In their words
"Stivers High — and the sports I played there — pretty much saved my little rear end. It gave me new direction."
— Bob Logan, Stivers High Athletic Hall of Fame inductee
"That first Christmas he got more presents from her (my mom) than I did. She bought him a winter coat and a scarf because he didn't have one, and he wore them everywhere."
— Jean Logan, Bob’s wife on his first holiday with her family
The induction
The Stivers High Athletic Hall of Fame will hold its fourth annual induction ceremony and dinner today, Oct. 11, at the Presidential Banquet Center.
University of Dayton coaching legend Don Donoher and Bill Hosket Jr., the former Ohio State star, NBA champion and Olympic gold medalist, will serve as the masters of ceremony. The inductees include:
Joe Kitchen, Ray “Sheik” Otto, Larry Shadowens, Wilson “Jit” Lightner, Larry Ferguson, Kenneth Stiles, “Herbie” Schafer Jr., Marty Armbruster, Beno Keiter, Dale Fairchiild, Vern “Teddy Bear” Woods, Jerry Bohannon, Bob Logan, Sahara Ballard, Dick Landis, Bill Wikle and Rusty Young.
MEDWAY — Before Stivers High School decided to enshrine him as one of its most storied athletes ever — more than just an all-city football player, he’s become a hard-nosed legend of Tiger reclamation — the school helped save him.
That’s why, as Bob Logan has looked forward to his induction into the Stivers High Athletic Hall of Fame today, Oct. 11, he’s also found himself looking back to a time when teenage trouble — and the incredulous penalty it drew — was giving any hope of glorious accomplishment by him a solid stiff-arm to the snoot.
Growing up poor in the 1940s and early ’50s, he lived in the hardscrabble Fifth Street neighborhood near Stivers on Datyon’s East End.
He can tell you about pulling a little red wagon up and down the railroad tracks picking up coal that fell from the passing trains and bringing it home.
He put cardboard in his shoes to cover the holes in his soles, and he remembers toting a kettle into the Rendezvous, an old Italian place at La Belle and Fifth, and getting 50 cents worth of spaghetti so his family could eat.
He said his dad was a rough man — “his discipline was bad news” — and died when Bob was 12. To support her son and daughter, Logan’s mom worked long hours as a waitress in the bars and eateries along East Fifth.
For a while, Logan spent all his free time at the Bomberger Center and the Boys and Girls Club. But when he turned 15, he began hanging out with a bunch of guys, most of whom cared little for sports, school or anything else constructive.
“We were standing around one day wondering what we were gonna do, and one kid says, ‘I got a brother in Newark, New Jersey. Let’s go see him,’ ” Logan said.
Without a cent in his pocket and just the clothes on his back — “I’d never been nowhere in my life” — Logan joined three other guys and hitchhiked to New Jersey.
“We spent a couple of days there, went over to Coney Island then thumbed back,” he said. “It was an adventure and it went pretty well — so then one of the guys said, ‘Let’s go to California.’
“I said, ‘Let’s go. We hitching?’ ”
The kid told him no, he’d get a car.
The four piled into a ’42 Chevy — Logan anchored in the back because he didn’t know how to drive — and they headed west. But near Martinsville, Ind., they ran out of gas.
“We went over to an abandoned farmhouse, smoked some cigarettes, and then we left the car along the road and walked into town,” he said.
Soon the local cops had them corralled.
That car the kid had produced — it was stolen.
Turning point
“Times were different then,” the 73-year-old Logan said as he sat at the kitchen table of his home outside Medway the other day. “There was no phone call, no lawyers, no trial, no nothing. Nobody back home even knew where we were. The judge just sentenced us to six months in the county jail.”
After four weeks of confinement, a jailer let one of the kids go to a nearby store to buy a soda pop. Instead, he boy called his mom back in Dayton.
“Next thing you know here comes the lawyers, and after six weeks of us being locked up, all charges were suspended,” Logan said. “We were feeling pretty good until the G-people showed up and said, ‘You boys took a car across state lines.’ They handcuffed us and took us to the federal prison in Danville, Illinois.”
After another six weeks, they finally appeared before a judge who told the kids he was sending them to a correctional institution in Washington, D.C., until they were 21 years old.
