Obituary of Fred Lester, 1923-2010
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Coach who recreated himself FREDDY LESTER ATHLETICS COACH, ACTIVIST 21-1-1923 - 15-6-2010 By JANEY STONE Published in The Age, 19 Aug 2010. 'LIFE isn't about finding yourself,'' George Bernard Shaw said. ''Life is about creating yourself." Which sums up the life of Freddy Lester, who has died of prostate cancer at a nursing home in East Hawthorn, aged 87. Lester arrived in Australia with nothing in May 1939 as part of a group of 20 German-Jewish refugees. The life he created in his new country was not only rewarding and fulfilling, but touched a wide variety of people through his activities and involvement in the community. Born Fritz Lustig in Breslau, German Silesia (now Wroclaw in Poland), his mother Grete managed to send him to London in 1939 to escape the Nazi anti-Jewish pogrom, while escaping herself to Shanghai, China, where she spent World War II. The 20 boys arrived in Australia on a program for study and farm work, but like other refugees he was classified as an ''enemy alien'' and had to report weekly to the police. He attended Wangaratta Technical School, worked on farms in the region and then joined the army. After the war, he trained as a craft jeweller and was able to bring his mother to Australia. Somewhere along the way he Anglicised his name to Frederick Lester. Stewart Harris, in Political Football, his book about the Springbok Tour of Australia in 1971, comments: "… not enough credit had been given to people like Fred Lester, an unassuming middle-aged man in Melbourne, who is secretary of the Marathon athletics club. Lester brought a lot of sportsmen into the movement." This points to Lester's twin passions - politics and athletics. An active, long-serving communist, having joined the Communist Party of Australia in about 1943, he was particularly passionate about East Germany. Lester saw no need to keep politics and athletics apart. He wrote an athletics column for The Guardian, the CPA newspaper, and was a sports leader for its youth group. At camps, he would sing German songs such as one about Florian Geyer, the mediaeval German rebel. A lively and popular comrade, Lester was a member of the Kew branch until the party's dissolution in 1991, and he remained involved with a network of comrades and continued to speak his mind on political issues of the day. He worked at the CPA's International Bookshop from 1961 to 1977, initially selling Soviet technical textbooks and later social and political non-fiction to secondary schools. A range of progressive teenage fiction became his specialty, and his knowledge and enthusiasm for the books he sold was much appreciated by librarians. 1 Lester was an innovator in athletics during an almost-unbroken stint as secretary of the Victorian Marathon Club (VMC) between 1961 and 1994. In 1961, he had the foresight to organise the annual Zatopek 10,000 metres race, named after Emil Zatopek, three-time Czech Olympic gold medallist, with whom he had a long friendship. The Zatopek race celebrates its 50th running this year, 47 years after Ron Clarke ran a world record in the 1963 race. He developed a range of other well-measured distance runs, the forerunners of many popular fun runs to come later. Lester encouraged athletes - male and female - to keep their legs warm while training in winter, by wearing pantyhose in an era before the availability of skin-tight leggings. A story is told that one young private schoolboy followed this advice until a teacher discovered the pantyhose and, assuming nefarious activities, confiscated them. In 1978, Lester was appointed course director of the first Melbourne Marathon; it will be run for the 33rd time this year. He was an inspirational coach and mentor to athletes. Inspired by Wally Sheppard, Alf O'Connor, and running friends, Les Perry and Dave Stephens, Lester organised VMC runs in the 1960s to give young, talented athletes such as Clarke, Trevor Vincent, Neil Ryan and Jim Crawford the opportunities to compete locally. At the Kew-Camberwell Athletics Club, Lester coached runners of all standards. At races and training, he was conspicuous with his army slouch hat, covered in badges, shouting directions to participants. "All right you prima donnas, listen up" became his well-known catch-cry as he issued instructions. He would end with "tell the finish recorders your first name, surname, age and whether you are male or female, in case they cannot tell". The Fred Lester Scholarship Fund honours his service to distance running and provides financial support annually to two young runners under 25 years of age. He travelled frequently with his partner of 35 years, Rose Stone, including a visit to Prague to stay with Emil Zatopek and his wife, Dana. Lester suffered dementia and spent the last four years of his life at Auburn House in East Hawthorn, where he also created friends among the staff and other residents. Lester is survived by Rose, his stepson Norm, and his family. Vin Martin, Len Johnson and Carmel Shute helped to prepare this tribute. 