RIP Thread

Coach Jim Rodarte (on the left next to Coach Frank Doretti on the right) passed away last month due to "covid-19 complications." Both of those coaches were Servite coaches before moving to Los Alamitos. Rodarte was the baseball coach who cut me from the JV baseball tryouts when I was a freshman. I had no problem with that, as I got a late start in sports, and wasn't very good yet.

Coach Rodarte's first game as Los Al's head football coach, was against a Servite team that was expected to (and did) win the Angelus League Championship. Los AL broke out ahead by 21-7 (if my memory serves me well), and Servite, (behind eventual Cincinnati Bengals QB Turk Schonert), had to really scramble to finish the game tied 21-21.

RIP with the Lord coach.

Legendary test pilot and WWII ace Chuck Yeager has died at 97. Every once in a while a national treasure comes along who is worthy of everyone's respect and admiration. Chuck was one of those guys.

Yeager was a legend. There were so many interesting stories in his autobiography which I read many years ago. He was flying P 51's in WW2 and got shot down over France. He was rescued by the French Resistance which smuggled him down to Southern France and over the Pyrenees into Spain. He showed up back in England and wanted to keep going. But the rule was that if you were assisted by the French Resistance the army wouldn't let you fly again because the risk of your being shot down and being forced by the Germans to give up information on the Resistance was too great.

But Yeager fumed endlessly about not being able to get back into the war. He made such a stink about it that he was actually introduced to General Eisenhower, who said he just wanted to meet the pilot who refused to go back home. Yeager was granted the reprieve.

When he broke the sound barrier in the X-1 he kept from everybody the fact that he had broken a couple ribs a day or two before, falling off a horse. He was afraid he’d lose the chance to break the sound barrier and they might bring in another pilot. He had to climb out of the B-29 in mid air to get into the X-1 and had trouble keeping his balance because he couldn’t use the bad arm very well. He did it anyway. He was told many times afterwards by people how much they admired him for his courage and he freely admitted that he was scared every single time he got into a test plane.

The Americans captured a Russian fighter – I think it was a Mig 15 or 17 - and had Yeager fly it to see what its advantages and limitations were. He had an extraordinarily difficult time getting it into a power dive and then pulling out and came close to baling out, from what I remember. He had to attempt it multiple times before he finally figured out the trick. Years later he was at a dinner talking to some Russian test pilots and mentioned how hard it was to pull that Mig out of a full power dive and they looked at him like he was insane. It was widely understood by the Russians that you were never supposed to put that Mig into a dive like that because you couldn’t pull out of it and were probably going to die trying. The orders were to avoid the maneuver altogether.

What a stud. He and MDDad's father would have been good buddies…………..Luca

Looks like that may be a false rumor.

The Fonz is immortal.

Winkler appeared in 255 episopdes of Happy Days as the Fonz, but the one line I remember best from that character is his philosphy of life: "You live fast, you die young, you leave a good lookin' corpse." Maybe that's not a bad way to go through life.