Clyde Stinson
“Ordinary runners would have quit, but they were a bunch of champions.”
Clyde Stinson
Biography
Inducted 1997
Clyde Stinson ran on one of the strongest cross country teams the University of Maine ever had, and in addition he was a highly successful high school track and cross country coach. A great role model for his boys, he trained right along with his team. His boys from Houlton won the National Interscholastic Cross Country Championship in 1932. It is understandable why Stinson and his team of 1932 have been enshrined forever in the hearts of Houlton townfolk.
Stinson grew up on the coast of Maine in South Deer Isle. The story goes that he never set foot on the mainland until he went to high school. And his wife of 44 years, Mildred, recalls the first time his father took him off to college at the University of Maine. His father drove up to the school, opened the door, let Clyde out, and drove off. That was that.
Well, Clyde Stinson had to make the university his new home in short order. It appears he had little choice. And it appears he fared well. Stinson found a niche for himself in the university fieldhouse and on the cross country course. It was at this time that UMaine was blessed with running talent. Two of the school's greatest distance runners were there. Harry Richardson of Lee, and his teammate Bud Lindsay from Springfield, MA would, during these four years, win three straight New England Cross Country Championships while also winning the national title at Van Cortland Park in New York in 1929. They did this all while tying for first place.
Now if Clyde Stinson had run at the university at any other period, he'd likely have been noticed a great deal. He was a great runner. But because he always ran behind two of the greatest ever, he didn't get a lot of attention. But if it had not been for Stinson and a few other good runners, UMaine would never have won three straight New England Cross Country Championships, two New England track championships, and place second in the nationals.
A lot of what Stinson did and believed in is expressed in a speech he gave to the Rotary Club in Houlton later in his life. Here is the speech he wrote in its entirety.
"I'll start off by saying that the Houlton High School cross country team did win the National Championship at Newark, N.J. on - Thanksgiving Morning, November 24, 1932. Now, for my own background that made me interested in coaching, I ran on the cross country team and indoor and outdoor track teams at the University of Maine for four years. I ran the two mile in track. We had a very outstanding coach, Frank Kanaly, who was himself a world champion in every distance from a mile up to 10 miles during his youth. The cross country teams were New England College Champions during my last two years, placed third in the national meet during my junior year and second during my last year. The track team also won the New England Championship for the last two years I was there.
So, from the college experience, I had high goals when I started coaching. I feel that my coaching benefited from what I learned from my coaches and from my own experience as a competitor. I learned a lot from my mistakes as well.
I started teaching at Houlton High School during the fall of 1929, fresh out of the University of Maine. One night after school that September I happened to walk into Mr. Lambert’s office and overheard a conversation between Principal Lambert, Supt. Tom Packard and Huse Tibbetts, the athletic director. Mr. Tibbetts was saying that he wouldn't have time to coach track. He was already assigned to coach football, basketball, and baseball. I piped up and said that I would like to coach track. Well, Mr. Lambert said, I'll make you the official track coach of Houlton High School.
The very next day I put out a call for track practice. I had more distance running candidates than anything else. I ran with them in every workout. In a few weeks I went to Mr. Lambert and told him that I would like to start a cross country team. He was opposed to the idea, but consented after I told him that the boys want very much to have a team.
There was a write-up in the Bangor Daily News stating that Caribou had won the County Championship. So we challenged them. They beat us rather badly. Frank Sherwood, our only star, did come in first.
We ran all winter and all spring. The next fall Houlton placed fourth in the state meet and won the county meet. I felt then that we were on our way because Caribou had placed second the week before in the state meet. We kept at it all winter and all spring. We kept picking up more good runners every time we put in a new call.
I knew for sure that future prospects looked very good when, in a track meet at Caribou during the spring of 1931, seven Houlton boys tied for first in the mile run. Caribou, you remember, had placed second in the state cross country that same school year in the fall before. The next fall, the fall of 1931, Houlton surprised everyone downstate by winning the state meet by a very wide margin. We placed five runners among the first 12 finishers and Frank Sherwood came in first, breaking the record.
We kept running all Winter and all spnng. The next fall, the fall of 1932, the team started off at the MCI Interscholastic run in competition with 10 downstate teams and put five men in the first six. The only one not wearing the black and white jersey was Frank Sherwood of Houlton, running for Higgins C.I. He placed second. Garald Wiggins had beaten him out for the first time.
