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Interview with Jack Griffin

Citation

Please feel free to use the information from this transcript in any scholarly work. The full citation for this document is : John T. "Jack" Griffin, interview by Bridget Moore, December 8, 1997, OH006, Oral History Collection, Frederick Community College, Frederick, MD.

Abstract

Jack Griffin is a Frederick City resident. He is retired from teaching physical education at West Frederick Middle School. He became boys' track coach for Frederick High School in the late 1950's and started a track club for girls since they had no sports at their schools. Two West Frederick Middle School students, Debbie Thompson and Tammy Davis, joined his club. At the young age of twelve, these girls were running times that were competitive at the national level. Griffin took them in and trained them for eight years. As a white man, he encountered many obstacles coaching black women because of racial segregation in the United States at that time. The success of his athletes was too important to let anything deter him. They, and other girls Griffin coached, went on to win Olympic medals and break United States and world records. He took girls with no training and little future in a racist society and turned them into world class athletes. Mr. Griffin is still dedicating himself to track. He volunteers his time to assist in coaching the Frederick High School girls' team. Major topics include how he got into coaching, experiences with Debbie Thompson and Tammy Davis, changes with desegregation, and athletic opportunities available today.

Transcript

BM = Bridget Moore (interviewer)
JG = Jack Griffin (interviewee)

BM:	Today is December 8th, 1997. I am interviewing Jack Griffin. I'll start off with how you got interested in track?
JG:	A long, long time ago. It's like telling a story. I went to New York University, and my college coach was an Olympian. I couldn't run fast enough but I could throw a ball pretty hard so he asked me to try the javelin. And I was on a team with seven other Olympians and my freshman coach was on the 1936 Olympic team so they kind of got me hooked. My roommate was the third best shot-putter in the United States so I really got interested in track.
BM:	From that, what made you want to coach?
JG:	When I came back to Frederick, track was... was a minor sport. Football, basketball, baseball were the big sports. And track was kind of, they just kind of played it. And then, when all the schools got tracks, it got popular. Then it became a big sport. But I got interested because in teaching physical education, I used to time my students and there were some remarkably fast boys. So I started coaching Frederick High School boys, and then I started a track club for girls because girls didn't have sports... didn't have track. And I started that club in 1957. And high school track started in 1972. So '57 to '72... it was just my club. There were no teams. But I enjoyed it mostly.
BM:	Did the Brown versus Board of Education case in 1954 make a difference in who you coached from Frederick High?
JG:	Did the what now?
BM:	Did the integration of schools...
JG:	No, no. They were excited to have a chance. Boys had Little League. Boys had football, little midget football and all that. God knows what they didn't have... Basketball, you know, Sertoma league basketball. There was nothing for girls. So they jumped at the chance. The only meets we could get into was if I drove them. We'd drive to Baltimore. Then when they got to be about fourteen, we started going to New York City and Madison Square Garden. And then one year, we went to Los Angeles, Cleveland, Toronto, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Richmond, Albuquerque, New Mexico... The town raised money for myself and these two girls. My girls' track team had about thirty-five runners. It was equally... about half and half, black and white. Coaching for the black girls... It was an adjustment coming to West Frederick [Middle School]. There were only, in the whole school maybe there, maybe 18% black. That was hard. For me, people who I thought were my friends... I lost their friendship because I took blacks, I coached blacks. I had people who wouldn't eat at a table with me because of that. These are school teachers now. School teachers. Mr. Bill Lee, who was principal at West Frederick, who became an alderman in Frederick over the last ten years... We taught together for twenty-one years. And the first day he came to school as a black teacher, we went to the cafeteria and three teachers got up from the table when we sat down. They wouldn't eat with a black. So... I would get phone calls to my house. I can't use the language that... I wouldn't want it repeated. Then of course I had blacks that hated me, I had whites that hated me. Because some blacks thought, you know, taking advantage or, you know, doing something. I mean, it was kind of crazy. The Frederick newspaper ran the first picture of a black athlete when Debbie Thompson broke Wilma Rudolph's world record at Madison Square Garden. Because before that, the schools weren't integrated so they didn't run pictures of them. Lincoln High School, which was the all black school, they didn't run pictures of the all black schools. So Debbie kind of broke the color line for the newspaper. I had a reverend, a black preacher came to me once and said that what I was going was an act of God. Because the town was so separated, that I would be willing to take black girls and run them with white girls. And we had no problem with any parents. Do you want to hear how hard it was for black kids? They could not walk into Baker Park; they could be arrested. They could not go into the library; they could be arrested. If they went to a movie theatre, they climbed the fire escape to get into the movie theatre, to the balcony. They put chicken wire across the balcony. I was lucky, my mother and father... God bless them... saw what was wrong and never once, ever degraded anybody. So it never struck me as being, what I was doing was wrong. But I guess some of the friends I had, who I thought were my friends, you know, were hiding their real feelings. So it got exciting. A lot of people were for it and a lot of people were against what I was doing.
