Eugene was a champion athlete, but he was also a champion person. He lived in the aptly named Race Path Community of Myrtle Beach. He lived on Neighbor Lane. Neighbor Lane actually wasn’t very neighborly. When we dropped the athletes off late at night after away track meets, Neighbor Lane being a “shoot zone”, they all ducked onto the floor of the bus whenever we went through there.
But I could never duck because I was the one driving the bus. And Eugene never ducked either. He just sat there and smiled and made cracks about the danger (ever-present to him since he was born) as he rattled off some observation about the potential i our team that he had seen on the track that day, getting ready to call in the results of the meet to the Myrtle Beach Sun News, all a part of his meticulous record-keeping of our team’s results.
The trailer Eugene grew up in had only three sides. The fourth side was “open air”, with big sheets of thick plastic to ward off the cold of the Carolina winters. His trailer really had only three sides. It was right next to my French student Joannie Hayes’ trailer, which also had three sides, but wasn’t quite as bad.
I remember once seeing Joannie, who one year earned a perfect score on the National French exam at level 3, earning her #1 in the nation honors, by chance in the Charlotte airport years later. When I asked her what she was doing, she replied that she had just graduated from the Duke University School of Medicine.
Eugene’s dad had left his trailer when he was only six years old. During those six years, Eugene was occasionally beaten. That accounted, perhaps, for his pronounced stutter.
(to be cont.)