LEGION HALL MAUPIN OREGON PROFESSIONAL

“We had a bucket of beer on ice and George apparently had a clause in his contract that prohibited him from drinking beer during the season.

“We rented a limousine and picked George up on Bainbridge,” says JC Carlson. Jack Sikma, Chip Hanauer, 'Downtown' Freddie Brown, and former Mariner team owner Jeff Smulyan all showed up, as did George Karl, former Sonics coach. Hank Bauer, noted for being involved in of the worst trades in baseball history when in 1959 he was sent by the New York Yankees to Kansas City for Roger Maris, who in 1961 broke Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record with 61, made a guest appearance.

Now the average MLB player makes more than $4 million a year and to reach them one has to go through several hoops, and that is not an easy process.īut there have been some notable Mariner players who have come over on a ferry to speak to the BAR/KAR – broadcaster Rick Rizzs, Aaron Sele, Willie Bloomquist, Harold Reynolds and Bill Krueger and an all-time favorite in the late Dave “Hendu” Henderson, among others.

LEGION HALL MAUPIN OREGON PROFESSIONAL

In the early 1990s, Washington athletic director Barbara Hedges and The Fabulous Sports Babe (Nanci Donnellan), who had a sports show on KJR Radio in Seattle, were also guest speakers.īefore salaries in professional sports soared through the roof it was fairly easy to get a Seattle Mariner player over to Bremerton as a guest speaker. Marlyn Carlson, wife of Jim, was the first woman member and the first and only female president has been Cyn Angelau, and the first female guest speaker was Chris Gobrecht, who at the time was the women’s basketball coach at the University of Washington and is now the head coach at the Air Force Academy. The Board meets the third Monday of each month in the Vault at the Bremerton Bar & Grill and members consist of former Kitsap Sun sports editor Chuck Stark (also softball coach at OC), Danny Haas, Maupin, Jack Edwards, Jodee Strickland, Jim Carlson, Bob Koch, Sam Rucker, Noah Garguile, Brennan Mayfield and Cameron Salley.Īt some point, the organization decided to allow women to join. In the years since Foxy’s closed in about 1990, the monthly meetings have moved around to various establishments in Bremerton, including the Cloverleaf Sports Bar & Grill, American Legion Post 68, Arena Sports Bar and Grille and Kitsap Golf & Country Club, and All Star Lanes in Silverdale. Those years were filled with raucous meetings that had fabulous guests like Lenny Wilkens, Jud Heathcote and Marv Harshman, and usually ended with Chase using an Olympic College red and white helmet to tail-twist fellow attendees to pony up dollars for raffle tickets for donated prizes that was a big help in raising money for area youth. Foxy’s was owned by George and Virginia Payne and they served an excellent buffet of food that included meat donated by Carlson, who owned Minder’s Meats.

In the early years the BAR held monthly meetings at Foxy’s Char Broiler on Lower Wheaton Way in Bremerton. That’s all it took to make phone calls and have numerous informal meetings over coffee to set in motion the meeting at Top of the Town that filled in the blanks and established a board of directors that consisted of Bernie Burke, Ken Chase, John McConnell, Ron Rogerson, Lance Haynes, Red Brown, Lawrence Soriano, Ted Rohwein, Norm Shoop, Dick Bearbower, James Civila, Louie Soriano and Bob Uhlich. This birth started when Don Atkinson, who would become the organization’s first president, mentioned to fellow Bremerton KRBO Radio employee Linc Perry, a fabled and very active booster of Olympic College athletics, that maybe an athletic roundtable like Spokane and Tacoma had could be formed in Bremerton. None of the above could have been anticipated when a group of like-minded sportsmen and businessmen met one day at the now defunct Top of the Town Restaurant above Anderson’s Men’s Store at the corner of Burwell and Pacific in downtown Bremerton in 1967 to fill in the blanks around bylaws that were drawn up by a young local attorney, Lawrence Soriano, and to fill out the board of directors for the new organization. “We made $3,000 or so when Jen Cohen came over.” “We got enough money in the bank again,” says current president Will Maupin.

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