After Years Apart, Three Local Runners Were Finally United
By Sonny Marks
Frank Murphy, left, finished second to his Lake Charles High teammate Bobby Dower in the half-mile in this 1968 junior varsity meet at LaGrange High School. Photo courtesy of Beverly Dower Swanson
The photo of two runners about to cross the finish line was shot on black and white film in the spring of 1968 on the track at LaGrange High School. Junior varsity meet, half mile. That’s Frank Murphy on the left and his Lake Charles High classmate, teammate and friend Bobby Dower on the right, at the tape. A Lake Charles American Press photographer shot this picture, but it never ran in a local publication — until now.
The boys had met several years earlier, when Murphy was 8 and Dower was 9, and they went to different schools.
“We met when we played peewee ball,” Murphy said. “He was always one step ahead of me in Little League and he was already a star, the same way he was a star his whole life. I don’t know whether he was a good baseball player or not. It was 50-50 whether the ball thrown to me would hit me in the head or not.
“We didn’t sustain any friendship as boys because the distinction between the Catholic school system and the public school system was almost absolute in those days. We didn’t have any occasion besides Little League to know each other. In Little League, Bobby was a much better player than I was, in part because I have terrible eyesight.”
Murphy began running track in junior high. He won the parish meet in the mile in eighth grade and drew the attention of Lake Charles High track coach Bob Hayes.
“He said, ‘Come meet me at the Lake Charles High gym after school and we’ll go run together.’ This, to me, was mind-blowing,” Murphy said. “After that workout, he said, ‘Why don’t you transfer over?’”
So Murphy left the Catholic school. Landry enrolled at Lake Charles High and dedicated himself to running.
“I liked the fact that if I wanted to be good at track and field as a runner, I didn’t have to wait for track practice. I could just go run.” He loved the freedom of it “and the possibility of achievement, and the tangible reality that somewhere out there, a scholarship was waiting with my name on it, if I could just make something happen,” he said.
Murphy was finally at the same school with his friend Dower. As can happen with adolescent boys, their friendship grew from teasing. Murphy pulled a hamstring early in high school and Dower kidded him about his limp. Dower also made fun of the way he scuffed his loafers as he walked.
On many weekends, they played the basketball game of 21 one-on-one. “And not one single one of those games was ever played straight or clean,” Murphy said. “We cheated each other all the time.”
They both ran the half-mile, and each took a leg of the mile relay. Murphy concentrated hard on track; Dower spread himself around school. He played the drums in the band.
“I ran much more than Bobby did,” Murphy said. “Bobby didn’t need anything to be the making of him. He was already Bobby Dower. He participated in track and field, but he didn’t need it as badly as I did.”
They came to know Reggie Ware, who entered Lake Charles High the year after the school integrated, and was one of 20-25 black students among a student body of 800. Ware’s father knew the school would offer his son better science classes and a broader curriculum. “I took Latin and those kind of classes you normally don’t find,” Ware said.
The three boys bonded on the track team, which was prestigious at Lake Charles High. Hayes was a renowned coach and the school had success on a statewide level. There was no baseball team yet at Lake Charles High, so track and field was the major spring sport.
Ware said, “I probably weighed 99 pounds and was about 5 feet tall. I tried to play football, but I didn’t grow. Coach Hayes said, ‘Call your parents: You’re going to be late because you’re going out for track.’ And that’s when I met Frank and Bobby.”
Ware ran the mile. “I was a little too slow to run the half-mile,” he said. “(Murphy and Dower) were a little too slow to run the quarter-mile.”
Hayes took his team to run in the sand at the lake when their track was wet. When Interstate 10 was being built through Lake Charles, Hayes dropped his runners off 8-10 miles down the highway so they could run back to school while he was coaching football.
The boys were sophomores in high school when the black and white photograph was taken at a JV meet on a Tuesday. There’s nobody in the background of the photo because Dower and Murphy were that far ahead of the competition. They knew that’s how it would be, just as they knew they’d get whipped three days later at the varsity meet.