Later in the season, they ran the Maine freshmen at Orono, and five Houlton runners came in hand in hand for first place. The 6th man was also a Houlton runner. In the state meet, Houlton placed six men in the first 10 to dominate that race. All the rest of the state just placed four men among our six. No other school had more than one star among them. Ted Curtis. the faculty manager of athletics, labeled the Houlton High School team "the best high school cross country team ever developed in the state of Maine."
"The boys and I were beginning to think of bigger and bigger things. I read the results of the two big meets in New York State in the New York Times. A team from Nott Terrace H.S. of Schenectady, N.Y. was running away With the Columbia University Interscholastics where over 300 boys competed. They had won all of the big meets in that area and were considered invincible. I studied the positions in which they finished and figured that we might place second in the National Meet that was to be held in Newark. N.J. on Thanksgiving Day.
The more I studied the results of the big meets, the more I began to believe that we might win the meet. I told the boys the positions that they would have to take for us to win. Then I went to Mr. Lambert and told him that we would like to compete in the national competition. He was quite strongly against us going. He said that there were some very strong teams there and that we didn't stand a chance of placing in such competition.
Money was scarce then and the school couldn't help us any financially. So I borrowed $25 from Charles Wood and asked the boys to chip in some, and I managed to pay the rest of the expenses for the trip. No one other than ourselves thought that we could win the National Championship. We thought that we were going to either take first or second. Well, you all know the results. It was the biggest thrill that I ever got in my life when the official results were announced and we took home the big three foot tall trophy to keep for one year.
We spent the night in a New York City hotel. The boys went to various shows. Some saw Eddie Cantor in person and I went to see Rudy Vallee in person. The next morning, the New York and Boston papers praised the boys who had come down from a little village in Maine to win the National Cross Country Championship. They even wrote editorials. There was a big spread on the front page of the Bangor Daily News in big heavy print in the upper left section of the page. It bore. a large headline and carried a picture of the team.
The following Monday, the team and I were guests at the Rotary Club at the Monday noon meal. After the meal, the Houlton High School held a parade through town, followed by the team, the Rotary Club members and others. The parade ended at the high school where a large reception was held. The president of every organization and club in town spoke in a special assembly in tribute to the team. The student body was given the rest of the day off.
A couple of things happened that made the boys victory all the more remarkable. Two weeks before the big event, Roy Gartley, who had placed second earlier in the state meet, was sick in bed with the flu. He was up and running again in a week, but his weakness accounted for him placing 32nd instead of among the first five positions. Another incident in the race itself almost cost us the victory. In the congestion and confusion at the start of the race, someone stepped on Fred Murphy's heel, badly spiking him and ripping off his shoe. Fred ran the whole 2.5 miles on one shoe and with a bloody heel. Ordinary runners would have quit, but they were a bunch of champions. They never quit."
When Stinson graduated from UMaine he found a job in Houlton teaching chemistry and physics. At that time his future wife, Mildred, was a sophomore at Houlton High. A year after she graduated, they got married. One of the greatest tributes that Stinson's wife had for him was the way he treated his entire team. She remembers reading a newspaper article several years after her husband retired and in it "one of the boys said that he used the second team just as well as he did the first team. And of course," she continued, "the reason for that was that he ran in the shadow of Richardson and Lindsay. So he realized that the next man was just as important on the team as the first man. And the second team was important because it was the next first team."
Harry Richardson was coaching track and cross country in Caribou while Stinson was coaching at Houlton. "They were rivals, yet they were friends," said his wife. Houlton took state team honors in cross country from 1931 through 1933, as well as in 1935, 1937, 1939, and 1953. In addition to the memorable year of 1932, Stinson coached a number of individual state cross country champions. Among them were Frank Sherwood, 1931; Ralph Carpenter, 1935; Sterling Hall, 1939; Paul Miller, 1946; and Joe Grant, 1964 and 1965.
During the first year he taught at Houlton Stinson took a summer course at Harvard for coaching. He later attended summer sessions at Rutgers, UNH, Clarkson College, and the University of North Carolina the purpose of which was to become updated on the day's advances in technology and science so he could better teach his students. He also took courses in teaching the gifted student.
