Steve Lundeberg

When I was a student at Rex Putnam High School, I wasn’t what you’d call a juvenile delinquent, but I didn’t exactly suffer from overdeveloped morals and ethics either, particularly when it came to respecting that school-purchased athletic apparel didn’t belong to me.

I made something of a habit of just sort of hanging onto things like practice clothes and team windbreakers. Sometimes I eventually returned them, other times not, which is why I still have a 1971 RPHS baseball jersey (which, in fairness to myself, only had a zipper that worked because my mom sewed in a replacement; she was the one who made the shirt usable, so I just kept it).

Right or wrong, I’ve never felt bad about owning that jersey — but something else I came into possession of at about the same time ended up haunting me for years.

Here’s the story:

Putnam’s school colors were green and yellow, as were the colors of one of our big rivals, West Linn, directly across the Willamette River from us.

One day in the fall of 1980, a laundry company accidentally delivered to Putnam a load of West Linn football jerseys, probably confused by the similar colors. The jerseys were in a few bags inside the PE teachers’ office within the locker room, and would stay there until getting re-delivered to West Linn, probably the next day.

Well, one of my buddies, being the son of a teacher and coach, had access to keys that would get us into the office where those jerseys were being stored. So that night, he and I returned to school and helped ourselves to a handful of them.

Why I thought this was a good idea, I honestly couldn’t tell you now. I’m guessing it was some combination of:

1) The jerseys were pretty cool.

2) By taking a few of them we could screw over one of our rivals.

3) The adventure of it all.

If memory serves, I grabbed three jerseys, two of which I gave to friends. The third I kept for myself.

I wore that shirt quite a bit over the next years, including for intramural games at Oregon State, but as I made a personal transition from a self-centered adolescent to a young adult with a much clearer idea of right and wrong, what I had done really began to bother me.

But what could I do about it?

Finally, I settled on an idea. Sometime not long after I went to work in the DH sports department in 1990, I pulled out the Oregon Coaches Directory and got a number for West Linn High and the name of  the athletic director; I forget the guy’s name, but it was not someone I knew.

I called up the school, requested the AD, told him what I had done and asked what he thought would be fair restitution.

To put it mildly, he sounded stunned by what he was hearing. But he thanked me for calling and suggested a check for $50 would put the matter right and allow me to forget the whole thing.

So I sent him a check for $50. And of course I haven’t forgotten the whole thing.

As for the jersey, my son Bob wore it in practice when he was a Boys & Girls Club football player. One of his coaches was convinced the green and yellow shirt was from Sweet Home High, but Bob knew it was actually from West Linn and always told his coach so.

What Bob never knew was how his RPHS graduate father happened to have a West Linn jersey. Well, if he reads this blog post, I guess he’ll find out. Nobody’s perfect, especially when you’re a teenager.

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