Every four years, they come into our living rooms and make themselves at home. They root around for a couple weeks, leave a few memories, and disappear. Four years later, a new batch arrives.

The Summer Olympics cyclically bring athletic stars we often forget just as quickly as we discover them.

We remember Jesse Owens, but how about Lee Orr?

We remember Dan and Dave, but what about Fred and Thad?

More than 110,000 athletes have participated in the Summer Olympics over the past century. The Herald has searched far and wide – from Edmonds to Sultan to Stanwood to Whidbey Island – to find a small constituency of them who either started or settled in Snohomish and Island Counties.

Over the next six days, The Herald will profile 23 of the area’s Summer Olympians, beginning with some of the old-timers and capping it off with a trio who are headed to the Athens Games this year.

The most obvious place to start is with Orr. Now 87 years old, the former sprinter represented Canada at the 1936 Games, where he went against Owens – among others.

But Orr, who lives in Monroe, isn’t the only local Olympian with ties that go way back. Eighteen years after Orr went to Berlin, a pair of Everett High School graduates went to the 1952 Olympics together, both competing in the pentathlon.

Fred Denman and Thad McArthur, both 76, still live in the Seattle area and remain friends.

Denman, McArthur and Orr are among the longest-living Olympians in the area surrounding Everett, and all three have remarkable stories to tell.

Another thing they share is the ability to shrug off their achievements after all these years.

Sprinter Lee Orr, Monroe

On a 10-acre plot of land just off State Highway 2 in Monroe, sits an ordinary house that holds extraordinary memories within its walls.

Not that a visitor would be able to unearth them at first sight. Other than a framed photo collage given to him by a son-in-law, Lee Orr keeps most of his memories of the 1936 Olympics stashed away.

“I don’t dwell in the past,” he’ll say without much emotion.

Yet Orr’s past includes being a witness to one of the most remarkable performances in Olympic history. It’s right there on the photo collage, where Orr’s 19-year-old face and muscular body can be seen running a few steps behind Jesse Owens in the 200-meter dash.

As any historian can attest, Orr did not win that race (he took fifth). It was one of four gold medals Owens took home at the Berlin Games – his performance happening right in front of Adolph Hitler during a time when Germany’s leader saw Aryans as the perfect species.

Orr was a 19-year-old freshman at Washington State College (now called WSU) when he competed in the Games that year. Owens was a senior at Ohio State, where he had already won numerous national championships.

“We knew he was the best there was,” Orr said. “We competed not against him, but in the meet.”

Orr bristles at the sense of revisionist’s history that has gone on in the past 68 years. He recalls the events a bit differently than they have been remembered by others.

For example, people still talk about the way Hitler stormed out of the Berlin track stadium after seeing Owens dominate the 1936 Games – an incident that Orr says has been overblown.

“He was treated very well over there,” Orr said of Owens. “People talk about Hitler snubbing him, but I never heard of a leader in any country going up to a competitor and congratulating him for beating the home team.

“Our presidents don’t go out and congratulate someone for beating our athletes, so why should Hitler go out and congratulate him for beating the Germans?”

While Owens was the pride of the United States, Orr was a relatively unknown sprinter who wore Canada’s uniform. He was born in Saskatchewan, but lived there only three years before the family moved to Monroe. Orr went to Monroe High School, and was such an accomplished runner that he helped the Bearcats finish second in the state track meet his senior year even though he was their only representative.

A WSC coach got wind of Orr’s birthplace and suggested that he try out for the Canadian team. He won an event in Vancouver, then finished first in the Olympic Trials at Montreal. Only when he arrived at Berlin did Orr realize that he had beaten one of the American qualifiers, Bob Packard, in a previous college race.

Orr sat behind Hitler for much of the track portion of the Games, eventually running against Owens in a legendary race.

After that trip to Berlin, Orr won a national championship in the 400 as a senior at WSC in 1938. But World War II washed out any chances of him competing in another Olympics. He fought in the war, worked and moved around the country until 1980, then retired back in his hometown of Monroe, where he still lives today.

Orr said he rarely thinks about those Olympics, although he gets reminded every once in a while. Such an occasion happened in 1999, when he was flipping through an issue of Time Magazine’s Man of the Century and stumbled across an ad for The History Channel. There, in black and white on a full-page ad, was Lee Orr running behind Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics.

“That brought back memories,” Orr said. “It was rather odd to see that picture.

“I guess I was one of the top performers of the day,” he added. “I didn’t really realize it then, but I must have been.”

Pentathletes Fred Denman and Thad McArthur, Everett

Coincidence.

