Shading my eyes to take in a quarter century...
Memorial Day 2004
Des O'Neill

The request for tee-shirts for Peru sent me to my closet.... Actually my wife sent me to my closet, not for misbehaviour this time, but to take the opportunity to get rid of all the impedimenta of all those years collecting race tee-shirts, whether I wanted them or not; and what an experience it was. Now I have about fifty pounds (22.7 kilos) of tee-shirts in a black plastic garbage bag, awaiting the opportunity to Do Good in Peru....and what an experience it was, what a trip down Memory Lane, all the way back to about 1977, when tee-shirts had just ceased to be given as minor prizes at races and had instead become major fund-raising mechanisms (and, when the order quantities were misjudged, wonderful filler material, insulation, etc., as anyone might see from an inspection of John Brennand's or Joe Howell's garages.)

There was a primo example of John B's sine-wave design for the half-marathon, the only other living example of which, now seriously threadbare, occasionally appears on Ralph Philbrick at races; Irwin Sorkin's violation-of-copyright knock-off which almost got us sued, the flaming-sunset-silhouetted Santa Barbara Mission of 1978, which got into some Tee-shirt Hall of Fame back East (I'm responsible for that one, and I'm still proud of it), all those Fourth of July shirts with a stars-and-stripes motif, Patsy's line of Nine Trails whimsically-misspelled map-shirts, still as accurate a map of the Front Country trail system as you'll find anywhere.....The list goes on and on, as did my memories as I extracted each shirt from the bottom of my closet and consigned it to the aforesaid bag. Then there were my recollections of the individual wearers who made some shirts so memorable; R.M. (anonymity requested) pausing in mid-marathon to throw up all down the front of his brand-new shirt; D.G. (another anonymous) filling hers so attractively; Joe Howell flinging handfuls of tee-shirts to the howling mobs at a Law Day race (no more room in the garage) and all those alarmed turkeys in full flight on the backs of so many Thanksgiving Day shirts. How many artistic ways can one pose an avocado, for instance (Carpinteria) or a pinto bean (Lompoc)? Flowers (Lompoc again)? Dolphins (Resolution Day)? I'm just talking local races here; there were others, out-of-towners, which might mean little to our readers, but significant, clean, almost-unused...As evocative as Proust's madeleine, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the downright ugly, a trip down Memory Lane almost as good as listening to an old Beatles album, the LP version, or going through a photo album of your parents' ("Who were these people? Where was this taken?") and, in a way, as poignant ("Did I really run all those races? I must have been so young and strong and foolish once....").

Ave atque vale, you old shirts. Melissa, you're not just hauling cotton to Peru, you're hauling a whole history of Santa Barbara running and racing.