2 Freddy: A Column By Len Johnson Published at http://www.runnerstribe.com, June 19, 2010. “All right you prima donnas, listen up.” With these words, or something like them, Fred Lester, who died this week aged 87, summoned runners up to the starting line for countless races. He would follow with the race instructions, usually including the advice to “tell the finish recorders your first name, surname, age and whether you are male or female, in case they cannot tell.” For almost 30 years, Fred was the face of the Victorian Marathon Club, the club started by Percy Cerutty, Les Perry and others to foster distance running in Victoria, nominally, but across Australia by example. Many of the things succeeding generations of runners take for granted _ including basics such as starting races in evening cool rather than blazing midday heat, accurate courses, participation for women in distance races _ were fought for and attained by the VMC. Fred Lester was born in Germany in 1923 and arrived in Australia as a refugee in 1939. He joined the Australian Army and fought in WW II, which was probably as good a grounding as anything for the many battles he fought for distance running. He was secretary of the VMC for an almost unbroken 30 years from 1961 to 1972 and then 1975 to the club’s winding up in 1990. He was secretary, when the club decided to stage an annual 10,000 metres track race named for Emil Zatopek, and when Ron Clarke graced the third edition of the race in 1963 with world records for six miles and 10,000 metres. Fred was a runner himself, a marathoner with a best time of two hours 34 minutes 20 seconds at a time when sub-2:40 was not fashionable. In researching The Landy Era, I came across the tale of how he was the training partner and mate of Dave Stephens who encouraged Dave to have a crack at Emil Zatopek’s world record for six miles at Olympic Park in Melbourne on 25 January, 1956. Stephens broke the record, despite cold and windy conditions, and told The Age’s Bruce Welch how Fred had written him out a schedule for 28 minutes. Lester must have been a good judge of form _ Stephen’s ran 27:54.0 to take four seconds off the record and there’s little doubt he would have got the record for 10,000 metres had he gone the extra 376 yards. Hundreds more runners came to appreciate such attention to detail. As a European by birth, Fred probably had an appreciation of opera. The phrase prima donna (Italian for first, or leading lady), has mostly come to be used in its subsidiary sense, that of an egotistical, capricious and demanding person, rather than its original sense of the leading female singer _ ‘the star’, in other words. For Fred and the VMC, the runner was the star _ not just the world record breaker like Dave Stephens or Ron Clarke, but every runner. The practical application of this attitude was that he treated every runner absolutely equally. 3 Rules were never bent for top runners under Fred’s watch, not when he ran every element of the club himself, nor when he delegated some of the work to others later in the piece (though a few ‘swifties’ may have been pulled behind his back then). If you were one second outside the qualifying time _ as Malcolm Norwood was for the Zatopek 10,000 one year _ you didn’t get a run. Fred once kept 1980 Olympian Steve Austin out of the Zatopek because his entry was a late; Derek Clayton got similar treatment. On another occasion, Chris Wardlaw drove to Fred’s home around midnight to slide a race entry under the door lest he, too, hear the uncompromising words _ “too late.” Then there were the rosters. All members had to take their turn at officiating. And the working bees around Fred’s kitchen table to get the newsletter out. In those days, Australia Post was a stickler for bulk mail conforming to all its regulations to qualify for the discount, so with Fred likewise being a stickler for detail, the task had to be performed meticulously. The VMC newsletter was the forerunner for publications such as Australian Runner, Fun Runner, Runner’s World and Run 4 Your Life, indeed, many contributors to those magazines got some of their first work published in it.