No other word can describe how two men who had attended Everett High School at the same time ever ended up together in a single Olympic event.

Thad McArthur (EHS Class of 1946) and Fred Denman (Class of ‘47) hadn’t been close friends at Everett High and never even competed on an athletic team together. But they were teammates on the U.S. pentathlon team at the 1952 Olympics purely by chance.

“The fact that we came from the same high school was a coincidence,” Denman said. “It wasn’t a big deal.”

Neither McArthur nor Denman had even heard of the pentathlon while attending Everett High. The under-publicized sport combines five events over five days, all of which were originally put together in 1912 as a sort of militaristic event. The original idea of the pentathlon events – horse riding, fencing, pistol shooting, swimming and running – was to bring together elements of a soldier’s journey while being pursued by an enemy.

For a long time, most participants had a military background. That was the case of Denman, a West Point cadet. A former football star at EHS, Denman was a natural athlete who also had a knack for fencing and handling a gun.

Upon his graduation from West Point, Denman was approached about competing in the pentathlon. He had recently been married and had a child, so the possibility of competing in the Olympics enticed him more than going off to the Korean War.

“I really didn’t want to leave my family,” Denman said recently. “I had my wife and kid there, and if I got dropped off that team, I was going to get separated from them.”

To Denman’s surprise, a familiar face soon arrived at the training center for the pentathlon. McArthur, a fellow Everett High grad and a casual acquaintance of Denman’s, had been recruited to try out for the pentathlon team while swimming in an open race near his New Jersey home.

McArthur’s background was as a swimmer at the University of Washington, where he had a modest career for the Huskies before taking part in amateur opens as an adult. He didn’t have the athletic pedigree of Denman, as school doctors told McArthur during his sophomore year at EHS that he couldn’t play football or basketball because of a heart murmur.

(The condition never stopped McArthur from being active. In fact, he competed in a triathlon just two years ago, at the age of 74.)

McArthur was swimming in an open event during the spring of 1952 when an Olympic recruiter approached him about trying out for the U.S. pentathlon team. He joined more than two dozen other pentathlete-wanna-bes at the West Point training center, where McArthur was given a 60-day pass to prove whether or not he had what it took to be an Olympian.

Although his conditioning gave McArthur an advantage in the swimming and running events, he had never fired a pistol or picked up a fencing sword before 1952.

“When I first saw Thad fencing and shooting, I thought: This is going to last 60 days,” Denman cracked. “But after he’d been there awhile, I could see that he was the guy to beat because of his endurance.”

More than 30 athletes rotated in and out of the training center, and eventually three qualified for the Olympic team. Amazingly, two of the three had gone to high school together.

“There wasn’t a great funnel to put people into this thing,” McArthur said. “But of those who were there, no one could have taken the challenge more seriously than (Denman) did.”

The 1952 Olympics marked the first time either McArthur or Denman had competed in a pentathlon. Both represented the U.S. well, finishing among the top eight of 54 competitors. Denman was challenging for a medal until the final two events – a 300-meter swim and a 4,000-meter run – while McArthur overcame a slow start by finishing third in the swim and first in the run.

Overall, Denman finished sixth; McArthur eighth. If either one of them had finished just one place higher, the U.S. team would have won a bronze medal.

“It was sort of a fortuitous, hit-and-miss thing,” McArthur said of the Helsinki Games. “But the result was more than fortuitous. A pretty remarkable bunch of guys got together there.”

Denman, who lives in Seattle and never competed in organized sports again after 1952, still takes his athletic achievement in stride.

“I honestly think that if there had been a proper screening process in the pentathlon in those years, I wouldn’t have even made the team,” Denman said. “I don’t think we had the best athletes there. It was about being opportunistic. I think there were at least a dozen guys I know at West Point who would have been better at it than I was. But they didn’t know about it.”

The pentathlon still exists today, but in relative anonymity. McArthur, who went on to help organize pentathlons at the 1984 Olympics and 1990 Goodwill Games, said he wonders whether the event will survive past the next two Olympics.

“If you put these five sports together, where you’re not a world-beater in any of them, all of a sudden you’re threatening to be the best,” he said. “You average this thing out, and it’s a marvelous combination.”

While Denman moved out of competition following the 1952 Olympics, McArthur continued to stay active in sports. Between his career as an Everett High swimmer and his triathlon in 2002, McArthur estimates he’s competed in 33 different sports.

“I’ve just gone from game to game to game,” he said.

None of those games ever carried the prestige of the 1952 Games. No matter how many events beckon an athlete, none will ever compare to the Olympic Games.