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The Indiana Daily Student

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Don Lash remembered as more than an Olympian

When Don Lash was a kid, he liked to chase rabbits.

As a young boy on his grandfather’s farm, he spent his harvest season afternoons chasing baby rabbits. Lash scooped up the rabbits one by one until he couldn’t hold any more, let them free and returned to the chase.

He never stopped running. By 1936, Lash was considered the best long-distance runner in the nation.

At the Princeton Invitational in June 1936, the 23-year-old IU student had set the world record for the fastest two-mile run, finishing in eight minutes and 58 seconds. For the previous two years, he had been the Amateur Athletic Union’s cross-country champion. He would hold the title until 1940.

He couldn’t be stopped.

But in the middle of the 1936 Olympic qualifying race, Lash stopped running.

In that particular race, he was competing against Louis Zamperini, who would later be the subject of Laura Hillenbrand’s best-selling novel and subsequent film “Unbroken.”

Lash was a shoo-in, certain to win the 5,000-meter race that would send him to the Berlin Games. He was Don Lash. So why would he stop running in the middle of the race?

Somewhere along the way, Lash had noticed his IU teammate, 20-year-old Tom Deckard, had fallen behind. So Lash stopped.

He didn’t just slow pace — he stopped running.

He waited to meet Deckard. If he was going to the Olympics, he was going to take his teammate with him. The top three runners would go to the races. Lash and Deckard were going to go wide-open to the finish.

“Tommy, you stay with me,” he said. “We’re going all the way to the top! You stay with me, Tommy!”

Sitting in his nearly 200-year-old Rockville, Ind., home, David, Lash’s youngest son, remembers hearing the story of the race that would send his father to Germany in the years before Hitler seized total control.

“My dad was just trying to get a teammate to do really good,” David Lash said. “They ran so hard that Dad caught up with Zamperini.”

They didn’t just catch up with Zamperini — Don Lash beat him. But it was close.

The announcer called Zamperini the winner, but the judges saw Lash’s foot come down on the finish line while Zamperini was completing his stride.

The judges were right.

Lash took first place, Zamperini was second and Deckard came in third.

Though Deckard later claimed Lash never helped him, Lash’s actions during the race were cited as contributing to his Sullivan Award, an award presented by the AAU to an outstanding young athlete, ?David said.

Lash’s athletic achievements were just the beginning of an adventurous life.

“My dad was more than a runner,” David said.

Don Lash finished his undergraduate degree in physical education in 1938. He received a master’s degree from the University in 1940. He served as an officer with the Indiana State Police before beginning a 20-year career as an FBI agent in 1941.

After retiring from the FBI, Lash was the regional director for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, owner of a real estate company, a 10-year member of the Indiana House of Representatives and an IU trustee for two years in the early 1970s.

For David and his siblings, older brother Russell and younger sister Marguerite, Don Lash was much more than an Olympic athlete.

He was a father.

***

David Lash didn’t look up to his father because of his athletic accomplishments or his time in the FBI. He admired his father because of the time they spent with one another.

Spend five minutes with David, and you will have already heard two anecdotes about what it was like to grow up with Don Lash as your father.

Sentences like, ‘My dad was a crack shot,’ and ‘My dad was very good at that kind of thing’ are uttered along with each tale, a smile on David’s face.

“I know it sounds like I am trying to brag about my dad,” David said. “But I grew up with this kind of thing, and I thought it was just normal for everybody to have a dad that could run and could shoot.”

Take, for instance, the time David spotted some geese out on the pond near their camp and ran back to the house to get his father. Don told him to go get his ?shotgun.

How many geese did he think were out there? Get as many shells as you think it will take to get them, Don said.

Don set up shop at the dry bottom part of the pond and told young David to hide out behind the top of the dam. David was to barely stick his head up over, and when he did that, the geese would do something. If David were to stand up, he would scare them away.

So David stuck his head up, just a little, and one bird flew up in the air and hovered. At that moment, Don Lash fired and the bird landed directly in front of David Lash’s feet.

Don knew exactly what the bird would do and when the bird would do it, David said.

“When he got through, all 12 birds were piled at my feet,” David said.

He’d only taken 12 shots.

***

David likes to say he took part in Don’s final race.

