PAT EATHORNE
By Terry Mosher
Editor, Sports Paper
A lot has been written about the late Les Eathorne, a man who virtually devoted all his life to the Bremerton community through his love for basketball, which he played at Bremerton High School and then coached in the area for 35 years while compiling 502 victories over his 41 years of coaching (he coached his first six years at Camas High School).
Eathorne died July 5, 2010 at the age of 86, but not before the gym at Bremerton High School was named after him.
He left behind Pat, who like him is a Bremerton person through and through. Pat O’Brien Lindberg Eathorne has spent virtually all her life in Bremerton. She didn’t play sports or coach sports, but in her long history with the community has been associated with sports. Essentially, she has been a sideline spectator for much of the history of the community during her 78 years.
“I have never been an athlete,” says Pat. “I think I played girl’s softball in the sixth grade at Warren Avenue Playfield. We used to have to walk across the old Manette Bridge – there was no Warren Avenue Bridge – and down to Lebo Field to play, and then walk back home. Nobody had cars.
“I have been a sports spectator all my life. I don’t recall how many games I have seen, but it’s been my whole life. Being married to a coach was good for me.”
Pat continues to live in the house in east Bremerton she and first husband – Jack Lindberg purchased 50 years ago. She loves it there. It’s a friendly neighborhood, quiet and has a wonderful view looking to the waters that gently lap on the shores surrounding Bremerton.
She was born Pat O’Brien on April 2,1935 to Hank and Babe O’Brien. It would be Hank and Babe’s only child, and Pat disliked that.
“I never liked it,” she says, “and I never will. “I would love to be from a bigger family.”
Her dad worked at PSNS for a time, then quit and moved on to other things, including as a real estate agent, a car salesman, and finally in the late 1950s he owned a bar in San Diego.
“He was a charmer,” says Pat of her dad.
Although her parents would move to San Diego, and she lived there for three years when Lindberg joined the Navy and was stationed there, Bremerton has been good to her, and she would want to live nowhere else.
“Bremerton High School was perfect,” Pat says. “I loved it. It was great for me, growing up in the 1950s. I loved the 50s. We had so much fun. We’d go downtown and cruise around and at homecoming events we would have big bonfires and snake dance through downtown. Brown Music was downtown and we’d go down and listen to records.
“We just had a lot more fun then. Of course, it was safer. The kids weren’t pulling the things they do now. I loved high school. I would go back tomorrow if I could.”
Pat was a cheerleader from junior high at Coontz through high school (she graduated in 1953) and became a childhood sweetheart of Jack Lindberg, who she met through her cousin, Art Waaga (Waaga Way is named after him).
Waaga was doing some American Legion coaching and happened to be living with the O’Brien’s.
:”It was a boring day,” Pat recalls,” and he says, ‘Why don’t you come down to the game with me and keep score or something.’ I met Jack there. He was pitching for the American Legion team and he was just a great guy – very handsome, and a very good guy. A real good guy.”
Pat went to Olympic College for two years and then transferred to San Jose State, but she wasn’t there long. Lindberg was a year behind Pat in school and when he graduate in 1954 left for Central Washington where he played baseball for a year. Then he decided to join the Navy, and shortly afterwards they married (1955).
“Nobody from Bremerton ever joins the Navy,” says Pat. “There were too many sailors around. You tolerated them as you got older, but you were not suppose to date a sailor.”
So much for that idea.
The young couple wound up in San Diego where Lindberg was stationed and when he mustered out they came back to Bremerton and then headed for Bellingham where Lindberg finished getting his education degree at Western Washington.
Then they moved back to Bremerton, buying the house where Pat still lives. He started teaching social studies to fifth and sixth graders in the Bremerton School District. Lindberg also started playing slowpitch softball with some of the better teams – first Haselwood Buick and then Scotty’s Tavern – in the Bremerton City League, which continued Pat’s connection to athletics.
Pat and Jack would have three children – Larry, Marty and Casey. . During their marriage Pat would hold various jobs spaced between times when she stayed home to have a child or to watch their games.
She worked at J.C. Penney’s when it was downtown, worked for the Bremerton School District and at Willows Retirement home (which she loved), and worked at Olympic College when the school had a thriving PE program and a an athletic program that was as good as any community college.
That is when Dick Ottele, Harry Russell, Lynn Rosenbach and Jack Stenjhem were around at the school and things were moving along well, including a football program.
The good times were rolling for Pat, but in 1978 Lindberg tragically died from cancer. He had just turned 42.
“I was the very opposite of Jack,” says Pat. “I have always been real outspoken, right in your face, and I talk to everyone and everybody, blah, blah, blah. But Jack was real quiet, real reserved, maybe a little aloof,” says Pat. “But he was very well liked by everybody.”
It wasn’t a good time for Pat. But she gamely moved on, and at some point she and Eathorne connected. They got married in 1979 and, again, the sports connection with her continued. She didn’t miss a basketball home game and Les insisted that she accompany his Bremerton basketball teams for road games.
“I had to sit up front with Les,” says Pat. “All the years I was married to Les were fun years for me. Casey was eight years old when Les and I got married. So Casey spent a lot of time at the gym hanging around. I enjoyed the game. I loved the kids. My whole life has been sports, so it’s been fun.”
