My wife, the lovely and talented Barbara Doyle, has a lot of great ideas. That’s why she’s such a fantastic executive and valued member of the Itron Inc. team, out in Liberty Lake. She’s there right now, actually, and will be flying home tonight before I leave first thing tomorrow morning for Denver and the Mile-High Nationals. It’s the life we lead.

But back to the brilliant ideas. Like I said, she has plenty of them. The other day, before she left for Spokane, she came up with one that will change this blog in, I think, a great way. At least for a while until the stories run out. We were talking about the many long months of editing Greg Halling and I went through, just to get the book down to a somewhat manageable 545 pages. The line I use the most is “We left a lot of really good stories on the editing room floor” when describing what we took out. They were some great bits, but in the end Greg and I had to do some tough cutting.

So, Barbara said, “Why don’t you put one of those stories, or personalities, in each blog?”

The lightbulb over my head turned on immediately. And very brightly. That’s a GREAT way to get many of those stories out to the world, and today we will start this new feature. Today, I present to you Larry Donaldson.

Larry is briefly mentioned in the book, in Chapter 6 on page 70. It’s the chapter entitled “College as a Cougar” and it recounts a lot of what we all did as student athletes. In the initial manuscript, Larry was featured much more but that pesky editing knocked him down to just a brief mention in the part about my senior year.

During that senior year, my buddies and I decided over the Christmas break to rent my brother’s big white house, in Edwardsville, to finally get out of apartment living. Lance and Radar are still great buddies, and I’ll actually be seeing them next week out in Seattle when we have our annual summer reunion, along with Oscar. But, moving into the house with us, back in 1978, was a newcomer to the team and to the school. It was Larry, and he was a character.

He was a pitcher, from Peoria, and he was a big strong guy. When he first got there, we were all hopeful that he’d throw as hard and as well as it looked like he could. It turned out that big strong body didn’t match up to the arm, but Larry was a valued roomie and teammate.

He needed to feed that body of his, and he was always hungry. He was probably never not hungry. And when he ate, he focused strictly on the food. Nothing else mattered to Larry when it was time to eat.

Back then, one of our go-to joints for dinner was the local Bonanza Steak House. The steaks weren’t much more than passable, but you got an unlimited salad bar, a potato, and Texas Toast to go with the Top Sirloin. Plus, with our SIUE student ID cards, we got 25% off. So, once the food was ordered and the math was done, we could stuff ourselves with a steak, a baked potato, all the salad we could eat, and the toast, all for less than $3, and that’s not a typo. Hence its position as a go-to place for hungry young lads.

One evening, the four of us had taken our seats at a table and Larry was strictly focused on the consumption of what was before him. As the knife and fork sprang into action he fell into his own world, bite after bite. There was a table of SIUE girls sitting near us, and they didn’t appear to have much interest in their Texas Toast bread, which caused Lance to say, to them, “You better be careful with that bread. Larry will take it right off your plate.” Radar and I got a laugh out of that but not as big a laugh as we were about to have. Through the fog of dinner bliss, the word “bread” somehow got through and into Larry’s brain. When it did, he reached toward the girls’ table and said, “Did she say she didn’t want her bread?” Lance, Radar, and I all started laughing hysterically while the girls looked shocked and scared, as if Larry might not just eat their bread but might also steal their purses.

I guarantee, next week out in Seattle, one of us will say, “Did she say she didn’t want her bread?” at one of our dinners. That line has lasted nearly 40 years.

Another fine Larry story had to do with his room, and again his body. He slept in a downstairs room while the rest of us were upstairs in the two-story house. Our only phone (a land line, of course) was in Larry’s room. At about 6-foot-5, he was roughly six inches longer than his bed, and he slept with floppy white tube socks on his giant feet. If you needed to make a call in the morning or go through Larry’s room to the main bathroom, while Larry was still in bed, those big feet in their white socks would be sticking out of his covers and hanging out over the end of his bed, invariably pointed straight up.

One weekday morning, I did something very unlike me. I decided to cut one of my classes in my major, TV-Radio Broadcasting. Since it was in my major, I called my professor an hour before the class was scheduled, to let him know I wouldn’t be there and that I’d make up anything I missed. I would always do that for my TV-R classes. But, for some reason I felt like I needed a better excuse than, “Dr. Regnell, I’m just not going to come today…”

So I called my instructor and told him I was at my parents’ house, over in Kirkwood, Mo. about an hour away. And (this was the key) my car wouldn’t start so it was going to be impossible for me to drive back to Edwardsville for class. I apologized profusely, explaining my frustration, and Dr. Regnell said, “Don’t worry about it, Bob. Just get your car fixed and I’ll see you next week.”

