I”d never met Bob Mastin, but I”ve known his son Jim for 30 or so years, and when Jim told me recently that his dad was about to be inducted into the California Coaches Hall of Fame I thought it was time to call the old guy up. I don”t mean “old guy” is a disparaging way, but as an honest description. Bob”s 96. He”s earned his old.
Bob spent most of his college coaching career in the Bay Area and Sonoma County. He moved to Ukiah about eight years ago at Jim”s suggestion, and we agreed it was probably that Jim wanted dad around because he needed someone to mow the lawn. Bob settled on contributing by just doing the laundry once a week, which seems to make everyone happy.
You”d think Bob would be happy, if not for being assigned laundry chores, then at least because he”s in line for a rather lofty honor. In March of 2015 he gets to go to Visalia to become one of the newest members of the California Coaches Hall of Fame. Or maybe not.
“I don”t know how I got voted into this,” he sighed. “They must have run out of other people; I don”t know how I got anointed, how I got selected. They called me up and told me I was voted in. I didn”t even know I”d been nominated. I guess I have to go to Visalia, but oh man, I wish I didn”t,” he sighed. “Some of the guys want me to be there but I”m not looking forward to it. It”s a long drive. Gotta make a lotta stops when you get to be my age, you know?”
His professing to not know how in the world he finds himself on the receiving end of the highest honor a California college coach can be awarded seems a bit disingenuous to anyone making even a casual inspection of Mastin”s career.
Examples abound:
•After graduating from Stanford he got a call from an old teammate about a coaching job with the Santa Rosa Junior College football team. That was in 1947. By 1950, with Bob Mastin as line coach, the Bear Cubs went undefeated, capping the year with a win over Lasalle-Peru of Illinois in the Gold Dust Bowl.
•Also in ”47, Bob was named Santa Rosa”s head basketball coach and guided the Bear Cubs for the next 16 years. In 1953, the team was ranked No. 3 in the nation.
•In 1952, he was head baseball coach, and the team won the state championship.
•Bob became head football coach at SRJC from 1962 through 1964, and his teams were unbeaten in league play and appeared in both the Prune Bowl and Lettuce Bowl.
•Next up, golf. He started the golf program from scratch in the 1950s, and eventually guided Santa Rosa to No. 3 in all of California. He continued coaching golf until he retired in 1979. And, typically, he downplayed his contributions.
“I had to coach golf,” he said. “Nobody else wanted the job. But as it turned out it was the greatest thing I ever did – the kids taught me how to play the game and I got to spend all those years playing on some of the greatest courses anywhere..”
He laid his success on the baseball diamond to a chance partnership with an assistant coach named Dolph Camilli; older fans will remember Camilli as a terrific All Star first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers. And while Camilli no doubt helped the Bear Cubs plenty, it was Mastin who was head coach back then.
Basketball? Mastin”s recollection is that “I was almost a great coach. Almost. I had a kid named Charlie Russell playing for me for two years and he talked his brother into coming to Santa Rosa too. It was all set.
“Except all of a sudden UCSF offered him a full scholarship,” said Bob. “You might know the name? Charlie”s brother, a guy named Bill Russell?” (Every basketball fan in the solar system puts Bill Russell among the dozen best players ever to play in the NBA. That Bill Russell.)
Bob says some Mendocino County players were among his best during those years coaching. On the football teams, he mentioned Ron Vaughan, a quarterback out of Boonville who starred at SRJC for two years, and Ken Uselton, a running back. “Then there was Bob Eller, another running back, who wound up working at the Ukiah Safeway for a long time,” said Mastin.
In baseball, Jim Busch, who later ran a pharmacy in Ukiah for a number of years, was an outstanding outfielder on the 1952 state champ team, said Mastin.
Another outfielder, Larry Weller from Fort Bragg, later managed the Skunk Railroad train. Mike Dunsing, another Fort Bragg player, was on Mastin”s teams in the early 1960s.
This ignores Bob Mastin”s own athletic career, which was good enough to earn him a spot in the Santa Rosa JC Sports Hall of Fame. He was inducted in 1997 on the basis of his football career, which ended with his graduation from the school in 1939. He later became the junior college”s third Athletic Director.
Today, he looks back on his years as a player and quickly acknowledges the game has changed immensely, and that the teams are better. When Mastin played, he was 5-10 and weighed 175 – not bad for a high school player. Except that was his size and weight when he played as a tight end in college.
“Yeah they”re bigger today than when we played back then,” he says. “And they work a lot harder at sports than we did.”
And aside from the games, honors and awards, Bob has spent a career in sports having fun, working hard and collecting memories. He recalls playing basketball against Jackie Robinson on a barnstorming tour through LA in the 1940s, and later going up against Robinson on the football field. “The guy was great,” Bob said. “He could do anything.”
Mastin recalls he played basketball in the old (still standing, but now as retail space) gymnasium in Hopland. The ceiling in the gym was built to the height of the tops of the backboards, he said, which meant shots were basically flung up as line drives, and that the ceiling was covered with scuff marks.
Bob laughs thinking about the games he played there in the 1930s with the Santa Rosa Furniture Company in the old AAU league. All this Hopland talk helps Bob recall the numerous times he and his buddies, including fellow football coach Herman Meister, would pull over in Hopland to pick up enough beer to hold them through their annual fishing trips on the river between the Eel and Mattole.
He sometimes wonders if he now associates those beer stops in Hopland many decades ago with his affinity today for Red Tail Ale, a bit more modern brew but with a distinctive Hopland strand of DNA to it. “I like Red Tail,” he said. “It”s got some bite to it.”
The sports merriment had to end eventually, and when Bob retired in l979 he and wife Jessie took to traveling around the country in their RV, at least until they hit Gold Beach, in Oregon.
“Jessie said ”This is the place,” and so that was where we wound up living,” he said. Bob also pointed out that Jessie (now deceased) was well worth her own story: Born in Brooklyn and raised in Shanghai, Jessie worked for the U.S. State Department during World War II until she was captured by the Japanese in the Philippine Islands. She was held as a prisoner of war until later being freed and sent to the European Theater.
It was during his retirement years he began painting. “It wasn”t that I was any good, because I wasn”t,” he laughs. “I never sold anything, that”s for sure. If someone ever told me they liked something I”d painted I”d tell them ”Here, take it – it”s yours”.” He says he encourages anyone who retires or is getting up in years to be sure to take up a hobby.
When the inevitable questions about aging get asked Bob has some answers. “You want to live a long life? Then my advice is to find yourself a family with a good history of longevity to get born into.” His own siblings were older than he is when they passed way.
“And at this point it all doesn”t matter much to me, being alive or dead,” he said. “It”s not like I look forward to dying but it”s also not like I”d resent it at all.”
I”m not going to argue with him. Maybe Bob”s got the right attitude. He”s the one with all the honors and awards, after all, and come next March he”ll pick up another big one.
