Inside A Rare 56-Year-Old Photo, A Time Capsule

That Stirs Memories And Remains A Source Of Pride

A DyeStat story by Dave Devine

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It begins the way these things usually do — you’re looking for something else.

Researching a different story entirely, a track and field article that has nothing to do with Steven Roland Prefontaine. You’re poking around on a running website, following a lead, tracking down a contact, and then you click a link. And then another. Going down a minor rabbit hole. And you suddenly find yourself staring at a photograph of Prefontaine that you’ve never seen before.

You figured, after all these years, that you’ve seen most of the Prefontaine photos out there. Everything from the iconic to the mundane. Professional images at international competitions and blurry snapshots from high school dual meets. Candid photos capturing Prefontaine’s disarming, sidelong grin and gritty action shots on ovals around the world. Mustached and clean-shaven. Coos Bay to Eugene. Marshfield High to Munich and beyond. 

The one of a young Pre, wearing Marshfield’s PIRATE 2000 MILE CLUB shirt, on a jog through his hometown? Seen it.

The Sports Illustrated cover of Prefontaine as a 19-year old Oregon freshman running in the hills above the McKenzie River? 

It’s in a box in your closet.

The post-race photo of Steve brazenly wearing a STOP PRE shirt? Given. 

The Nike poster of Prefontaine glancing over his shoulder at an otherwise empty Hayward Field homestretch, his last race ever in Eugene? The one with the Pre Lives caption?

It hung on your apartment wall for years.

But this — this is a Prefontaine photograph you’ve never seen before.

The pose is vintage Pre: seemingly spent in the final meters, head thrown back, eyes closed, mid-stride. Still a high schooler, he’s callow and lean, not yet the barrel-chested dynamo he’d become in college. And he’s about to charge through a finish line string that’s being held by a young boy.

It’s the boy that catches your attention.

He might be 9 or 10 years old, towheaded and buzz-cut. Sneakers perched precariously on the chipped curb that edges the cinder track. Trousers buckled over a long-sleeved football jersey — number 29. He’s angled slightly away from Prefontaine, keen to avoid the close velocity at the finish line. And huddled all around him, serious men in sports coats and narrow ties. Crew cuts and horn-rimmed glasses. Stopwatches and notepads.

It could be a Norman Rockwell painting.

Somehow fleeting and timeless, all at once.

But you can’t help thinking about that boy. Who was he? How did he end up holding the string? There would be no way to know his name, except that it’s written on the photograph. Right above Pre’s signature. Even as a high schooler, Prefontaine was already signing autographs for the Coos Bay kids who swarmed him after races, but this was different. 

This is a tender note from a teenager to a child who clearly admired him. Steve’s adolescent penmanship faded, but still legible:

Rocky, Thanks for holding my string. maybe someday i'll be holding the string for you. Your Friend always, Steve Prefontaine

It sticks with you, this photo of Pre and the boy. The simple, affectionate note. You can’t quite shake it.

A few months pass. A year.

You move on to other stories, subjects more contemporary and pressing. No time for that old, yellowed photograph. What would you do with it anyway? Where’s the story? But every few months you pick up the thread again. Follow the string, barely thicker than floss. And it keeps leading back to the towheaded kid alongside the track. 

Wondering what became of Rocky.

What happened to the boy with the string?

* * *

The voice on the other end of the phone hesitates, slightly guarded. There’s an audible shift. A television playing in the background.

"Now, tell me again how you were able to find me?"

You go back through the numerous internet searches, the website caption that contained his last name, the limited number of “Rocky Johnsons” in the state of Oregon. Inquiring again whether he might possibly be the one that grew up in Coos Bay in the 1960s.

“That’s right,” he says, still wary. 

And then you mention the photograph…Steve Prefontaine…the little boy…wondering if there’s any chance he remembers that picture.

“Remember it?” he says. “I’m looking at it right now. It’s on the wall in my house.”

John “Rocky” Johnson is 67 years old these days, a retired doctor in Salem, Oregon.

He’s never been far from that photograph of Steve Prefontaine crossing the finish line. It’s hung in every place he’s ever lived.

Rocky’s father, also named John, was a three-sport star — football, basketball, track and field — at Marshfield High from 1951 to 1955. On the track, John placed fourth at the Oregon state meet as a junior in both the 100- and 220-yard dash. An injury his senior spring prevented him from competing at that state meet. He married his high school sweetheart, Rosalie, in 1957, and returned to Marshfield with his University of Oregon degree to begin a career as a math teacher and coach for the same three sports in which he’d competed.

Rocky, the oldest of four energetic boys, spent much of his childhood hanging around the fields, courts and ovals where his dad was coaching. He’d help out in some places, get into trouble in others, eventually making heroes of the high school boys his father mentored.

The name Rocky, that came from a baseball player his dad coached in summer ball — the elder Johnson looking for an easy way to distinguish father from son. No one expected it would last six decades.

"Even now,” Rocky says, “if anyone calls me John I know it's someone who doesn't really know me."

