SNOHOMISH – The mind is racing now.
One story leads to another.
“Oh,” Keith Gilbertson chuckled, “I’ve got a million of ‘em.”
Some he’ll tell. Others, he might tell, but not for the record.
He doesn’t want to embarrass anyone.
He not only has stories. He has an infinite number of scores of football and basketball games, and who made the winning touchdown or scored the deciding basket. And he has the times of countless runners stored in that quick, accurate mind of his.
“I guess they were important to me,” he replied when asked how he remembers them all.
They were important to him because they happened to kids who attended Snohomish High School. And for almost 60 years, that’s the place Keith Gilbertson Sr. has more or less called home.
It’s just up the street from his real home, convenient so that he can get there quickly and not waste any time settling down to watch films of Snohomish football games to try and see what he can learn to help the 2006 edition of Panther football.
He studied more than 100 hours of film this spring, including games from a year ago, sometimes homing in on one kid, perhaps a defensive back.
“He’ll jot down two or three things the guy has to improve on,” head coach Mark Perry said, “such as ‘he’s got to get off blocks better.’ He pays close attention to detail.”
The man knows his stuff. He’s coming up on his 58th year of coaching and his 57th at Snohomish High, his alma mater, class of 1945.
After graduating from Washington State University, including one fall as an undergraduate assistant in football and one spring helping coach the Pullman High School track team, he returned to his old high school to embark upon a coaching career in 1950.
He never left.
He was the head coach in football for three years. He also headed the track and cross country programs at one time, as well as assisting in several other sports. And he put together and for years ran the conditioning program for the highly successful football program of Dick Armstrong.
Retiring as a paid coach in 1981, he continued coaching as a volunteer assistant in football and girls basketball. And that was why he was out on the football field this week. The Panthers were staging their annual gridiron camp, and Gilbertson was eager to share all that knowledge he’s gained in 78 years of living.
Some of the kids he’d be tutoring were the sons of men he coached.
“I’ve worked with three generations of families,” he said, as he sat on a bench overlooking the field before practice.
He was wearing a red baseball cap and a red pullover – the predominant Snohomish color – on a cool, breezy evening.
Down below more than 100 football players were warming up with exercises Gilbertson had introduced to the program.
“Somebody asked me why I still do this and I said, ‘Because that’s what I do,’” his voice insinuating that it was kind of a silly question.
And as for doing it without any recompense, he scoffed, “I should pay them for the opportunity. That’s my reward. I’m totally engrossed in what’s happening. I make a lot of corrections (on the field), I like the fundamental part of teaching.”
The budget crunchers in the school district should like the bottom line. Asked how much it would have cost to pay another assistant the last 25 years that Gilbertson – better known as “Gilby” to countless students – has been volunteering in football and basketball, Perry figured $7,000 a year. “I’d say close to $200,000 total,” he said.
That doesn’t even take into account all the out-of-pocket money Gilbertson spent taking kids all over the country to compete in summer track meets way back when.
He did it because he loved doing it.
He especially loved helping kids who had a strike or two against them. Which inspired one of those stories he loves to tell.
“The kids who appreciate their education the most,” he began, “are the kids I had in practical English – the slow learners, the dyslexics, the guys who really had problems, and the only thing they could do was run, that was their one chance to be successful in high school.
“I used to think that anything a kid did in high school that he was successful doing should be a subject, and I really kind of believe that today, that you’ve got to give a kid a chance at something or he’s not going to stay. He’s going to be a dropout.
“Anyway, this kid was a dyslexic, and boy was he tough. He got more out of his ability just by being tough. I’ll tell you the kind of toughness he had.”
And then he told of how on the day that President Kennedy was killed, the boy came to Gilbertson and said how terrible he felt and asked the coach to take him out and run him. And Gilbertson got in his car and followed the boy to Granite Falls, 10 or 12 miles away, and when Gilbertson then asked him how he felt, the boy said he needed to “get this out of my system” and so he ran back to Snohomish.
When he got back to town, Gilbertson asked him how he was going to get home, and the boy said he was going to run, and run he did – up a two-mile hill.
The boy grew up and went to work for a grocery store chain, got married and had a couple of kids. “Had a great life,” Gilbertson said.