BM:	Did you get help from the city to coach these girls at all?
JG:	I was lucky because they were so good. And they ran all over the world. They ran in Russia, Japan, Australia, England, let's see... Poland, Germany, Communist Germany and free Germany, West Germany and East Germany. They ran all over the world which was good for Frederick. So my club, to get money, the Junior Chamber of Commerce would raise money for me. The Senior Chamber of Commerce, the county commissioners, the Maryland Board of Aldermen... they just adopted us. And if I had to go to a meet, I would put in the newspaper that I would have to get to... let's say Los Angeles and we had one month to raise money. And the newspaper was wonderful. They'd put in, like a thermometer, "have raised $500, need $2000 more." Next Monday, "Have raised $1100, need $900 more." And the money came. So I didn't have to go knock on doors. But so much money came from service clubs that in one year, that in fifty-two weeks of the year, I spoke forty-three weeks going to service clubs, thanking them for money. So talking about thanking them, every time our kids went overseas, they wrote notes to everybody that gave them money. So they spent a lot of time on airplanes writing thank-you notes and mailing cards from Moscow, Warsaw, Munich, Germany, London, Paris. It's quite a story.
BM:	I remember you telling a story one time about how you had you had to shovel snow off the sidewalk and train on the sidewalk...
JG:	Yeah, that was an incredible story. Tammy, the hurdler, and Debbie had just recently broken Wilma Rudolph's world record. We had no place to run. The gym was too little so we used to run on the sidewalks at West Frederick and in the parking lot, and one day it snowed. So we got a shovel and shoveled the sidewalk off from the girl's locker room at West Frederick down to the library entrance. That's about 75 yards and the longest race indoors would be 60 yards. So we put the hurdles up and Tammy broke the world record with full sweats on, running down a sidewalk that just had snow on it that was wet. So I got on the phone and I called Louisville, Kentucky, one of the great indoor meets in the United States. In those days was called the Mason Dixon Championships. So I called the meet director and I said, "What's the chance of getting in your meet?" He said, "Well, most of them are foreign athletes," he said, "I know you have two good kids," he said but... I said, "Well, if I told you one of them was going to break a world record at your meet, would you invite us?" He said, "Can you promise that?" I said, "I'll promise that." That was a wild guess. But we had to run 70 yards in Louisville, Kentucky so we trained. Well, we had a dance, the West Frederick student body. They were 9th graders. And we had this dance and we only made 35 dollars. In those days, you could fly a plane from here to New York for about 20 dollars. You could fly to Los Angeles for 150 dollars. So things were cheap. Of course Coca-Cola was 10 cents. You know, everything was cheaper. So I was so upset because the next day was going to be the meet and I had been accepted. And if you remember the Snow White Grill... it was on, down here by the square corner.
BM:	It's still there.
JG:	The guy that owned it was a guy named Mr. Hurst. It was about 1:30 in the morning and I was so upset and I was wandering around with 35 dollars. I didn't know what I could do because I couldn't go anywhere to borrow money because it was that late. So I went in to get a hamburger. Mr. Hurst was checking the cash register, he didn't serve burgers. He was the owner. And he said, "You don't look happy." And I said...told him the story. He said, "How much would it take to get you to Louisville?" I said, "About 100 dollars. Each of our tickets, I have 35. Each one of them is about 40 bucks to get from here. Now, that would be 250 dollars to get from here to Louisville." He said, "How about if I loan it to you?" I said, "That would be just wonderful and I could pay you back. It might take a couple of months." "Well, let's make a deal. If that girl breaks a world record, you don't owe me a nickel." And he said, "If you come back," he said, "then I'll treat you to a hamburger." This is a true story. So he gave me the money, I went home. The next morning, I got on the phone, told the girls. It's not a very long flight to Louisville, only a couple of hours. We went down to National Airport and it started to snow. We couldn't get a flight to Louisville. Impossible. It was a milk run. We stopped in Farmington, West Virginia, or maybe that's Virginia. Then we stopped at some other place. So they'd fly about 30 minutes and we'd land. Pick up passengers. It was a milk run, you know, a real slow flight. Well, the snow got so bad that when we landed, I think it was Farmington, West Virginia, or whatever, the pilot wasn't sure if we could take off. I said, "We got to get to Louisville." He said, "We're only talking about 40 minutes from here," he said, "What do you think are your chances of getting a bus?" I said, "This meet starts at this particular time, and you're supposed to land 45 minutes before the meet starts." He said, "Well, we're late now." Well, the Lord must have been with us because the snow stopped. It stopped coming down heavy, it just came down in flurries. We took off, we landed. We got a taxi cab. We had to go to this huge field house . So the girls changed into their uniforms in the taxi cab. This was something. It was wild. We jumped out of the cab. I told the cab driver the story and the cab driver was really, I mean he, I know he broke the speed limit getting us there. And I gave him whatever I had in my hand. And he said, "Don't count it, just run." So we ran in the door and they were lining up for the hurdles. They were lining up for what they call the preliminary... trials...