Coos Bay was a "good place to grow up,” he says, “a great place to be a child in those days." Raised in a community of longshoremen and timber fallers, commercial fishermen and ranchers, his closest role models were math teachers and high school coaches. Some of his earliest memories are of piling into the family station wagon — Coach, Rosalie, and the boys: Rocky, Marty, Lane and Andy — for short drives to Marshfield’s rival high school, North Bend, and two-hour drives north to the schools in Eugene.

Lots of late nights in chilly football stadiums. Crowded basketball gymnasiums.

Busy cinder ovals.

During track season, Rocky’s dad primarily coached the sprints and jumps under legendary head coach Walt McClure, but Rocky came to know — and be known by — all the kids on the team. Including the team’s standout distance runner, Steve Prefontaine.

"Everybody knew Pre," Rocky says.

He remembers seeing the star runner at practice, watching in awe during his races. He absorbed the esteem his dad had for Pre in those days, recalls the high schooler as kind and polite, charismatic and slightly mischievous. Pre smiled a lot, Rocky says, and had a soft spot for the little blonde kid with the crewcut. He put up with Rocky’s questions, tolerated his stories. Let the coach’s son lope along at his heels.

Rocky doesn’t remember how he came to be holding that string the day the photograph was taken, just that he was always around the infield at meets. Eventually, he’d be given a job.

Here, Rocky, carry the starting blocks. Help move some hurdles. Mark the finish line.

"Someone hands you a string and you hold it,” he says. “It was fun, but sometimes there were a lot of races..."

He’s still not sure why Pre scribbled the note on corner of that photo, but says it seems like something Steve would’ve done. And then he remembers another thing he wants to tell you.

“That guy up on top, with the stopwatch? That’s Chuck Crandall, my dad’s best friend from the Marshfield math department.”

 * * *

Chuck Crandall…you start wondering. Is there any possibility?

Any chance he might still—

The photograph was taken more than 56 years ago. The man with the stopwatch appears to be at least 30 years old in the photo. Maybe 35. Which would make him…

A quick internet search finds a “Charles Crandall” living in Coos Bay, Oregon.

On the fifth ring, a man with a thin, raspy voice answers the phone.

You assure him you’re neither a telemarketer nor a bill collector, and then charge through a rushed account of the photograph…the story you’re working on…Prefontaine…the kid with the string. 

Like Rocky Johnson, the man answering phone wonders how you found him.

When you explain there was a caption on the website where you first discovered the photo, and then Rocky mentioned his name, and then the internet turned up a phone number in Coos Bay, there’s a long pause on the other end.

“Well, I’ll be darned,” Chuck Crandall says. “You’re lucky I didn’t hang up on you. I get a million phone calls to donate money and all kinds of stuff. So, if I don't recognize the number, I don’t answer it.”

You thank him again for not hanging up, then revisit the photograph. Any chance he remembers it, all these years later?  

“Oh, I’ve got it hanging on the wall,” he says, “right here in my house.”

It’s in the short hallway between the kitchen and the living room, Crandall says. Rocky’s mom, Rosalie, gave him a copy years ago. He had it blown up and “redone,” as he puts it, improving the resolution and contrast. It’s a photograph he walks past every day, usually more than once. Not as quickly as he used to, he clarifies; he uses a cane now, struggles with a bad back. 

He’ll be 89 in a few weeks.

“But I show that photograph to everybody who comes by for a visit,” he says, chuckling. “Some I might show them two or three times, because I didn't realize they’d seen it already.”

Crandall now lives alone in the Coos Bay house he purchased in 1966. His wife, Maralyn, passed away nine years ago. They first met at Marshfield High in the mid-1950’s, when Maralyn asked Chuck to the annual Sadie Hawkins dance. The couple used to double date with John Johnson and his eventual wife, Rosalie— all four were Marshfield students at the time.

“And that,” Crandall says, “is how long I’ve known the Johnsons.”

Chuck and John were track teammates under Coach McClure, although unlike his speedier friend, Crandall was a middle-distance runner. A decade before Prefontaine pushed the school records into the stratosphere, Crandall held the Marshfield all-time marks in the mile and the half-mile.

In 1954 he ran 2:01.8 for 880 yards — a detail he rattles off lightly — and won the district title. He then went on to place fifth at the Oregon state meet, “losing to a fella you might’ve heard of,” he says: 1960 Olympian Jim Grelle.

After college, Crandall taught high school in Washington for a few years before returning to Coos Bay with Maralyn and their daughter in 1966. There, he joined his old friend John Johnson on the Marshfield math faculty and began a series of assistant and junior varsity coaching positions that spanned most of the sports the school offered.

“I was going to coach Prefontaine,” he says, “but it didn't work out. They hired somebody else for that assistant position, so I ended up helping out with baseball.”

Crandall doesn’t remember how he ended up holding the stopwatch in the photograph on his wall — he never did end up coaching track — but figures Johnson, as a track assistant, asked for help officiating the Marshfield home meets and Crandall’s background running distance made him a good candidate for manning the watch. 

He never taught Steve in a math class, Crandall says, but he has an indelible memory of Prefontaine the person.