It’s the kind of story that brings a happy tear to an old man’s eye. Just as do thoughts of all the other “great kids” he’s had the pleasure of coaching over half a century.
“The last few years, in girls basketball and football, we’ve had just super kids to coach,” he said. “Not so much that they were all great players, as they were great people.”
Such as “those four seniors (this year) who graduated in girls basketball. Some marvelous young people.”
At the end of the season, he took them out for breakfast. “And I’d do it again – only this time I’d pay,” he said with a hearty laugh. “They wouldn’t let me pay.
“Just great kids. The kind of kids you want to stay in touch with.”
Over the years, he has stayed in touch with many of his former students. He gets up early each morning and for two hours writes letters to athletes, coaches, soldiers, old friends, grandkids.
You didn’t read that wrong. He writes letters. He simply feels it’s more personal when he sits down and pecks out a missive on his 1940 Underwood typewriter.
“I can hardly hit the right keys anymore,” he said. “My letters look more like censored V mail from World War II. I always apologize to those who were in my English class.”
Among others he corresponds with is a former solicitor general for the state of Washington. The lady was a teacher’s assistant for Gilbertson, and then went on to study law at Harvard. “I’ll tell you, that family really showed me something,” he said. “There were eight of them, came up here from Muleshoe, Texas, and they lived in a school bus for a year while they built a house.”
The old coach has also showed a lot of people something during his life. “When he talks, kids listen,” said Ken Roberts, the Panther girls basketball coach whom Gilbertson has assisted for several years.
As he sat there reminiscing, one of the senior girl basketball players walked over and gave him a hug.
“I love him,” she said of the old coach. “He’s an awesome guy. He’s done a heckuva lot for me and the whole high school.”
A fellow in his early forties came walking over on crutches to say hi to the coach. “Ruptured my Achilles tendon,” he said by way of greeting.
Gilbertson asked him what year his dad graduated from high school. Of course, Gilbertson had coached both the father and the son in football.
“I had the privilege of having Mr. Gilbertson as coach,” the son said. “I bench pressed over 300 pounds because of him. He told me, ‘Get your head into this.’”
A player from the current Snohomish team hustled by on his way to the field. “You OK?” Gilbertson shouted with a grin.
Which brought up another story.
It seems that during a practice this spring Gilbertson was down on the field when this kid, reaching for a pass, didn’t see the coach in his path and blindsided him.
“I was worried because he took a shot,” Perry said. “His hat went flying one way and his glasses the other.
“But he got back up, put his hat back on and adjusted his glasses as if to say, ‘Nothing’s going to hurt me.’ The poor kid felt like a heel.”
To the “poor kid,” Gilbertson always asks with a gleam in his eye, “You OK?”
If he can take a hit by a husky 17-year-old, he can survive almost anything.
“I feel right now that I could coach ‘til I’m 100,” he said, “but that’s probably a long shot.”
Don’t bet against him.
He suffered a stroke in January of ‘82, a month after retiring. “A blood vessel broke in the brain stem and later they told me that’s usually fatal,” he said.
Sixteen years later, he had surgery for prostate cancer. He has had no residual effects from either the stroke or the cancer.
What did have a “profound effect” on him was the death of his wife, Eileen, in 1995 after almost 50 years of marriage.
“I think in the last 11 years I became a better person,” he said. “I think my perspective on life has changed for the better, my faith has been strengthened over time. I have maybe a little better purpose in life now, just from the standpoint that I feel a need to get up and go to church on Sunday.”
He said he doesn’t “growl” like he used to.
That may be, but the fires that burn within are as hot as they ever were. “I still have the competitive thing,” he said. “That’s what my wife understood about me more than anything. She was probably the perfect coach’s wife.”
The camp had now begun, and Gilbertson – always at least a half hour early to every team meeting – was probably feeling a little guilty about not being down on the field.
To set up this interview, he had gone to the old Underwood and typed out a note on a card: “You might see me standing around killing the grass.”
Fat chance.
He tugged his cap down tightly on his head, adjusted his windbreaker, and walked purposefully onto the field.
Just as he’s done for almost 60 years.
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