BM:	Right.
JG:	And I knew the guy with the gun. I was lucky enough to know some people. And he saw her come through the door. And the meet director... I had written to him. But anyway, he recognized us. He said, "We'll put her in the second heat. She was supposed to be in the first. We'll switch it." Tammy ran and broke the world record in the trials. Now this is jumping off a plane and changing clothes. Debbie won her heat in the 70 yard dash. And then in the finals, Tammy broke the world record again. And Debbie got on a lean. I had to say, its a close race at the finish line and on a lean, Debbie got beat from a girl from Jamaica. Good time. It wasn't a world record but it was close. So to come home, we didn't have enough money to fly the plane back. So we took a bus from Louisville. Greyhound bus. In the middle of the night. To Cincinnati. From Cincinnati, we caught a train to Martinsburg. And that's how we got home because we had just enough money. And then some people drove from Frederick to Martinsburg to pick us up to get us back to Frederick. And that's the way it was. Now, when you went down there, integration, it was tough for them. You go to a restaurant and they weren't permitted to sit at restaurants. Times were pretty tough. That was one of the most exciting stories. We're sitting here at the Hall of Fame at the armory. You look over my shoulder and there's a picture of that world record, down in the lower showcase.
BM:	Oh yeah.
JG:	That's a world record.
BM:	Was that in Kentucky?
JG:	Louisville, Kentucky. And that came from the Associated Press. The local newspaper called the Associated Press and said, "We want this, if this girl does this, we want to put it in the next morning's paper." They said, the wire service you know, buzz it across. So it was exciting. I have another story that's crazy....
BM:	Go ahead.
JG:	All right, integration was very tough. Frederick was starting to integrate but there were still restaurants in Frederick, still gas stations in Frederick that were very tough about going to the restroom. They would have "colored" and "white." As the years went by, they took those, it was against the law. So I was going to New York. So I had about eight girls with me. And we got up to Delaware and I was running short of gas. So I pulled into a gas station right before the Delaware bridge. As I pulled up, the guy, must have been the owner of the station, came over and said, "Could you do me a favor?" I said, "Well, I was going to ask you to do me one. We need gas bad or we're not going to make it to New York." He said, "See those guys over there with the 2x4's?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "If I sell you gas, they're gonna wreck my station. They're going to break the windows out, beat me up..." I said, "How do you know that?" He said, "Because they came across this morning. They said 'If you serve any of" --that terrible word, the n-word- "then we're going to destroy your place.'" I said, "Well I don't know if I can make it." He said, "If you can get over the Delaware bridge, where you come down, you'll be in New Jersey/New York. You can get served," he said. He said, "I'd give you a can of gas, but they'd see me." So we shook hands. I said, "I'll do the best I can." And we made it over the bridge before the New Jersey Turnpike, and there was a gas station. And I told the guy the story. He said, "That's right, right across that bridge." I said, "Was the guy kidding?" He said, "No, we had an incident a couple weeks ago where five or six guys beat up a gas station guy." So that's how tough it was. Go in a restaurant and they had to sit outside. Things were tough. So we, when we got to New Jersey, they were used to not walking into restaurants. They would stand at the door. New Jersey they could sit anywhere they wanted to. It took a long time for them to get used to the two ways of living. By the time they graduated high school, there wasn't that problem. And Frederick had come along really, really well. It was okay. There are a lot of stories about integration in Frederick. We'd have to give a lot of credit to Bill Lee. I mentioned him before. He became an alderman. Because of men like him who could handle tight situations, the crazier things got, there was the loud mouth threatening, beating somebody up... Mr. Lee was the kind of person who got calmer and calmer and calmer. Most people you walk up and say something like that, you know, derogatory remarks, they kind of look like they're ready to hit you. But he would just get calmer and calmer. I saw him get out of a lot of situations when the average man... there would have been a fight. But he handled himself well. He really did. So I considered what he did to help me learn what to do. He helped me a lot to get me through all those, I guess it was ten... eight years with those girls. A long time.
