SWAMPSCOTT, Mass. — “No star fades faster than that of a high-school athlete,” the author John Grisham wrote in his 2006 book “The Innocent Man.” Today’s column is about a high school athlete whose star never faded — and whose star is casting a gentle light over the community he electrified as a football halfback, basketball guard and baseball shortstop for the Swampscott High Big Blue more than a half-century ago.
I suppose that calling Dick Jauron, who later was a Yale gridiron standout and played and coached in the NFL, a high school athlete probably minimizes his achievements.
But for those of us who grew up in this small town north of Boston with the shimmery harbor a commentator prone to exaggeration and with a fanciful imagination once compared to the Bay of Naples, Jauron will always be remembered for his exploits on the green fields and in the perspiration-encrusted gym of our hometown. For that, and for being what Charlie Kimball, the tough son-of-a-buck who shaped a generation of 11th-grade history students, called “one of the two finest students I ever had.”
Now, just a year after his death, Jauron — who played for the NFL’s Detroit Lions and Cincinnati Bengals and was head coach of the Chicago Bears and Buffalo Bills — has added another garland to the memory of perhaps the town’s greatest role model.
That’s because what will endure long after the deaths of those of us who watched him play high school and college ball, and all of us who have dined out on Dickie Jauron stories for more than a half-century, is the $2.2 million posthumous gift he and his wife, Gail, made to Northeast Arc, the local social-services agency for those with disabilities and for children at risk of developing them.
“This is a transformative gift,” said Jo Ann Simons, who heads Northeast Arc. “We’ll use it to expand our recreation and sport programs for people who don’t have access to existing community recreation programs.”
Jauron wasn’t pushed out of football following being fired, in 2009, as the coach of the Bills. He simply left football. He did it to care for Gail, who had early-onset Alzheimer’s, and everyone in town knew that was why he suddenly departed the gridiron game. It’s the irritating but ingratiating fact about a small town like ours that everyone knows everything about everyone, though not always the uplifting things like this one.
Jauron was known for being taciturn in the New England way; it may have been no coincidence that he romped on the fields in the very town where Calvin Coolidge, not known for his garrulousness, spent his 1925 presidential summer at 35 Littles Point Road, down the street from where my Aunt Eileen and Uncle Herman lived in my childhood. Mrs. Jauron was much the same. Even those who noisily advertised that they were in the know — and we know who they are — didn’t know that Gail, who died in December, had a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard.
Mrs. Jauron’s Ph.D. thesis, pointedly, examined how people with intellectual disabilities were treated. Later, she taught people with disabilities basic life skills at local community colleges.
“For 11 years, because of her condition, my mom was stuck in time,” said Kacy Jauron, the former director of special events for Northeast Arc and part of its development team. “Now she comes into clear vision, along with how she found the great opportunities that my dad’s life in football gave her — the platform to be involved in community service.”
From the stores at Vinnin Square to the sands of Phillips Beach, Jauron still is remembered as the quiet fellow whose principal characteristics weren’t his contribution to a football dynasty but instead his modesty and generosity.
For he was the boy who climbed a ladder to help his neighbor Roz Stone paint her house, only to be ordered down to the ground when Coach Stan Bondelevitch saw him as he drove down Bay View Avenue; he worried that his star player might fall. Dick hardly knew me; he graduated from our three-year high school just before I entered it. Yet he called one day after he returned home and moved next door to my mom to say he’d keep an eye on her as she slipped into memory loss. He offered to shovel her walk when it snowed.
That selflessness is part of the legacy that endures here.
“He was a guy from a small town and wanted to do something that contributed to the community,” said his brother, Robert, who played football at Brown. “He and Gail wanted people to live as fully and successfully as possible. And it was very important to Dick that he thought of himself and Gail as a team.”
It also was important to Jauron that he resisted going uptown, leaving his hometown friends behind for the allure of the glamorous athletes he met on celebrity golf outings or in the green rooms of network interview shows.
“His tremendous talents made him a celebrity, but he didn’t let that take over his life,” said Carl Kester, an emeritus Harvard Law School professor who was an offensive guard on their high school team. “He carried that status with dignity and always remembered who he was and where he came from. He lived a meaningful life and, even now that he’s gone, he’s still doing that.”
Randy Werner, who was two years behind Jauron at Swampscott High, watched NFL games with him at Jauron’s home every Sunday until 4:45, when the former coach bolted to have dinner with Gail in a memory-care facility. “Forget sports and a Yale education,” Werner said. “Watching what he did for his wife is the greatest thing I have ever seen.”
He had the same effect on his pro teammates.
“He never experienced with bravado or animosity the tremendous physical contact he was exposed to,” said Reggie Williams, a Bengals teammate for three seasons beginning in 1978. “I always thought of him as a uniquely good person.”
Simons, who was in high school with Jauron, is struck by a great irony.
“The thing about Dick was how quiet he was, how he never looked for attention,” she said. “But because of this, he is getting attention, and of course it is out of looking out for others.” The star still shines
David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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