Los Gatos Weekly-Times file photograph
Los Gatos High School's football and track venue was built and dedicated to Douglas White Helm shortly after World War II.
'Look for the local angle," news editors shout to their reporters as they hike out the door.
So, without looking and thanks to Barbara, my better half and better letter writer, Winnie Ferris, the former Winnie Helm, writes from Rio Vista that her father's first cousin, Margaret Jenkins, was the first woman from the South Bay to participate in the Olympic Games.
Jenkins was a national champion javelin and baseball thrower in the early 1920s. For her Olympics, she threw the discus. Jenkins died last spring at the age of 92, Mrs. Ferris writes.
Today's photograph shows Helm Field at Los Gatos High School, named for Douglas White Helm, Winnie's father. With its all-weather, eight-lane track, it is qualified to host national and international events.
As for Helm, he faced an Olympian task when he took on the man-killer job of boys' physical education instructor and coach of all boys athletic teams.
At Santa Clara High School, he participated in sports and later graduated from San Jose State University (then San Jose Normal School) and promptly joined the LGHS faculty. Preparing the school's football venue was worthy of a gold medal, given the obstacles it presented and the headaches and backaches it caused.
The space available for a football gridiron was the baseball outfield and a section of New York Avenue. On game days--Friday afternoons--Helm dispatched his gym classes to walk side-by-side the length of the field picking up rocks that sprouted after each use of the field.
Helm was the lone coach for all boys sports ranging from varsity football to varsity and "lightweights" basketball, tennis, baseball and track. His counterpart in girls' physical education was Miss Baird.
The gymnasium was built in 1925, the year Helm arrived, and contained boys' and girls' showers and locker rooms, and there were bleacher seats on both sides of the court. The basketball venue became known as the "cracker box"--so close were the out-of-bounds stripes to the walls. The gym stood at the site of today's girls' gym.
A track venue was formed by chalking an oval around the baseball outfield.
Three out-of-doors tennis courts and a basketball court stood on asphalt at the site of today's industrial arts buildings. A baseball diamond was located in an area behind the gym, where the current swimming-pool complex and main gym stand.
In the mid 1930s, the school district exercised its right of eminent domain to acquire a creekside truck farm. Football, baseball and track moved to that turfed complex, now the site of girls' softball, soccer and field hockey.
Helm broke up his killer day with a cup of coffee and checker game at Louie Vlamis Park Cafe. Helm enlisted honest George Vlamis, who owned the Los Gatos Grill, as the school's baseball umpire. No one from the visiting bench ever accused Vlamis of "hometowning" his umpire duties.
Doug and his wife, Sylvia, raised daughters Winnie Farris and Audrey Mullins of Los Gatos at their Los Gatos Boulevard home.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, August 14, 1996.
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