BM:	Did they ever have a problem, did the girls have a problem with their families or anything, like economically so they couldn't...
JG:	Thank God, they both were lucky. Debbie's father owned a shoe repair shop and was well known in the community. She had a brother named Charles Robert who was as fast as she was. God bless him. I took him to meets in Baltimore. Nobody in Baltimore could beat him. The problem was, Debbie ran as fast as boys. I mean, he ran fast, but not on the level of men. But Debbie's level was... Tammy's mother and father were together all their lives, like Debbie's mom and dad were together. Tammy had a brother who got very jealous of her. One time he kind of scared her a little bit, you know, older brother to a sister. Like: don't think you're such hot stuff. You know. Tammy never, or Debbie ever strutted their stuff. They didn't have an attitude. They just took it and they handled it. If you could imagine being in Sports Illustrated, being in the Sunday newspaper, Parade magazine. The State Department came. They were in a handout book from the United States the State Department gave to people talking about outstanding young Americans, well, mathematicians, musicians, knowing that they were in there for girls' track. They handled that extremely well. There were people that were sometimes jealous. If we went to a meet in Baltimore and we lined up to run, we had some adults threaten to throw rocks at them. So this fellow from Baltimore's name was C.C. Jackson. A black gentleman, gray hair, looked like someone from a story book. As well mannered as any man I'd known. He said, "Take my hand," he said, "You and I are going to walk down that 100 yard dash and we want people to know that we're friends." And he said, "I don't think we'll have any trouble," he said, "If we don't do this, you and I, I'm afraid your girl might get hit." Because at some races, they threw rocks at white kids. It was crazy. I mean, it was just... There were blacks that didn't like whites. There were blacks that didn't like blacks because the blacks ran for a white, like me. It was difficult for them. And they handled it. We never, ever had an incident where those girls were in trouble in school. They did their work. If you didn't know who they were, you wouldn't know who they were because they never talked about it. It was in the newspaper a lot, you know. But they never walked up and down the halls, you know, "Did you catch me doing this? I beat so-and-so." They never. They were very very... So they both were lucky that their parents came from very good families, which made it nice for me.
BM:	What was it like in other countries? Did you have problems there?
JG:	We didn't have... I took a lot of trips. I was lucky. I took Tammy one time to Russia, Germany, Poland, there was another country... It might have been England. Years go by and I forget. But there was no problem. The team... I was head coach for women. There was never a problem. Europeans didn't look at it as being unusual to have black and white on the same team. I had some very famous runners that I was lucky enough to take. Wylomea Tyus who broke the world record in Mexico in the 100 meters. I mean, in Tokyo, they came back in Mexico to win the 100 meters back to back... first women in the world in the Olympics. And then a girl named Edith McGuire won the 200 meters. The names kind of... I have to stop and write all the names down. But there was never, we never had an incident on the team. We had black and white athletes together and we never had an unkind word. It just... they were too busy doing what they were doing. I mean, get off an airplane and you get jet lag. Go to the track and look at it. Then you go to meetings. Get up the next morning. You might have a day to practice. The Russians didn't want you to have too much rest because jet lag was for their favor. The Russians wanted to beat you badly. Well, I should say the Soviet Union. The Russians themselves weren't bad but the Soviet Union, the leadership, communists were... they didn't want to see an American win. Especially not in the Soviet Union. So, but even they never said anything to their kids. Well, they weren't kids, 20, 23-4.
BM:	I think it's funny that you go to other countries and you have no problem and you have problems in your own country.
JG:	Yeah, it was hard for some of the foreign coaches to understand what the problem was. Why there would be a problem for a black child to get on a bus or go to a black university and you couldn't stay in the dorm. Did you ever know that? When black athletes were first recruited, they had separate dorms for them. They didn't stay in the dorm that other people stayed. They worked out some kind of an arrangement or else they got rooms in the town. But if they went to a university... It took a while for all that to smooth itself out. Frederick was very lucky. Like I say, people like Bill Lee who could handle all that. All the wild talk. "We're going to beat you up," and all this stuff. He took care of it. And there were a number of other black gentlemen that handled that situation.
