Editor’s note: This is the Jim Bartko obituary that appeared in The Register-Guard March 19, 2020. Jim Bartko, a former University of Oregon associate athletic director who was instrumental in the school’s rise to prominence as a collegiate sports power and brand, died Monday. He was 54. Bartko collapsed after working out on Sunday at the Oakway Fitness Center. Paramedics transported him to PeaceHealth Sacred Heart...
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Daughter-in-law Deena, here with our son, Jason, and their three boys. When a foul ball flies toward you, a spectator, there’s not much time to prepare. It’s pretty much instincts. Either you try to catch the ball or try to get out of the way, right? But on May 29, the foul ball at Sheldon High that shot into the air like a NASA rocket launch and arced over the estimated 45-foot-high screen and toward me wasn’t so simple. Though the...
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SEIAD VALLEY, Calif. — After seven summers on the Pacific Crest Trail, nothing surprises me anymore. An Israeli couple — trail-named Bugs and Bunny — hiking with speakers atop their backpacks, listening to rock music? Check. Yours truly, deep in the Washington state forest and having not seen a human being all day, ducking into an out-of-nowhere outhouse for the luxury of an actual pit stop – and suddenly being interrupted by a hiker...
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SEIAD VALLEY, Calif. — It is 100 degrees and, along with two dozen hikers roughly a third my age, I am sitting in the parking lot of the only cafe in this town of 300 people. This isn’t how our trip was supposed to end. But a fire near he Oregon-California border has once again curtailed a Pacific Crest Trail hike. And I’m OK with that. Originally, my book about hiking the entire 2,650-mile, Mexico-to-Canada PCT was going to be...
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From the Feb.5, 2017 Register-Guard Nothing puts life into context like death. And so it was that while at Edwin Coleman’s memorial service last Tuesday, I was reminded why, in 1974, the former University of Oregon English professor put such a timely, and significant, piece in my life puzzle. The reason was rooted in a mugging. My own. Like a tagged trout, I had, as a high school sophomore, just been released by my folks into the shallow...
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As a Pacific Crest Trail section hiker, I don’t deserve — nor would I want — to wash the sweat-soaked socks of the “thru hikers” who go 2,650 miles from Mexico to Canada each year. They’re major leaguers; I’m the kid in the Prince Puckler baseball toss at Ems games who misses the entire board with my throw. But having just finished another section — 217 miles from just north of the Columbia River to Snoqualmie Pass east of...
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