children, Bill, David and Susan, who in turn produced three grandchildren for Jim and Janice to play with. They are Dewitt, Clifford, and Rachelle.
Jim was one of the most organized individuals I’ve ever known. When he’d go backpacking, everything was labeled, and he’d even cut off the handle of his toothbrush to save weight. (I’ve often wondered how one uses a toothbrush without a handle.) With this mindset, one can only imagine the frustration the Ancients must have caused him. To quote from a letter to Jim written in the last century by Ken Lorell, the AFA were “a totally disorganized non group group.” Particularly if you were to be wearing an AFA tee shirt, you were likely to be asked “What do I do to join?” Your response of “Nothing, just come on out and run.” was likely to be met with a somewhat puzzled stare. Having mentioned the AFA tee shirt, I have to say that it was one of Jim’s more inspired attempts at organization. He and Janice drove to some outfit or another in San Jose with their design and color scheme (and Janice told me the other day that SHE was responsible for the high quality and shapely design of the womens shirts) and placed an order. Subsequently, Stanford Professor Jim Gere could be found hawking shirts from his locker and from the back of his car. The AFA does have a couple of inspiring mottos which I ascribe to Jim, although with some trepidation. One, originally in Latin but loosely translated for us illiterates, is “To Start is to Compete, To Compete is to Win.” The other is “Start Slow and Taper Off.” There is yet another phrase, which I’ll get to in just a minute, which many of us came to associate with Jim.
Jim was born with a metronome embedded in his head. When I first met him he could tick off 6 minute miles with astonishing regularity. But eventually the metronome began to wind down and he had to use his wits, rather than speed, to keep pace with the long distance AFA runs. This was the beginning of the splinter group known as “The Shortcutters”. Over the years, as various body parts either wore out or fell off, this group slowed to the point that we found that a good part of our workout was devoted to solving the World’s problems. Politics, religion, medicine, science, it didn’t matter. The group, now having somehow been named the WIMPS, had one or more experts in any field, and sometimes these experts didn’t agree on the solution. Sometimes they REALLY didn’t agree. Poor Gentleman Jim, who felt uncomfortable in the presence of such discord, would try to adjudicate with the phrase “You’re both right”. That’s how I remember Jim.