A Fever in the Heart: And Other True Cases (3 page)

That was plenty big enough in high school, in college, there were players who dwarfed him. Dennis Mccurdy, Herman Mckee, and Clarence Williams were playing halfback for the Cougars too and they were 6'1", 6'3", and 6'2" respectively, and they all weighed over 190. Morris's dreams of becoming a professional football player before he started a coaching career seemed less realistic than they once had. Besides that, there was Jerilee. Jerilee Karlberg was three years behind Morris in school, and she attended the other public high school in Yakima:

Eisenhower High. Morris barely knew her when he was in high school but he got to know her well when he went back to Yakima to visit his hometown. He had always been a guy who dated casually. As far as any of his friends remember, Morris was never serious about any girl in high school. Jerilee Karlberg was another story. Outwardly, she seemed to be what every teenage girl in the sixties yearned to be. She had a perfect figure: slender, but full-breasted. She had clouds of dark hair and blue eyes and she wasn't just pretty, she was beautiful. Her skin was flawless and her features were enchanting. She was petite and entirely feminine. And of course she was a cheerleader for Eisenhower High.

"Jerilee was everything we wanted to be," one of her peers remembered.

"She was pretty and slender and popular so popular with boys. Her father was Henry Karlberg* and he had his own real estate company. He let Jerilee drive his new Cadillac whenever she wanted. While we all yearned after the jocks,' Jerilee married Morris Blankenbaker, the super athlete of them all. We envied her. .. I suppose some of us hated her. Or at least resented her. It's hard to put into words. Maybe you had to have lived in Yakima in the sixties to really understand." Jerilee Karlberg may have appeared to have had everything, but her life was far from perfect. She had her insecurities in high school and often smiled to hide private heartbreak. True, she came from an affluent family and she was gorgeous, but the world she knew was falling apart. Henry and Marge,* Jerilee's parents, had divorced and her father had remarried and begun a new family. The world she had always known blew away like dandelion fluff in the wind. No one can ever really know for sure, but Jerilee's attitude toward males may well have changed radically then.

She was devastated for a long time when her parents divorced.

Morris was something solid for her to hold on to, and she loved him for that more than for his prowess on the football field. She wasn't really that interested in sports. She could see that everyone liked Morris, and he seemed to have scores of friends. Morris was handsome and built like a young Greek god with bulging biceps and a "washboard" stomach that rippled with muscles. He was a college man and he made the boys at Eisenhower High look like wimpy kids. There was no question that Jerilee was completely in love with Morris. Jerilee was still in high school when she started dating Morris, and she begged him to come to Yakima to take her to her proms. She didn't want to miss the most memorable social events of any teenage girl's school years, yet she refused to go with anyone else. For Morris, it was almost a four hundred-mile round-trip, but he made it willingly. He posed with Jerilee who wore lovely formal gowns with the corsages he'd given her. Sometimes, the long trips back to Yakima cut into his study time and his grades suffered, but it didn't matter. Morris Blankenbaker was in love for the first time in his life.

Jerilee certainly had the intelligence to go to college, but she didn't want that, she wanted her own family. On August 28, 1965, three months after she graduated from Eisenhower High School, Jerilee and Morris were married. She was just eighteen. He was twenty-two. "They had a big church wedding in the Presbyterian church," Olive remembered. "With a huge reception at the Chinook Hotel in Yakima. They served food and had liquor and everything.

.."

Henry Karlberg had put on a wonderful wedding for his daughter.

Had it been up to her, Olive would have chosen not to serve liquor at the reception. It was just one of the things that carved a chasm between Olive and Jerilee's family, one that they all crossed tentatively for years to come. Olive and Morris had not exactly lived a hard scrabble existence, but nothing had ever come easy. No big houses and certainly no fancy cars. For decades after that wedding in 1965, Olive and Jerilee Blankenbaker would have an ambivalent relationship. It was to be expected. They both loved Morris. He was Olive's only child, the son she had struggled so hard to raise, and he could do no wrong in her eyes.