“I almost flipped my gasket and passed out,” Logan said. “Then the judge said he was suspending the sentence and giving me two years probation.”
Once back at Bomberger, Logan wondered what he was going to do. The three other kids never did go back to school, and a couple would get into serious trouble later.
“I looked across the street at Stivers and decided to walk over,” he said. “Mr. (Floyd) Carpenter — he was the principal — happened to be there that day and I told him I wanted to go to school. He made me a freshman and, well, that moment changed me forever.
“Stivers High — and the sports I played there — pretty much saved my little rear end. It gave me new direction.”
That direction often led Logan straight to the end zone. Though just 5-foot-6 and 150 pounds, he became a tough-as-nails, two-way football star for the Tigers, winning all-city honors as a junior defensive back and senior running back.
His games fueled newspaper headlines. He had touchdown runs of 75 and 70 yards — an 85-yard score was called back — against Wilbur Wright.
He led the Tigers to a stunning upset of Chaminade, which had won 49 straight games and, as Logan remembers it, “hadn’t lost to a City team in like 12 years.”
And then there was the game against Roosevelt. Logan was a little sophomore defender and ended up running face first — there were no face masks back then — into the helmet of a Teddy lineman.
“When I saw him after the game, he goes, ‘My mouth got messed up,’ ” laughed Betty Jean — she goes by Jean — who back then was his new girlfriend and now is his wife of 53 years. “He was all bloody, and his two front teeth were gone, so all you saw were the nerves dangling. He’d played the whole game like that.”
Family life
Jean met him when he was a freshman and she was a Wilbur Wright eighth-grader. The first time she brought him to her McReynolds Street home, she said her mom had a less-than-flattering assessment, saying:
“That’s a hood if I ever saw one.”
Her mom, like so many others, soon learned what Bobby Logan really was about and, as Jean put it, “he ended up her favorite.
“That first Christmas he got more presents from her than I did. She bought him a winter coat and a scarf because he didn’t have one, and he wore them everywhere.”
When he graduated from high school in 1956, Logan paid no attention to the small-college football interest he had drawn and that August borrowed $20 from a friend and ran off with Jean to get married in Liberty, Ind.
Jean and Bob — he’d work 19 years at NCR, then at other factory jobs — had three daughters, who in turn have brought them seven grandchildren and one great-grandson — several of whom play prep sports in the area.
Bob was an avid softball player until 1973 when histoplasmosis cost him all but a little peripheral vision in one eye. In 1994, the fungal disease got into the other eye and left him legally blind and unable to drive, work and, for a brief while, even fathom a future.
Worthy honor
Once again, sports saved him.
“I remember one morning he was kind of sitting here feeling sorry for himself, but when I got home from work something had changed,” Jean said.
“A neighbor told me from early that morning, he had been out in the field next to us here, determined to learn how to hit a golf ball again. He finally came in the house at dark, just covered with mud — he was a mess — and said, ‘I’m golfin’ again.’ ”
Though he has to cock his head a bit sideways to see the ball — and then it’s only a white blur — he has figured out a swing and plays at least three times a week at Kittyhawk, where he once had won two club championships and has a lake named after him.
Now walking each round, he plays to a 12 or 13 handicap and four years ago had hole-in-one.
He and Jean regularly walk their neighborhood with their beloved dog, Patty, and they spend a lot of time at their grandkids’ sporting events at Fairmont and Milton-Union high schools, where one grandson is the Bulldogs’ starting safety.
“The only way I can see anything is if I train my binoculars right on him,” Logan said.
Today, the entire family will be at the Presidential Banquet Center as Logan and 16 other Stivers sports stalwarts are inducted with a social hour, dinner and ceremony that begins at noon.
“He’s really honored, but he was a little taken aback, too,” Jean said.” He says, ‘I didn’t go off to college like some of the guys. I didn’t do this or that. I didn’t really do anything that great.’ ”
Maybe it’s the vision thing — maybe he’s still wary of an unexpected ride to a fabled place — but everybody else who knows him can see this one clearly.
There is no one more deserving of Stivers’ embrace than Bob Logan.
The two are forever intertwined.
He brought the school plenty of football field glory, and it — as he put it so perfectly — saved his little rear end.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2156 or tarchdeacon@DaytonDailyNews.com.