“Whenever I happened to be around him or see him in the halls, and I’d introduce him to people, he was always so polite. People loved talking to Pre.”

And what about watching his races?

“Oh yeah, of course. That was something.”

The former teacher’s memories of Rocky, his best friend’s son, are even clearer. 

“Oh, I remember lots about Rocky,” he says. “I liked to fish, and I had a little 18-foot outboard that I fished in the summertime. I would take Rocky and he'd steer the boat for me. So yeah, I was close to him — great kid.”

* * *

Rocky Johnson went from holding the string at high school track meets to breaking a few of his own.

Like his father, he was a three-sport athlete at Marshfield — football, basketball and track — with baseball in the summer. As a senior quarterback, Rocky led the Pirates to a 7-2 record, just missing the state playoffs. In the spring, again like his dad, he took to the sprints and relays. But by the time Rocky reached high school in the fall of 1972, Pre’s reputation extended far beyond the Marshfield oval where his career began. 

As the school year opened, Oregon’s distance star was competing in the 5,000-meter final at the Munich Olympic Games.

Rocky doesn’t recall how he watched the race, but he’s guessing the Johnsons would have gathered around the television to catch the broadcast when it aired. And even though Johnson can’t place the specific details, he clearly remembers the outcome and the pride his family took in it. The way Prefontaine, still only 21 at the time, gamely charged for the lead in the final lap before battling home in fourth.  

“We all thought he was going to win,” Johnson says. “It was the Pre we remembered watching in high school. He came so close, and it was devastating that he just missed out on the medal."

Prefontaine, who went undefeated in cross country and track his final two years at Marshfield, never lost a race longer than a mile during his career at the University of Oregon. He was the first college runner to win four national titles in one event, claiming the 3-mile from 1970 to 1973. By May of 1975 — Rocky’s junior track season at Marshfield — Pre had set 14 American records, holding every U.S. mark from 2,000 to 10,000 meters. 

The last of these records came, fittingly enough, on the track at Marshfield High.

On May 9, 1975, Prefontaine staged a meet at his alma mater as part of a five-stop Finland Tour he’d organized to showcase top runners from that Nordic nation. He was determined to bring one of the meets to his hometown as a gift to “Pre’s People”— the local fans who supported him throughout his career. 

It was the first time he’d run in Coos Bay since 1971.

"We all went out for it, of course,” Johnson recalls. “The field was just filled with people, kids lined up and cheering along the sides of the track.”

Pre electrified the crowd of 2,500 as he chased the American record in the rarely-run 2,000-meter event, eventually crossing the line in 5:01.4 — his final all-time mark.

According to Eugene’s Register Guard, he lingered more than 30 minutes after the meet ended to sign autographs for a throng of children who had tagged along on his victory lap. 

“It was incredible seeing him on that track again,” Johnson says.

Three weeks later, in the first hour of May 30, after the final meet of the Finland Tour at Eugene’s Hayward Field, Prefontaine died in a car accident in the hills above the university campus.

His death sent shockwaves through the world of track and field and the news hit his hometown especially hard.

"Everyone was just so sad,” Johnson recalls. “He was so young, and I think most people felt like he was just starting to reach his potential. We all thought about how much was lost."

Crandall, the math teacher, first saw the news on the front page of that afternoon's Register-Guard. Under a piercing portrait of Prefontaine’s face ran the terse headline: 

Pre's death 'the end of an era'

“Just sadness,” Crandall says now. “And wishing that it hadn’t happened, of course.”

A few days later, on Monday, June 2, Prefontaine was buried in his Olympic uniform at a Coos Bay cemetery after an outdoor service at Marshfield High’s stadium. The same track on which he’d raced so often in his short life. 

“That’s where it all began,” Pre’s father, Ray, told a local reporter, “and that’s where it ends.”

* * *

Thanks for holding my string, Steve Prefontaine wrote.

Maybe someday i'll be holding the string for you.

Pre, of course, never had the chance to hold the string for his young friend. 

But in many ways, Rocky Johnson still holds the string for Prefontaine.

He tells Pre’s story, shares his legacy, passes on the memories, preserves that photo on the wall of his home.

After high school, Rocky matriculated to the University of Oregon. Unlike his three younger brothers, who followed their dad into coaching, Rocky attended medical school after college and embarked on a 30-year career as an anesthesiologist. He’s now retired, living in Salem with his wife, Beth.

He looks at that photo sometimes, and can’t believe how much time has passed.

Fifty-six years, but the figures in the photograph remain forever young. 

Steven Roland Prefontaine, eternally stilled midstride, neither foot connected to the ground. Suspended, lighter than air. And a gossamer strand that connects him — even now — to a towheaded boy at the finish line of a high school race. Two young lives, each gilded with potential. Everything still possible in that moment.

Pre still very much alive. Still connected to Rocky.

The string between them like a charged wire, conveying the electric energy of a teenager on the verge of big things. A star runner who befriended a little boy. The words Rocky Johnson holds onto, even now. 

Tightly, like the string all those years ago.

Your friend.

Always.

Steve Prefontaine.

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