“We agreed that we would tie, which we did occasionally — sometimes being ostentatious enough to hold hands,” Murphy said. On this night, Dower broke the pact and, with 15 yards to go, sprinted to the finish line.
“I didn’t have enough time to get back up to him,” Murphy said. “That’s him to a fare-thee-well.
“That photograph is a better representation of our friendship than it is a representation of what happened athletically in that race.”
The Press photographer gave that print to Murphy’s father, who used it to scold his son. “You need to look at this picture,” he told him. “You’re not getting any scholarship if your friend here beat you.”
Said Murphy, “I didn’t really do what my father said. I didn’t pore over that picture and think evil thoughts about Bobby. I did have fun with it.”
Murphy did get a track scholarship, to Tulane. Ware went west to Houston, where he ran long distance for Prairie View A&M. Dower went to McNeese State and pursued journalism, going to work for the paper that shot that photograph.
The three stayed connected, thanks to Dower. He kept up with Murphy’s track career, pulling his Drake Relays results off the Associated Press wire in the American Press newsroom.
“Bobby was a good enough friend to take some satisfaction in that,” Murphy said.
When Ware was back home for visits, he dropped by the newspaper office to visit Dower.
Years went by. Dower became an editor for the American Press. Murphy developed a law practice in Kansas City, coached cross-country for a college team and wrote three books on track. Ware made a career of the Navy, then moved back to Texas and became a high school science teacher.
Lake Charles High merged with W.O. Boston. For years, Murphy resisted Dower’s invitations to return home for Lake Charles High reunions.
“We lost track of Reggie,” Murphy said. “Bobby was always trying to get me to come to a reunion, and I said, ‘I’m not coming until you can produce Reggie,’ because Reggie was really critical to the both of us growing up.
“There came a year where all of a sudden, Bobby called and said, ‘I got him. He’ll be here.’ So I went down to the reunion and we had such a good time together that we decided to create the Do Nothing Weekend.”
Teammates and friends Frank Murphy, from left, Reggie Ware and Bobby Dower reunited at a recent Lake Charles High reunion. Courtesy of Reggie Ware
The three friends and their wives made it an annual weekend, rotating among each other’s homes. They did nothing but eat, drink and reminisce. It was at one of those weekends that Dower produced the color photo of the three.
“That race was Bobby and me in the last spring of boyhood,” Murphy said. “The next year, our junior year, we would see, and in some ways be captive, to our future selves. But on that afternoon, no, we were purely ourselves, a team of two — three when we knew Reggie was waiting to run the mile in that meet. That picture is a representation of pure joy, and that is why Bobby and I both prized it.”
Three years ago, Dower felt pain and went to a local hospital, not believing it to be serious. He didn’t know he had stomach cancer. During his time in the hospital, one of the things he kept by his bed was the photo. Two weeks after being admitted, Dower died at age 62.
Murphy came to the hospital during those two weeks and stayed with him one night.
“I wanted Bobby to be angry; to acknowledge the unfairness of his wonderful life cut short; to feel the loss of his powerful and giving wife; to scream and yell; and, to [quote] Dylan Thomas, to ‘rage against the dying of the light.’ He wouldn’t do it,” Murphy wrote soon after Dower died July 9, 2014.
“He came intermittently out of the oxygen mask. He spoke only of how lucky he was to have the parents he did, to have his siblings, to have enjoyed his friends, to have loved his work and the people with whom he worked. Please, Bobby, [I said], give me something. It wasn’t in him. I am angry for him. My anger, to quote The Dude, abides.”
Murphy moved the photo off his bedside table. “It just made me unhappy to wake up every morning to see Bobby in that photo. I didn’t like to greet every day with the knowledge that Bobby was gone.” He moved it to his office, in a setting with other photographs.
“That photo meant the same thing to him that it meant to me. It meant: Here are two kids who no longer exist, who are having fun. And stayed together an entire life.”
Sonny Marks can be reached at SMarks1111@yahoo.com
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