The bus trip up to Port Angeles was always an adventure. One year a couple kids from Port Angles followed the bus and began throwing rocks at it. Then they would pull ahead of the bus and slow down
“At Discovery Bay they turned the car sideways and the bus had to stop,” says Pat. “Les gets up and tells everybody to stay on the bus. By the time Les gets to the car, Leonard Barnes, Henri Campbell, or maybe it was Oza Langston, were there and one of them reaches in and punches the driver.
“A few years later this kid comes into Les’ PE class at Bremerton, tells him his name, and says, “I suppose you are going to flunk me.’ Les had no idea what he was talking about and told him his grade would depend on what he did.
“Finally the kid tells him he was the driver of the car that gave him a bad time.
It was an experience to go up there (to PA). One time they threw eggs at our bus.”
Les did not bring the game home.
“Not really,” says Pat. “He just started getting ready for the next game. The thing he didn’t like about coaching was when he had to make the cuts. A lot of coaches just put the names of those who make the team on a piece of paper. Les would take those who didn’t make it aside and tell they why, and encourage them to go to Sheridan Park Gym and play and come back next year. He was really fair about that.”
Les came through the fabled Bremerton basketball program built by the legendary Ken Wills, who committed suicide Nov. 19, 1962. Wills was a mentor to many kids. Les was no exception to that.
“He did talk about Ken Wills,” says Pat. “He was very close to Ken. Les’ dad had died and maybe because of that he was really close to Ken. He never really got over his death, because nobody knows for sure why it happened. There are a lot of stories out there and he didn’t know what to believe.
“The night before he killed himself (with a pistol), he went into the dark gym (at Bremerton High) and just sat in the middle of the floor. He appeared to be very distracted.”
Wills was forced to take the Olympic College men’s basketball job, a position that had been occupied by his good friend and next door neighbor, Phil Pesco, who had died five days before of a heart attack, and he did not want to leave the Bremerton High coaching position.
The same night Wills sat in the middle of the gym, he had visited a good friend and appeared to be very distraught. Whether being forced to take a job he didn’t want was the main reason he killed himself will never be resolved. It’s a possible answer, but nobody will ever know for sure.
The last few years of Les’ life he struggled with COPD and heart problems. He had to be put on oxygen. It all seemed to come down suddenly. Pat remembers one night the two of them was running to catch the ferry at the Coleman Dock in Seattle.
“I ran ahead to get the tickets,” she says. “It was a wonder he didn’t have a heart attack that night. He was struggling to get there.”
That prompted a visit to the doctor and Les was diagnosed with having an irregular heart beat (atrial fibrillation). The doctor wouldn’t let him go home. An ambulance was called and he was taken across the street to the hospital and was placed on blood thinners. That was the start of his health decline.
Pat says Les, “Loved his job (PE teacher and coach). He really liked to get to work every day. He couldn’t think of anything else he would like to do than teach and coach.”
He finally retired from teaching in 1988 and from coaching several years later after two years at Olympic High School. He did try once to be a substitute teacher at an elementary school, but it didn’t work for him when he discovered that the kids, unlike high school students, had to be shown what to do.
“ He was so tired that night and said he would never sub at an elementary school again,” Pat said.
Pat and Les managed to do some traveling when they were in full retirement, including to Hawaii, a drive for a couple months around the United States, taking in the southern states, then on an American Heritage tour to all the important Civil War battle grounds, and to Spring Training in Arizona a couple times.
But sports were not far from them.
“Everywhere we went we had to stop and go to a hotel to watch on television the Final Four,” Pat said. “We did that several times.”
When Les died three years ago his ashes got split up. Some are at Forest Lawn in Bremerton, and the rest were given to family.
“I think Mark (Eathorne, one of Les’ sons) has some of them, and then my kids took some and went over to Walla Walla.”
Walla Walla was the family home of the Klicker’s, which is family on Les’ mother’s side. Les used to go over to Walla Walla every summer and pick berries on the family spread.
“We stayed at the family homestead, which was the originally Klicker home,” says Pat. “My kids took his ashes up on the mountain and scattered them up there.”
Pat’s Bremerton High Class of 1953 is having its 60th reunion on Sept. 13-15 and she will again be the narrator for the Saturday (Sept. 14) bus tour of town as she was for their 55th reunion. The bus tour will hit all the hot spots that kids went to in the 1950. Most, if not all, have since disappeared. –Coontz Junior High, all the elementary schools, XXX Drive-in on Sixth Street, Alice’s Restaurant, Olberg Drugs. But that won’t deter Pat from talking about them as the bus motors around town.
“I’m a true Bremertonian, “says Pat. “That means I’m all for Bremerton. I don’t like it when people talk about Bremerton in negative ways, probably just because I was born her and was raised here. The 50s were great. I would go back tomorrow if I could. I was happy, I was doing a lot of things, I was in a lot of activities, had good friends. So I don’t like it when people talk badly about Bremerton, our schools, our parks or our weather.
“And I feel like I was truly bless to have two good men in my life.”
Both of those men are gone and times have changed. It’s what happens. There is nothing you can do about it. Life goes on and society changes, sometimes in ways you wish it didn’t.
It used to be Pat and Les’s home in east Bremerton was like a revolving door with so many of Les’s former players coming and going.
“Now it’s totally different,” says Pat. “It’s pretty quiet around here.”
But as long as Pat is around the memories will flow and the world as it once was will again come to life, and life as it is will be full of enthusiasm sprinkled with joy and goodness.
That’s just the way Pat Eathorne is.