TERRY MOSHER
Ron Corcoran, one of the better local sports guys, died this week. It is a terrible lost not only for his family but for the community. I was stunned to learn that Ron had brain cancer early this week and two days later learn that he had died. Josh Farley will have a story on Ron for tomorrow’s Kitsap Sun and I thought I would share the following question and answer that I did with Ron in April of 2011 for the Sports Paper. I think it’s important to not forget people like Ron, who contributed so much to our community.
A CONVERSATION WITH Ron Corcoran
RON CORCORAN
Corcoran has lived in Bremerton much of his life and while the 1960 graduate of West Bremerton High School didn’t play school sports he has been around sports most of his life. He coached and played slowpitch softball in the area for many years. Corcoran also has been on several local boards of directors, including the old Bremerton Athletic Roundtable (now the Kitsap Athletic Roundtable), and was part owner of KITZ Radio when it was located near the Kitsap County Fairgrounds. He also is a writer who annually writes The Christmas Story that at one time appeared in The Kitsap Sun. He also writes a column for the Sports Paper.
SP: Didn’t you grow up in a section of west Bremerton with some pretty good athletes?
RC: I played Naval Avenue Pee Wees with Norm Dicks, who graduated in 1959 from West. I lived on Cambrian between 13th and 15th and Paul Stoffel (who became an assistant football coach at West and head coach at Central Kitsap) lived on the 1300 block of North Lafayette. Other Neighborhood kids included Jim Cunningham, Mike Ullock, Bruce Hegle, Dennis Wain, Terry Hornseth, Frank Bruns, Aaron Capps (owner of Advantage Nissan), Ted Liner and Gary Koslowski, to name a few. We were all seasonal athletes. We played football in the fall, basketball in the winter and baseball in the spring. We would play until it got so dark we couldn’t see. We would play on the field at Haddon Elementary School until our folks would come and yell for us. It was a terrific experience growing up. We did a lot of things. Nobody got in trouble. We had bicycle races. It was just a great growing-up experience. A lot of that experience has stayed with me. I did a lot of collecting baseball cards. I find out who is playing baseball to this day. I got a good foundation of that when I was growing up, and here I am knocking on 70 and I still do golf and tennis. I want to keep that up as long as I can, even knowing I’ve had one knee replaced and probably will scheduled to have the other one done in the not too distant future.
SP: You had one knee replaced?
RC: Yes, and I remember it so well. The pain I went through wasn’t like anything I went through in my life. However, at the end of the situation (six weeks of rehab), I could play tennis and golf. I went with some of my buddies to Bend, Oregon and played 90 holes of golf over a weekend. But going into those six weeks was unlike anything I had been through before. The pain was absolutely terrible. It is my experience that there isn’t any surgeon who will encourage you to do it. My surgeon doesn’t want my second one to be done just because I’m not playing tennis the way I want. He says don’t do it unless you are having trouble with every day things of life. Once you get to that spot, yes. But I am not to that point yet.
SP: Why didn’t you play sports in school?
RC: I was a short guy, and frankly not good enough in any of the big three sports. I was, however, very good in Ping-Pong. I grew four inches in the summers before my junior year and again the summer before my senior year. But I was still too short. I worked as a carryout boy at TBM, which was on the hill atop Kitsap Way. It was a terrific grocery story. Lot of guys worked there (during high school).
SP: What did you do after high school?
RC: I went to Olympic College for two years and then went to the University of Washington, got a degree in electrical engineering in 1965 and went to work for a company in the Bay Area in Sunnyvale, California. I was excited about being in Sunnyvale because I knew there was a lot of good softball being played there. I had tried to play fastpitch early on, but I just didn’t have it. So I went into slowpitch in 1959 with some high school friends, including Jim Trull, and had some success there. I played for Bud Higgs’ Lakers (in 1959). Higgs had a furniture store. He was one of the original owners of the Bud & Chuck Used Car Lot. Chuck was Chuck Haselwood. Their used car lot was on the corner of Sixth and Park in downtown Bremerton. I played slowpitch while going to the U-Dub. The two teams to beat were Haselwood Buick and Chico Service. Haselwood Buick eventually became Scotty’s Tavern and Chico Service became Gene Lobe.
SP: Can you clear up the time line for you during this period? You were in Sunnyvale and then back to West Sound?