BM:	Do you think black athletes now have the same opportunities as white athletes?
JG:	They have a good deal now. Because universities recruit them. The most recently is Valerie Williams, which you know very well. Back in the days of Debbie and Tammy, there were only two schools they could go to. That was Tennessee State University, all black. And the others, one was Morehouse which was all black. Prairieview was all black. White schools didn't recruit black runners in those days. Now, if you're good, you can go anywhere you want. And nobody thinks about it. But coaches. In those days had to be careful recruiting black athletes because of the alumni. You know, the board of directors for college, they don't want to see too many blacks. So a black coach... a lot of people risked their reputation, risked their careers on... on...
BM:	Like you did.
JG:	On giving black athletes the chance. Not so much in Frederick because it wasn't so big a deal but there are places in this country that you took a chance on recruiting a black athlete. Now, black athletes are in good shape now. The money is there. All they have to do is apply themselves. So, you know, it has come a long way.
BM:	I think that's about it, unless you had any other stories that you wanted to add in? I mean I... I'd love to hear them.
JG:	There are a lot of stories. I'm going to tell a story about when I was a boy. About Frederick in the parks. When I graduated from Frederick High School, there were only eleven grades because World War II was on. And I graduated at the age of sixteen. And that was young to graduate from high school. Most people graduate at eighteen years old now. Seventeen or eighteen. And the war was going on and all that sort of thing. The war ended when I was still seventeen. And you went to war at the age of eighteen. I was very lucky. I never really saw that war. Then when I decided to go to college, I went to school at New York University. Of course integration was no problem there. I came back to Frederick. I was a basketball player. And I went to Baker Park. There was a basketball court set up on one of the tennis courts. And I was shooting the ball all by myself. And a young man named Brown, I think his first name was Kermit. But anyway, he came by on his bicycle. And I was about eighteen and he was eighteen. I said, "Kermit!" Because we had played ball together. I said, "Come on down and shoot the ball with me. I'm tired of chasing it by myself." He said, "I can't come in the park." And I had forgotten. I forgot all about it. I said, "It's only from where you park your bike to the court, fifteen feet. Walk across the sidewalk and there's the court." And he said, "I don't know if I should do that." Well, I talked him into it and we played one-on-one. I guess about half an hour later, the police car pulls up and came down and got Kermit and said, "you know you don't belong here." And I said, "I'll take responsibility." He said, "I don't know who you are, I don't care who you are. I'm talking to him. He doesn't belong here." I said, "He'll just go and leave." He said, "No he won't, I'm arresting him." So he took the boy's bicycle and put it in the trunk of his car, put Kermit in the front seat. And they were headed for the police station. So I ran across the street and asked this lady if I could borrow her phone. I called the police and she was the lady who called the police. I never knew it until about five or six years later. I found that out. So she was the one who called the police and let me use the phone. And when I called the police... well, first I called my father. My father called the police. Then I called the police to prove that it was my fault. And they let him off or he would have had to pay the fine. That's how tough it was in Frederick.
BM:	What year was that?
JG:	That was in the forties.
BM:	So why do you think she let you use her phone?
JG:	I'm sorry, I didn't hear you.
BM:	Why do you think she let you use her phone?
JG:	I think she might have been embarrassed if I knew. Because they were friends of my father and I could say I didn't know it until at least five years later. Somehow my father happened to hear of this incident and he said, "My God, that was my son that was playing ball." Of course he didn't see any problem with that. And, but, life was not easy. It was pretty tough. If you went into a store, if a black went into a store, they couldn't try any clothes on. That is, if the store would sell them clothes. They went in and said what size and they took it off that rack, and you bought it. If it didn't fit, they had to take it home and alter it because they couldn't bring it back and they couldn't try it on while they were in the store. Can you imagine things being that difficult? So I think Frederick County has come a long way. Like we say, we have to thank a lot of people who had a lot of patience. People who had enough brains to know that there's not a difference between any of us. It's how you apply yourself, what you do with your life. That makes you a person that isn't... that old story of the color of your skin and so on doesn't make or break an individual.
BM:	Thank you so much.
JG:	Do you think anybody would be interested in all this?
BM:	Oh yeah.
JG:	Really?
BM:	Yeah.