Extracurricular Athletic Activities

There were other activities generated by being part of the Shell scene in San Francisco. There was a Shell bowling league and I participated in this. It was at an alley called the Broadway Bowl (I suppose it was out on Broadway). After work we would ride the street car out, what day of the week I have no idea now. Whether we’d eat some supper before the bowling I can’t really remember, though it seems dimly that we did.

Part of the cost for the bowling was allocated towards prizes or prize money and I used this on one occasion to purchase a softball glove. This I used in another sport activity — that of the engineering department softball team. I wasn’t a very competent performer but the whole league of Shell teams was pretty low key. Like when I played softball as a child in junior high in Gowrie I was always out in the outfield where my performance was least critical.

The games were typically on Saturday mornings at some school yard in south Berkeley. The engineering department had a pretty good record because it had one very good pitcher — one Merle Gould. As I recall the team captured the title in the SDRA (Shell Development Recreational Association) competition more than once.

My good friend Hugh Guthrie was the catcher for the team, an effective partner in the pitcher/catcher combination. Long after I no longer participated in these softball games (which I seem to recall sort of swindled out of existence), I still had the softball glove I’d purchased with the bowling prize money. I think I finally gave it to one of the Piehl boys — Jean had met their mother Lucille in the Alta Bates hospital when Muriel was being born and Lucille was having their oldest child. We kept up with them for occasional family visits for a long time, I guess until we moved to Houston or they moved to Napa to reside.

Later on, after I was married I used to participate in the Shell league at the Albany bowl. Somewhere along the line I bought some bowling shoes, but I did not go so far as to buy my own bowling ball as some of the Shell leaguers did. After I had totally given up bowling, I guess after we moved to Ashland, Jean was noticing the boxes of unused shoes and they were disposed of. Where they went I don’t recall or perhaps never knew.

Another “sporting” event that I participated in was the weekly football pool in the engineering department. I think it was Dick Olney who chose and handicapped the games (only college games as I recall). Dick had been at Iowa when I was but he was a year ahead of me. He was there as a grad student during my senior year. I had a lot of contact with him during the San Francisco and Emeryville uears as he was the supervisor I worked under.

Dick was a very capable engineer but for some reason he didn’t really “click” with the Shell organization and never moved to a higher position than supervisor. Sometime before the move to Houston he became disenchanted with Shell and the increasingly liberal scene in Berkeley and moved to a conservative section of Orange County. I haven’t heard from him in years. although occasionally I get individual reports from mutual acquaintances who live in southern California and have encountered him. I do know from the obituary list in the AIChE magazine that he died at the age of about 83.

He married one of the secretaries at Shell and they had one child, Norma, who is I believe lawyer. In his later years, Olney was a teacher in one of the colleges on San Diego, but he never worked for a company like Shell after he left them.

My knowledge of football was pretty sketchy but as luck would have it I did win the engineering department football pool once. I think I got $10 or so. To enter the pool one had to contribute 25 cents.