RC: I worked in Sunnyvale the summer of 1965. I got involved with this company – Lockheed Missiles and Space Company – and I was rotating around and didn’t have time to play softball. Then I got assigned to work up in Bangor. So I took a job 1,000 miles away and wound up three months later working at a place 12 miles from home. I worked for two years at Bangor. In 1966, Jim Horn, Bob Hinkle and I formed a Lockheed Missile & Space Company slowpitch team to play in the Bremerton City League. We were a team for two years, but then disbanded when some of us were transferred to Lockheed jobs located in Scotland. I was transferred to Scotland at a British missile facility. Then I got transferred back to Sunnyvale in 1968. That summer I called the Sunnyvale parks and recreation department to ask which where the top softball teams. I got the names of the coaches and made cold calls to them. I called the number two team first and he said to come out and he’d look at me. I made the team – Kim Amick Chevron. What was unusual about that team is the entire infield had played with or against each other in high school and had gone on to play baseball in different major league organizations. So they had some success over the previous years, but wound up not making it. So they all came back to Sunnyvale to play and were on that team. And they all wore their particular organizational caps, and this was back when you couldn’t get such caps in stores. It was a very intimidating sight for the teams we played. I played right field, and was damn glad I could do that. This turned out to be the best team I have played on and we not only won the Sunnyvale City League we then went on to win the Lower San Francisco Bay Regional Tournament championship game that ended at 11:30 p.m. on a Sunday evening.
SP: How did you get back to West Sound and did you start playing slowpitch around here right away.
RC: In December of 1968 I took a civilian job with the Navy at Bangor. For the 1969 season I was back in Bremerton and helped assemble a team of attorneys and police officers for the Bremerton City League. The name of the team was Sexton Realty and it consisted of, in part, Gary Sexton, Jim Wooten, Jeff David, Denny Northcraft, Lowell Daugherty, Lane Dowell and Bob Battermann. We were kind of a middle-of-the-pack team, but had moments of brilliance. The team stayed together for three seasons. I got hooked up in 1972 with Scotty’s Tavern (to play slowpitch). Scotty’s had guys like Bob Scott, Jim Jessup, Arnie Stadshaug, Don McDaniel, Don Thorsen, Dick Anderson, Jim and Jack Lindberg, and Marty Krafcik. Scotty’s won the state championship in 1971. Many of the guys from Scotty’s went to Brother Don’s 35 and over team in the late 1970s, and Scotty’s went with some younger guys. At the same time, the more senior players from Gene Lobe graduated to form the Recycleables team, which also participated in the new over-35 league. For these two teams, it was like déjà vu all over again. And both teams played in that league and traveled to tournaments around the state for several more years – with pretty much the same results (Lobe winning). Then in the early 1990s, Jeff Highham assembled an over-50 traveling tournament team – the 50 Caliber Slugs – to participate in the new over-50 slowpitch softball tournament schedule. I joined that team, too. The team morphed into a team sponsored by Silverdale’s J&R Tavern, a team which had some great successes in state and regional play, and eventually even nationally and world tournaments. I played with the over-50 team until 2000, one year short of qualifying for the eventual over-60 team, which by now is the local over-70 team.
SP: When did you get into coaching?
RC: I started coaching a girl’s team in 1979 and went until 2000. We never had a losing season. I coached Cascade Natural Gas in 1979. We got to be pretty good. There was (ASA) A and B. My team played A. That team became Peninsula Volkswagen after one year. Three years in a row we were the (Bremerton City League) Division A champion. We went to state and took third in Bellingham in 1982. In 1983 we won state at Moses Lake and 1984 we were third at Mount Vernon. Some of the players were Tracy and Kelly Mollison, Darlene Moore, D.J. Mott, Kim Calnan, Mel Schmid. Darlene died of cancer five-six years ago. My players became friends for life. Not all of them. I had a couple that didn’t either like their playing time or where I put them. At the time I had a Corvette and I had to be careful where I parked it. I was afraid they would walk off the field and hit my car. That is the honest to God truth. I remember lugging the bats and bag from a long distance. I didn’t trust them. I was chairman of the Andy Pendergast Athletic Complex Committee to build the park up there (Andy Pendergast Regional Park in West Hills in Bremerton) for eight years (1992-2000). I sponsored my team a couple years during that time, and I called it Andy’s Park. We would go around to tournaments and I would have people come up to me and ask what was Andy’s Park?
SP: How did you become chairman?
RC: I went to too many meetings. And maybe I missed the meeting when they had the election for chairman and I wound up being elected (laughter). I was aggressive and energetic and loved the idea of having something like that (Pendergast Park). I played on Roosevelt Field and the old Warren Avenue field when fastpitch was played down there. I would sit on the bank with my dad and watch (pitchers) Doc Bonnema and John Ridley and Swede Moore play. Ridley was a flamethrower and Bonnema was just a rock out there. This was during the heyday of fastpitch in the 1940s and early 1950s. Bremerton was a haven for fastpitch players. Then it became a haven for slowpitch. In the 1960s there were more slowpitch players per capital in the city of Bremerton than anyplace else in the state.
SP: Didn’t you at some point publish a local slowpitch paper?