She had wanted so much for him to graduate from college before he got married, and Jerilee had detoured him from that goal. For her part, Jerilee at eighteen was perhaps a little spoiled. She was not nearly as expert at either housework or a career as Olive was. Eventually, however, the two women would come to have a kind of grudging respect for one another. The newly married Mr. and Mrs. Morris Ray Blankenbaker moved to Tacoma, Washington, where Morris planned to obtain his bachelor's degree at Pacific Lutheran University. He hadn't given up on his ambition to get his degree and become a coach. It would just take a little longer. Morris had dropped out of Washington State and joined the Marine Corps Reserves before the draft could scoop him up. This meant that he had to train in the desert outside Coronado, California, for a few weeks each year, and risk being called to active duty in Vietnam. He was lucky, he didn't have to go to war and eventually he made lance corporal. Four years later, in February of 1969, he was honorably discharged from the Reserves. Talmadge Glynn "Gabby" Moore had coached at Davis High School in Yakima since the 1960-61 school year. Like Morris, he was a Yakima boy, although he wasn't a native. Gabby was born in the depths of the Depression in Missouri four days before Christmas, 1931. His family moved to Yakima when he was a child and Gabby attended school there, graduating from North Yakima High School in 1950. He too was a sports hero. He received North Yakima High's football inspirational trophy. But Gabby Moore, like so many teenagers graduating in the early fifties, went off to the Korean War instead of to college.

He served in the Air Force from 1951 to 1955. When he was discharged, Gabby came back to Yakima. He was a very handsome young man then with straight blond hair and heavy-lidded dark eyes. Gabby Moore, who looked like the jock that he was, clean-cut and in great shape, wanted to be a high school coach. He went to college on the Gl Bill first to Yakima Valley Community College, and then to Central Washington State College (now Central Washington University) in Ellensburg where he got his BAIN 1958. Two years later, he received his master's degree at the same college. Gabby's education wasn't easy, he taught and coached while he was going to college. He had married by then, to Gay Myers, and during the time Gabby was getting his education and beginning his career as a teacher they had three babies: Sherry,* Kate,* and Derek.* Gay, who was startlingly attractive with smoky blond hair and a lithe figure, eventually became a physical education teacher herself. As they are in most small towns in America, sports were king in Yakima, and the Moores were so much a part of the fabric of the town, of its educational system and its sports circle. Gabby Moore had taught in tiny Union Gap first, and then at Washington Junior High in Yakima. He moved steadily up the career ladder. In 1960 he was hired to teach and coach at Davis High School where he stayed to become a much-admired fixture. Gabby taught math and driver training and was the track coach and the assistant football coach. One year he was the head football coach.

But the gridiron wasn't his forte, it was at wrestling that he excelled as a mentor. He became, arguably, one of the most outstanding wrestling coaches in America. He could have moved on up to college coaching he was certainly skilled enough but he had sunk deep roots in Yakima. Gabby Moore was the impetus behind bringing "kid wrestling" to Yakima. The town's boosters were pleased, and the Yakima Junior Chamber of Commerce honored him for that program by giving him the trophy for "Outstanding Physical Education Educator" for 1969. Moore's wrestling team took the Washington State Championship in 1972. He was a member of the selection committee in the Washington Cultural Exchange with Japan, where wrestling is a major sport. Gabby found a way to travel to the Orient with his star athletes so that they could wrestle with the best.

Athletes from many graduating classes had passed through Gabby's wrestling programs and they never forgot him. He could take a boy with no particular aptitude for sports and turn him into a champion. He could, and he did, not once but many times. His athletes loved Gabby, and he cared deeply for his boys. Beyond his solid place at Davis High, Gabby Moore had other compelling reasons to prefer Yakima to one of the college towns on the "coast" near Seattle or to the east: Pullman or Moscow, Idaho, where Washington State and the University of Idaho were located. He and Gay had an extended family in Yakima with a closeness that anyone would envy, a tight circle of love and emotional support.

Gabby's father-in-law, Dr. A. J. Myers, was an osteopathic physician and surgeon who owned and operated the Valley Osteopathic Hospital on Tieton Drive in Yakima. "Doc" Myers had practiced medicine in Yakima for more than thirty years and in 1952 he built Valley Hospital. "Doc" and Gabby met for the first time shortly before Gabby married Gay, and they soon became fast friends. Myers was Gabby's doctor and his friend, a relationship that existed outside of Gabby's marriage. In those days Gabby Moore was a family man and a revered coach.