In 1945, he got a job in Old Town "but absolutely hated it," said his wife, Then, the teacher who was hired to take Stinson's place in Houlton found another job, and Stinson was asked if he wanted to return. He did, and stayed 10 years. In 1955, he took a teaching job in New Jersey where he taught seven years. But once again, Houlton needed a chemistry teacher, called Stinson, and he returned, retiring there in 1962.
Stinson was a real disciplinarian when it came to the daily lives of his runners. Proper sleep, knowledge of training and diet were sticklers with him, especially diet. When any strong team came to Houlton to run, he made sure they were fed as well as his own family on the day of the meet. "I would have to have them up for dinner," his wife remembers. The menu was always the same: broiled steak, baked potatoes, toasted bread, and custard.
He made sure that his own family followed his dietary rules, too. "We had to eat in our own home exactly what a runner would eat," recalls Mildred. "If a runner didn't eat it, we wouldn't get it. And when Joel (their son) started running, it was even worse,"
"No fried foods, no pie crust, no hot breads, day old bread toasted. I followed the diet except for breakfast. At breakfast, I rebelled. I would wait until he'd go to school, then I'd have breakfast. Of course, I was brought up on a farm and I learned to cook... and he wouldn't let me cook'"
When Stinson's 1932 team won the nationals, they had brought home a big trophy which they were allowed to keep for one year. If they ever won the nationals three years they were allowed to keep it. But, of course, they didn't. So one year Coach Stinson was so bothered by the fact that the school did not have a permanent trophy in remembrance of the national championship, "he bought one with seven runners on it, and a big one, to give to them to put in the cabinet," his wife remembers.
When it came to training runners, Stinson, like the most successful coaches of his time, used interval training as the primary focus. Impressive even in what is known today about training, his ideas and philosophy are practical and reflect common sense. Taken directly from his own notes on training, he wrote. "Avoid running on hard surfaces. A golf course is ideal or a farm or woods road that is not too rough. Avoid running during hot or humid weather. It tires you fast and is discouraging. After getting in shape a little, plan to run fairly hard every other day and easy the other day. . . NO HARD RUNNING for any distance," Stinson also emphasized the importance of relaxing while running.
Here is a training schedule he gave to his boys as a tuneup before the cross country season. He calls them "early workouts,"
July 20. Thursday: exercises (stretching). 100 yds. very easy. 220 jog. 440 jog. walk 100. 440 jog. 100 walk. 440 jog (no sprinting). Do it all easy.
Saturday: Exercises. 100 easy. 220 jog. 440 walk. walk 100. 1 /2 very easy jog.
Monday. July 24: Same as Saturday
Tuesday: Same as Saturday
Wednesday: Exercises. 100 easy. 220 jog. 440 jog. walk 100. 1/2 mile jog. 1/2 mile jog easy.
Thursday: Same as Wednesday
Friday: Exercise. 100 easy. 220 easy. 440 jog. 1/2 miles easy jog. 3/4 mile easy jog.
Monday. July 31: Exercises, 100 easy. 220 easy, 440 jog. 1 mile jog. 440 fast jog.
Tuesday: Exercises. 100 easy. 220 easy. 100 gi. 100 in easy bursts. 1 1/4 mile jog.
Wednesday: Exercises. 100 easy. 220 easy. 100 gi. 100 in bursts. 1 mile fast jog gi.
Thursday: Exercises. 100 easy. 220 easy. 100 gi. 100 in bursts. 1.5 mile jog with gi at end.
Friday: Exercises. 100 easy. 200 easy. 100 gi, 440 in three easy bursts. 1 mile fast jog. g1.
Monday. Aug 7: Exercises, 100 easy. 220 easy. 150 gi. 100 in bursts. 2 mile jog with gi at end
Tuesday: Exercises. 100 easy. 220 easy. 150 gi. 100 in bursts, 100 fair. 1 mile fast jog .
Wednesday: Exercises. 100 easy. 220 easy. 150 gi. 100 in bursts. 2 mile jog with gi
Thursday: Exercises. 100 easy. 220 easy, 150 gi. 150 in bursts. 100 fair. 440 fair. 1 mile jog
Friday: Exercises, 100 easy, 220 easy. 150 gi, 150 in bursts, 100 fair. 1/2 mile fast. taper off always after a fast finish by jogging slowly for 440 yds.
Saturday: Exercises. 100 easy. 220 easy. 150 gi. 150 in bursts. 2 mile jog with gi and taper off.
*Editor's note: the meaning of "gi" is uncertain