One day, Don said to him, “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll race you back to the cabin.”

David got the car while all Don had were his award-winning legs for running.

Don took off right through the briars and David began driving. David held it to the floorboard in first gear, shifted into second and came up around the corner so fast that his car raised up on two wheels.

Don was still in front of him, legs churning.

“All of a sudden someone — my mother — had put a bicycle out in the middle of the road,” David said with a smirk.

He had to stop the car, get out, move the bicycle and get back in to finish the drive. By then, Don had already won.

He was never able to beat his father in a race, David said. But despite all of his charm and achievements, Don wasn’t perfect.

David saw some of his father’s flaws as he grew up. He noticed his father’s competitiveness could result in recklessness.

He saw his father’s temper when Don Lash threatened to put a man in an FBI hold after a dispute while he and the kids were gigging frogs on the man’s property.

“I could see the human side of him,” David said.

Those moments of temper were rare, David said, as Don made sure all of the boys grew up right. He would bring them down to their camp, where they farmed Christmas trees, and teach them how to cut down and plant trees, how to build roads and drive in nails.

David said this was all to keep them out of trouble. They never smoked, drank or got into drugs.

“He made mistakes in life,” David said. “He wasn’t perfect. He was the kind of father you want to grow up with.”

Their mother, Margaret, was the disciplinarian of the family.

One time, she had the kids dressed up for church, and Don Lash took them by an ice cream truck.

The ice cream ran down their clean Sunday clothes on the way.

“Mother would hit the ceiling,” David said.

These types of memories were commonplace with Don Lash as a father.

“He was always winning your heart,” David said. “He wasn’t trying to win your heart, but he always knew the right thing to say or the right thing to do.”

There was one possession of his father’s that David wanted to be passed down to him. It wasn’t his medals, it wasn’t his awards.

He pulled a brown belt out of his belt loop on his pants.

The buckle was his ?father’s, but the belt itself was inscribed with the name passed down from father to son: Lash.

***

Decades in the newspaper business left Bob Hammel with a wealth of knowledge about IU athletics.

He spent 30 years as a sports reporter and editor at the Bloomington Herald-Times, where he covered the University’s athletics ?programs.

He didn’t know Don Lash personally, he said, but he certainly knew of him.

“Lash was by far the best,” Hammel said. “He was the unquestioned leader at IU and in America.”

Lash’s 5-foot-10 frame allowed for long strides, setting him apart from other athletes early in his career, ?Hammel said.

“I think he was a pretty consistent success story from high school through college and on beyond for a number of years up to World War II,” he said. “I think you would have to call him the best American distance runner of the ’30s.”

Lash wasn’t alone in his success. Under Coach Earl C. “Billy” Hayes, the IU track team was nationally recognized, winning three NCAA team titles, the national collegiate outdoor team title and eight conference titles, according to USA Track & Field.

From 1928 until Hayes retired in 1943, the IU team never placed lower than ?second.

Hayes’ team was the best in the bunch, Hammel said. Part of the team’s success can be attributed to Lash’s performance.

“He was basically the start of a very, very strong track and field tradition at IU,” Hammel said. “There were Olympians in 1904, but Don Lash was one of the first, if not the first, to be nationally and internationally recognized as a great runner while at IU.”

David and his siblings were only vaguely aware of their father’s success until they were older.

David, now 73, said he had no idea his father didn’t place at the Olympics until he was 43 years old. He had always seen the bronze medal emblazoned with “Berlin 1936 Olympics,” but he didn’t know it was nothing more than a token of participation.

After gaining 10 pounds on the journey to Europe, Don placed eighth in the men’s 10,000-meter race and thirteenth in the 5,000-meter race.

What was supposed to be the highlight of his career was a bust. He told a Sports Illustrated reporter in 1988 that he thought he would return to compete in the Tokyo Games in 1940, but the event was canceled because of the war.

David said his father was never disappointed about not placing well at the Olympics during his otherwise successful career.

“He didn’t express any disappointment,” David said. “I think the way he said it was: ‘I got to go. I got to go to the Olympics. Whether I won or not was not important. I got to go.’”

Despite everything Don Lash had achieved, athletic or otherwise, he was so much more to his children.

“My father was my hero,” David said. “He wasn’t just my dad. He was my hero.”

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