He was twenty-seven when Morris Blankenbaker graduated from high school, and they kept in touch, although only sporadically. There was no reason to think that their lives would touch again in much more than a tangential way. While Morris Blankenbaker was an Adonis of a young man who was everyone's friend, Gabby Moore's popularity came from his compelling, persuasive personality. As he aged, his appearance changed from that of a good-looking young coach to one of an average-looking man who seemed older than he really was. All coaches at every level are under pressure to win. Gabby didn't handle stress well. The pressure to win much of it self-driven got to him and he developed primary hypertension in his early thirties. Gabby's high blood pressure was serious enough to concern his father-in-law. A. J. Myers did his best to convince Gabby that elevated blood pressure was nothing to ignore, but his warnings usually fell on deaf ears. Gabby Moore continued to demand too much of himself and of his athletes. When he concentrated on something, it was with every fiber of his being, he did nothing halfway.

With the years, Gabby's hair thinned and he was beginning to resort to "comb-overs" and deliberately careless bangs over his forehead. By the time he was in his late thirties, despite his sports activities, Gabby had a burgeoning paunch that his wrestlers teased him about. He wasn't the handsome young coach he had been in his twenties, Gabby had come to look like a thousand other high school teacher-coaches in America. But that hardly mattered. It was his personality that shone through. An alumna remembered that, as a teacher of driver's training, Gabby was so calm so patient. "I had Gabby for driver's training," recalled the woman, who worked in the Yakima County District Attorney's Office, twenty years after graduation. "I liked him. We all did. l remember he always told us to Look for a way out' to expect trouble, and be ready to get out of the way. He wasn't temperamental. He wasn't mean. He was a great guy. .. I still can't understand what happened...." For most of his years of teaching and coaching, Gabby Moore was a dynamic, charismatic man who could make anyone believe anything. And if he believed, his listeners believed. If he said a kid from Yakima could make it to the Olympics and bring home a gold medal, then, by golly, the kid would go for it. He would not listen to excuses. "If you got a problem," Gabby would say, "you eliminate the problem and you win."

While Gabby was known to have a short fuse on occasion, it didn't affect his job or his status at Davis High School. Gay Myers Moore was a beautiful woman and, unlike Gabby, she grew more attractive as she approached middle age. Gay was teaching girls' physical ed at Lewis &

Clark Junior High. Both Moores were busy with their teaching schedules and raising three youngsters, but they made a great couple. Their marriage seemed as solid as Gibraltar. No one really knows how things are in a marriage, though, not from the outside looking in. Maybe Gabby focused too much on his wrestling squads and forgot that his family needed him too. He not only had after-school practice, he usually brought some of his wrestlers home for practice-after-practice. There weren't enough hours in the day for him to have had much time to spend with his wife at least during wrestling season. In 1965, just after Morris and Jerilee got married, he and Gabby Moore had no closer a relationship than Gabby did with any of his ex-athletes from Davis. They sometimes saw one another in Yakima when Morris and Jerilee came home to visit their relatives on holidays or during the summer, but that was about it. Morris had precious little free time. The curriculum at Pacific Lutheran University was far more demanding than the classes he had taken at Washington State. PLU attracted students with the highest academic records. And Pacific Lutheran is a private university where the tuition is a lot higher than a state school. This time, Morris had no football scholarship he didn't have time to play football. Both he and Jerilee had to work so that they could make it financially. Jerilee might have looked like a fragile, dependent girl who needed a man to look after her, and, yes, maybe she had played that role a time or two because boys seemed to like it. Inside, though, she was strong and smart, she just wasn't used to letting it show. She was the kind of woman who combined a kittenish quality with profound sensuality a Brigitte Bardot or a Claudine Longet kind of woman. Physically, Jerilee resembled Longet a great deal. Jerilee Blankenbaker was highly intelligent. She and Morris needed the money she could bring in, and she was determined to get a job. She applied at a bank in Tacoma even though they hadn't advertised for new employees. She simply strode in and said, "I want a job." The bank manager drew up a chair and asked her to sit down.