Like Nothing Else In Tennessee

The university gives Temple almost no help in getting the team to and from meets. Until Rome, Wilma and the girls had never flown anywhere, and had traveled only once in a train. Temple drove them in his own car, and still does. There is no money for stopovers, and the salutary effects of nonstop automobile trips to New York, to Texas or Ohio on a carful of long-legged girls are probably negligible.

Mrs. Temple, Charlie B., a charming woman of dry wit and infinite amiability, helps her husband in every way she can. She and Ed Temple met in physiology class their senior year at Tennessee ("She was settin' on an A—I made it my business to meet her") and married right after school, in 1950. Completion of her thesis for her master's in biology has receded into the dim future; she and Ed have little time for anything but the present. They get up at 6, distribute Edwina and Bernard, and on an average Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday Temple goes to teach his 8 o'clock and his 9 o'clock classes, then back to the post office until 4, and to track practice every day but Sunday. This year he had to have the full legal responsibility for the post office signed over to Charlie B. to enable him to leave for the Olympics, and he points out that she has not had even the two weeks' vacation called for by the State of Tennessee for five years. Temple himself has not had a vacation for six. "I ask the president, he say, 'But Temple, you've just come back from a trip to Russia!' I ask for a raise, he say, 'Temple, you're young.' I told him, 'Listen, Mr. President, when I go through the supermarket, that cash register register just the same as for a person 90 years old.' I went in once and asked if I could have just two jobs, and I thought he like to have died."

A friend said to this, "Well, Temp, you got to be dedicated."

"Yeah, well," said Temple darkly, "there is such a thing as running dedication into a hole."

(A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country. An administration which has known Temple since he was a freshman is still inclined to think of him as "little Eddie" rather than as the internationally renowned Olympic coach Edward S. Temple.)

Temple and his team

Thirty-three-year-old Ed Temple resembles a gentle bull. When he is forced to have his picture taken the resulting print is likely to betray a slight feeling of self-consciousness at war with a natural directness. The same conflict is apparent when he speaks publicly. He speaks bluntly but with a controlled stammer that reminds one of the self-consciousness that haunts his pictures—self-consciousness at being in front of people at all. The only thing that will get him into either of these positions is his devotion to his girls. He will have his picture taken if it will get his girls into the paper; he will get on a platform to speak if he can speak about his girls. His fine runners who were never recognized are the subject of his speeches—Faggs and Daniels, Matthews and Thompson and White—the names roll out again and again, and the three members of this year's relay team who are not Wilma Rudolph are doggedly recalled to his listeners. He cherishes his girls as if each were his child and his Stradivarius. On the post-Olympic trip he was too busy bullying people into hurrying their meals to eat his own: in Detroit he got up and left his lunch to buy pills for an ailing Lucinda. Next day, a sharp look at Skeeter ("What's the matter with you?" "My stomach hurts") sent him to phone the hotel for a doctor. He held watches on press conferences because the girls had to rest but was undisturbed when they went to the movies instead. "I know these girls, I know them. I can look down that table, and I know when one of them's sick, she don't have to tell me. But I don't get too close. Girls are different. You pay too much attention to one, they get jealous. I just usually go right around, talk to them five minutes each, right around the table."

The girls, for their part, obey him without question—though volatile Barbara Jones may huff. "Jones is at it again," Temple will come home and tell Charlie B., to whom the girls may bring their grievances. "Some days she isn't speaking to him," Charlie B. grins. "She's out there running, but they aren't speaking." The rule, however, is enthusiastic submission.

Skeeter and all of Temple's juniors will go with him next year should he accept "a very attractive offer" made him by Grambling, Louisiana (where presumably he will not have to run the post office), and Skeeter wants to go with him if he decides to go to Ghana. Temple discourages this. It would be better, he thinks, for her to finish her schooling.

A few years ago Ed Temple bought, at his own expense, a movie camera and a projector, to make training films and records of the meets. There is a film upon which he was recording the broad-jumping in a meet in Cleveland. Another photographer was right down in the pit—close, since the girls were jumping 16 feet—and when Temple's Willye B. White jumped 19 feet she had to twist in mid-air to avoid spiking the man. She badly hurt her ankle. So on this film there is a record of the beginning of White's fine jump, and then blue sky, just a succession of clouds across the sky as the camera went right on shooting where Ed Temple dropped it,