RC: In the early 1980s a guy by the name of Tim Carter and I published a sports newspaper called Fielders Choice. We were just having fun with it. We even looked into getting insured by Lloyd’s of London. They didn’t want to have anything to do with us. We had a picture of Dave Pemberton on the front page of our very first issue. We had a girl from one of my teams sitting in a Porsche and Dave leaning up against the Porsche. We turned the words around and had Dave getting advice on hot to hit from the girl. And you know how big of an ego Dave had. He went after me for a length of time about it, but since then we have made up (laughter). We carried the newspaper to a printer and sold advertising. We were doing it once a month. It was one summer of my discontent. But it also was a fun-filled summer of my life. Carter is the one who got me into coaching. He asked me to coach his team (Cascade Natural Gas).
SP: You write other things besides a column for this paper.
RC: For the last 11 years I have been writing my Christmas Story and I been doing minor projects of local people. I have done one of Kay Loga, who has bowled for years, and I’m doing one on Myrtle Pierce (Kressin).
SP: There was a time in the history of slowpitch in the region that the old Bremerton Sun used to run daily stories on that night’s action in the Bremerton City League. Teams would drop off the information at night to the paper. You used to write up your team’s information.
RC: Yes. We would (usually) go to the Cloverleaf (Bar and Grill) after the games and go to a table and order beer. I would go to the end of the table and sit there writing off our scorebook. When I was done somebody would stand up and read it. It would be a flowing story. I wouldn’t turn it into the paper into the slot in the front door until 11:30 or midnight. It would be soaked in beer and God only knows what all. Some teams would do a lousy job of representing their sponsor. If somebody didn’t have their full uniform or if they hadn’t pulled their socks all the way up, I definitely would them know about it. I was probably a stickler to a fault. If they didn’t run out a ball to the infield, they got a talking to. I just had this guttery sound I made. I didn’t have to say anything. Just clear my throat, that kind of thing.
SP: How long did you coach a women’s slowpitch team.
RC: I coached from 1982-2000. I was on the board of KPS (Kitsap Physicians Service) from 1989-99 and I put together a KPS team in 2000.
SP: What about your involvement in the community.
RC: The KPS board was looking for a non-member and I guess for whatever reason they asked me. I was well known in the community, so I was put on it. I was on it for 10 years, from 1989-99. I have had past board memberships on BTAC and K-BAR. I was also a part owner of KITZ Radio. I was really excited about it. I was really into radio. I had grown up with KBRO and when the second radio station came around I said I would like to do that. So I did it.
SP: Tell us about that J&R Tavern team.
RC: One time our team went to J&R Tavern about midnight on a weekday. We had putty knives and variety of things and we scraped off the popcorn ceiling that had turned black over years from smoke. It was really white, but we didn’t know it until we cleaned it. We found out it was an all white base after we carved it all off. Then we repainted the whole interior of the building all night. We finished at 6 in the morning. The owners had given us money to go to Palm Springs and Disney World and other places and this was our way of paying them back. We used to go to big national tournaments and we found that we were playing against teams from major cities, like Phoenix. They would put together all-star teams from these cities, but we were competitive with them. I can remember being asked where J&R was and when I told them Silverdale they would ask where is that? I had a great slowpitch career, with lots of all-star team selections and several tournament MVPs along the way. It was a fun ride with some great guys. One of my greatest joys playing the game was having Cliff Johnson and Dick Fenske as teammates on the J&R squad.
SP: I know you retired in 1999, but are you now serving on any boards.
RC: No. My time is my own now. I go over Wednesdays to The Willows (retirement home in east Bremerton) and play pinochle with a bunch of ladies in their late 80s and early 90s. We always have a good game. These guys are still mentally sharp and we play teams. They are very, very good at cards, and I really enjoy it.
SP: Tell about the story of your final days in Scotland
RC: We (wife Judy) took a month off between coming back to the United States. We had a Euro pass and decided to go all over Europe. We went to the Vatican on Easter Sunday in 1968. We went to Sicily and of course the bridge over the Blue Danube, into Norway. We didn’t have a lot of money at the time. So we would go someplace during the day and at night we would go to the rail station and see what ride was going overnight so we could sleep and then wake up and be some place else. We decided one night to go to Barcelona, Spain. We somehow didn’t wake up in time and the train didn’t stop. When the train stopped (at the end of the line) we got off and I turned to Judy and said, “I don’t think these guys are speaking Spanish. We were in the middle of France, in Toulouse. We had to wait a while and then catch a southbound train. So we didn’t get to Barcelona. We wound up going to Madrid and seeing a bull fight.
SP: You began playing tennis at some point
RC: I started playing in 1975 when Judy and I joined the Bremerton Tennis and Athletic Club. I did very well in USTA league play throughout Puget Sound, local tennis tournaments and at a few “Celebrity” tournaments in Oregon and California. My club nemesis was Randy Brooks, and my usual doubles partner for the traveling tournaments was Bob Scatena, who remains a very good tennis player and is a ranked player in the Pacific Northwest in his age bracket. I, on the other hand, have contracted something called tennis players’ “kneesies” and until I get my second bionic knee my competitive tennis days are over – for now. Coming full circle, however, I can still play a decent game of Ping-Pong.