Quite proud of myself and my creative ruse, I hung up. Larry looked up from his pillow and said, “Wow, that’s too bad. What do you think is wrong with your car?”

You can’t make stuff like that up.

Larry Donaldson, ladies and germs.

Here on the home front, which is also the book front, we’ve had some PR and publicity fun over the last two days. Yesterday, I taped a phone interview with longtime motorsports host Marty Hough and his sidekick, the one and only Doug Herbert (yeah, that Doug Herbert from Top Fuel fame) on their show “The Straight Line” over at Motor Racing Network. The good news: They’re great guys I’ve known forever and they gave me a solid 10-12 minutes on the show. The bad news: I followed Steve Johnson, the Pro Stock Motorcycle rider who has more rich stories than Jerry Seinfeld, and most of them are just as funny. That’s a tough act to follow. We did have fun though, and you can hear it at this link. If you want to skip some of the Steve Johnson hilarity, my segment starts right at the 23:00 minute mark.

http://www.mrn.com/MRN-Radio/Shows/The-Straightline.aspx

Then, this morning I drove over to the little bistro at Kowalski’s Market here in Woodbury, where we do most of our grocery shopping, and met a nice young man by the name of Blaze Fugina, who is a sports reporter for our very own Woodbury Bulletin. Yes, Blaze swears that’s his real name. I know I’m getting older but man he looked like such a young guy despite the fact he graduated from college in 2011.

Blaze had certainly done his homework with the notes Elon Werner had sent him, because we dove right into what turned out to be about 45 minutes of nonstop back and forth. Much fun was had, by both of us. The paper is a weekly, so the story should come out during the middle of next week. I’ll be in Seattle with my buddies, but on Thursday I’ll make sure I get a blog posted with a link. Thanks Blaze!

And here are my two photos for today. I put the top one on Facebook and Twitter yesterday, but it’s worth throwing on here and is one you’ll definitely want to click on to enlarge. The reason I posted this online yesterday was because I stumbled upon a whole gallery of photos on the SIUE website, all of our 1977 baseball team that was inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame.

It occurred to me that a lot of people have now read the book and gotten to know so many names of my college teammates, guys like Stan Osterbur, Lance McCord, James “Oscar” Noffke, Steve Novak, Kent “Cornpone” Wells, Dave Schaake, Mike Brown, Kent Hendrickson, and so many others who were all such good friends of mine. Since only a few of them are in the book in photo form, this team picture can introduce you to a lot of them. Great guys, great players, great teammates. It was a very rewarding time for almost all of us, and a fantastic experience. Being able to get my degree thanks to baseball, and to play alongside and become so close to such a great group was nothing less than priceless. And what’s also priceless is that the school slid “Oscar” into James Noffke’s name, in parentheses.

In my book, at the end of Chapter 6, I tell the tales about the final season so many of us played together, and what a horrible disappointment it was. Making it a little worse and lot more depressing for all of us, was the brutal and gruesome injury Steve Novak suffered playing against University of Missouri St. Louis early in the season. It depressed us, seeing our friend in such agony. It made Steve absolutely miserable for a very long time. When I found the photo gallery yesterday, it included this shot. It’s the first photo I’ve seen of Steve after he came back from the injury.

As I wrote about in the first two pages of Chapter 7, it was so bad for Steve he was actually “over it” when it came to the sport he loved so much. It had been a brutal injury (to this day he still can’t breathe correctly) and even after he came back the mask he had to wear was a hassle, our team was bad, and the fun had gone out of it. When the Detroit Tigers offered me a contract, they also offered one to Steve. We could’ve played together that summer, in Paintsville, but he turned it down. You have to be pretty down in the dumps and “over it” to turn down the dream we all had since childhood, but Steve had really gone through a rough season. It was depressing for us. It was a life-altering year for Steve.

It was really great to see Steve, his lovely wife Linda, and their son Ryan at the Hall of Fame induction last year. Linda was Steve’s girlfriend all through college, so I’ve known her about as long as I’ve known him. A great roomie and a fantastic guy who baked an absolutely killer cinnamon crumb cake.

So that’s it for today. I’m off to Denver in the morning and it sounds like Elon has some more PR work for me to do at the track. Hopefully we’ll sell a few more books this weekend, as well, to those great fans out at Bandimere Speedway.

By the time it’s Thursday Blog Day next week, I’ll still be out in Seattle with the guys. Thursday is our golf day, so I might write the next blog installment early (perhaps on my flight out there) to make it so I can just post it after I shoot an 82. That would be on the front nine, by the way. I’m pretty bad.

See you then, with photos, tales, and another great story or two that ended up on the editing room floor.

And, as always, the more “Likes” the better. So, if you read these words and like what you saw, hit the “Like” button at the top. Thanks!

Bob Wilber, at your service and loving the memories.