Pete and I ran slow. For me, it was the burning lungs; for Pete, it was short legs. For us both, what better event than the mile run?
Neither of us had any business on the Tempe (Ariz.) High School track team. Those other boys could spring, jump, clear hurdles, ripple muscles, pass other runners, kick up cinders as their cleats dug in to the track. Most of them also played football, basketball, ran cross-country, or wrestled. They were good. They wore the Tempe High blue-and-white jersey proudly.
Pete and I stood on the white chalk line, at the start, along with the other runners. For a brief moment, we were in the same race as them, equal. The official shot a real gun — bang! Halfway around the quarter-mile oval, it was just Pete and me. Breathing hard, two of his steps for each of mine — left, right, left, right. We traded off on the inside lane, neither of us conceding (or claiming) an advantage.
Except for our utter breathlessness, we’d have held a conversation — about our thoughts, our hopes, our dreams. For me, no question but that there would someday be college. The campus lay just a mile up the road — we could see the giant “A”-butte and the stadium tucked within it from the front door of our high school. Pete had told me, “Aw, no, I’ll be enlisting after graduation.”
Two slow guys, panting.
After about two and a half laps, the leader of the race would approach from behind, his cleats making solid and regular schunk, schunk, schunks as they dug forward. As if by unwritten rule, Pete and I would veer right to let him pass — steady, strong, churning.
The whole track meet seemed to wait impatiently while Pete and I slowly rounded the final quarter-turn. There were, after all, other races — the quarter mile, that torture of a long sprint, the high and low hurdles, the relays. But Pete and I were done for the day. We quietly stepped into our sweats again, and took our places in the metal bleachers, ready to cheer on the Tempe Buffaloes, crack wise and daydream.
After track season, we moved on, each with our own teenage lives. In such a large school, it was easy to drift apart. By 1969 and senior year, we were still on a “Hey, Bud,” basis, but no longer the track losers together we had once been.
I got sick for a couple of months, stayed in bed, bored, listened to my transistor radio, heard Lyndon Johnson and then Richard Nixon drone on about the war.
The old track shoes helped me get back to normal once the ailment passed, but this time it was mostly just running in the neighborhood, looping around the local school playgrounds, then to the Arizona State University campus and back. The idea of the solitary runner spread like a cult across America, and names like Prefontaine, Rogers, Ryun and Shorter became legend.
For me, college began early, a program that allowed seniors to begin taking freshmen classes while finishing up high school. By then, I had already said my mental goodbyes to childhood, became ensconced in the vast university library, stuck my nose in books, and looked intently ahead.
Tempe High held its commencement on the football field — which also served as the track infield — under warm May skies. There, among the long line of graduates, was Pete. We found ourselves, in our caps and gowns, standing on the pole lane of the track. Instinctively, we each took a quick glance up and down the track, as if to make sure we were not blocking any sprinters. “We’d better step to the outside lanes,” I laughed.
Pete replied, “No, let ’em pass around us this time.” We shook hands, one last time, and blended into the happy, tearful crowds of newly minted graduates and families.
• • •
In the fall of 1999, I was part of a team of municipal officials from Lakewood attending a weeklong training course at the National Fire Leadership Academy in Emmitsburg, Md. The schedule allowed us to visit our nation’s capital for the better part of a day, where we all expressed a desire to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Once there, it was difficult to keep back the tears. Men, women and children quietly sobbed, red-eyed, ashen. They wore faded olive-green jackets, jeans, T-shirts, sneakers. A man sat in a wheelchair, hunched, balding and bearded, staring at the shiny black monolith, as rain set in.
At the foot of the long chevron was strewn every imaginable artifact: plastic and real flowers, stuffed animals, framed photographs, hand- scrawled letters on blue or pink stationery held down from the wind with a stone, and garments of every sort, including some bearing military insignia, stars, stripes, medals, brass buttons, name plates.
At the far end of the memorial, on a low lectern encased within a waterproof Plexiglas box, a phone book-like registry contains the names of each deceased soldier, sailor, airman and Marine. The hometown of each of the fallen, as well as the panel and row where his or her name is located, are also provided.
The pages are frayed, dog-eared and faded. I carefully turn the pages to “S,” and find “Staddon, Peter Bruce. Phoenix, Arizona. Panel W6, Row 28.” The names on the panel follow the order of death, the dates listed with each name. I read “30OCT70.” Pete was barely a year and a half out of high school when life ended for him.
I had seen his name in the Arizona Republic, our morning daily paper. In those days, I checked the obituaries regularly, an activity seemingly odd for one so young.
There it was: Peter Staddon, Tempe High School, class of 1969. • • •
At the Vietnam Memorial, I remembered Pete running on the Tempe High cinder track. I then imagined him scrambling and crouching through a humid jungle, staring down the face of death. And tears came to me, as well.
I reached up to touch Pete’s name on panel W6, row 28. My fingers felt the letters that were routed into the black marble. Looking down the wall to the right, I saw the seemingly endless list of names of Americans still to fall after Oct. 30, 1970. For Pete, there was no more school, no best girl, no grandsons, no Watergate, no 1970s lapels, malaise, or bell-bottom pants, no morning in America, no stock market bubble, no financial meltdown, no hope we can believe in.
For Pete, there is rest from the long run; there is honor afforded the hero. There is, seared in my memory, the breathing of slow runners, determined to finish while the world waits.
James Zelenski of Lakewood is an affiliate faculty member at Regis University.
