Museum honors Monroe sprinter who ran with Jesse Owens

MONROE — Lee Orr won a lot of races.

At Monroe Union High School, he won the state 220-yard dash in 1934 and 1935. At Washington State University, he won eight Pacific Coast Northern Division titles and a national championship in the 440-yard race. Orr and his brother, Jack, ran a relay that set a world record in June 1937, running a mile in 3:12.

But the biggest thrill of his illustrious running career? Losing to Jesse Owens.

Orr was 19 years old in 1936 when he took to the track at the Berlin Olympics for the 200-meter competition. A freshman at WSU, he was chosen to represent Canada in Berlin after competing in the western Canada Olympic trials. Despite representing Canada, he was the first athlete from Monroe in any event.

While he was eliminated in the 100-meter competition in the first round, he made his way to the final in the 200. In the first race, he finished second behind Owens. In the quarterfinals, he tied the Olympic record coming into the games, at 21.2 seconds.

Orr found himself in lane 6 for the final, but he got off to a slow start and finished fifth. Immortalized in a photo from Time magazine, Orr can be seen running behind Owens, who ran 0.4 seconds faster than anyone else in the final.

“We knew he was the best there was,” Orr told a Daily Herald reporter in 2004. “We competed not against him, but in the meet.”

Three years before the outbreak of World War II, Orr found himself about 10 yards away from Nazi leaders, including Adolf Hitler.

Dexter Taylor visited Orr around 2000 and had tea with him. He said he never would have known he was an Olympian. He was very quiet and kept to himself.

Accordingly, he kept most of his ample memorabilia away from view.

“I don’t dwell in the past,” Orr said in 2004.

Yet when he died in 2009 at the age of 92, Orr left all of his memorabilia, four or five boxes worth, to the Monroe Historical Society.

“It was a surprise to me,” said Taylor, who serves as the historical society’s vice president. “I didn’t even know Lee had all that stuff.”

The mementos are now the subject of a new display at the museum. This is the first time they’ve been shown there, timed to the ongoing Tokyo Olympics this summer.

There are the running spikes he used. There are programs for the 1936 Olympics. There are medals galore. There’s the spade he used to dig makeshift starting blocks into dirt tracks for his races.

And that is far from all of it. Some pieces are on loan to the Snohomish County Sports Hall of Fame. Others are in storage at the historical society.

“There’s more medals and buttons and there’s a whole bunch of ribbons” that they didn’t display, said historical society board member Tonia Mains. There’s a pair of running shoes that still have dirt from the track in Berlin.

Orr was born in Saskatchewan in April 1917. At the age of 3, he and his family moved to Park Place, just west of downtown Monroe, where he won his first track trophy in sixth grade.

Among his contemporaries, Orr might have been remembered as much for his football career as for his track stardom, Taylor said. In a HistoryLink article, Merv Boyes remembered touchdowns Orr made for the Bearcats of Monroe Union High School, saying “no one could catch him. He had amazing speed.”

Orr would return to Germany during the war, with the Army. He was known to entertain his fellow soldiers with his football and running prowess.

He worked for a meat company in the Midwest for decades before retiring and returning to Monroe. He lived two miles east of the city on U.S. 2.

Located in Monroe’s original city hall building at 207 E Main St, the historical society is open from noon to 3 p.m. on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Organizers expect the display to stay up for several months.

Jake Goldstein-Street: 425-339-3439; jake.goldstein-street@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @GoldsteinStreet.