Mill Valley Oral History Program a Collaboration Between the Mill Valley Historical Society and the Mill Valley Public Library

Mill Valley Oral History Program A collaboration between the Mill Valley Historical Society and the Mill Valley Public Library

Fred Mack

An Oral History Interview Conducted by Nancy Emerson in 2019

TITLE: Oral History of Fred Mack INTERVIEWER: Nancy Emerson DESCRIPTION: Transcript, 23 pages INTERVIEW DATE: February 21st, 2019

In this oral history, retired high school teacher and athletic coach Fred Mack recounts his life in Mill Valley. Born in San Francisco in 1945, Fred’s family moved to Mill Valley when he was 5 years old, settling into the formerly unincorporated Alto neighborhood. Fred describes his father’s love of baseball and how both father and son became involved in Little League. Additionally, he vividly evokes Mill Valley’s blue collar baseball culture during the 1950s and 1960s. Fred attended Tamalpais High School where his mother Eunice taught. While at Tam he was approached by scouts to play professional baseball, though an injury ultimately blocked this path. After graduating from Tam, he attended College of Marin and Chico State, where he continued to play baseball and majored in biology. Following in the footsteps of his mother, he got a job at Tam after college, becoming a teacher of assorted subjects, a coach of various sports, and finally the athletic director. He and his wife Carol raised a son, Eric. After some 25 years at Tam, Fred transferred to Redwood High School in 1995, retiring from there five years later. Fred recounts how he then became involved in professional and international baseball, while also coaching locally and doing considerable volunteer work. Throughout this oral history Fred emphasizes the important influence his parents, coaches, and mentors had on him and how he has sought to follow their example in his teaching, coaching, and work in the community.

© All materials copyright Mill Valley Public Library. Transcript made available for research purposes only. All rights are reserved to the Mill Valley Library. Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the:

Lucretia Little History Room Mill Valley Public Library 375 Throckmorton Avenue Mill Valley, CA 94941

ii Oral History of Fred Mack

Index

Alto neighborhood…p.2 Alto School…p.1 Australia…p.12 Baseball…p.2, 4, 5-7, 11-13, 17-18 Fields…p.17 Beldon, Pete…p.19 Bell, Ray…p.19 Chavez, Ed…p.19 College of Marin…p.6 Downtown…p.21 Edna Maguire School…p.1 Fishing…p.15-16 Hanretty, Jim…p.19 Japan…p.12 Mack, Carol (wife)…p.14 Mack, Charles Frederick (father)…p.1, 3-4 Mack, Eric (son)…p.15 Mack, Eunice Helen (mother)…p.1, 4 Mack, Joanne (sister)…p.1, 3 Maguire, Red…p.17 Marshall, Hank…p.19 Mill Valley Middle School…p.1 Redwood High School…p.9 Sutton Manor…p.2 Tamalpais High School…p.5, 8-9, 21-22 Taylor, Ma…p.19 Taylor, Red…p.18-19 Von der Werth, Al…p.17 Wensloff, Charley…p.13

iii Oral History of Fred Mack February 21st, 2019

Editor’s note: This transcript has been reviewed by Fred Mack, who made minor corrections and clarifications to the original.

00:00 Nancy Emerson: This is Nancy Emerson on behalf of the Mill Valley Historical Society and the Mill Valley Library’s Oral History Program. I’m here in the Mill Valley Library’s recording studio on February 21st, 2019 with Fred Mack. Fred is a former Mill Valley resident, and a retired Tam High School teacher and coach. Fred, I’m so glad we can add your oral history to our collection. Are you ready to begin?

00:26 Fred Mack: I’m ready. Thanks for giving me the opportunity here.

00:28 Nancy Emerson: You bet. Let’s begin with your full name and your address.

00:33 Fred Mack: My full name is Charles Fredric Mack. I go by Fred, though, and I live right now in San Rafael, in Terra Linda.

00:41 Nancy Emerson: Okay, and can you tell us where and when you were born?

00:47 Fred Mack: Yeah, I was born in San Francisco on April 14th, 1945.

00:50 Nancy Emerson: Alright, and then you must have made your way to Mill Valley.

00:56 Fred Mack: We did. The first five years I lived in San Francisco, my father worked in the city, and my mother brought up my sister and myself. At 5, we moved to Mill Valley, where she took a job as a teacher, started as an elementary school teacher at Alto School — I’m not sure the name of that school now, they changed it, but she taught there fifth and sixth grades. And we lived right up the street from there; we were within walking distance. She taught there until they opened up at the Edna Maguire School, which is right next to that. Then she moved there to Mill Valley Middle School, where she taught seventh grade for a number of years. Eventually the middle school was opened on Miller.

01:49 Nancy Emerson: Let’s see, maybe we should have had you introduced your parents. What were their names? And your sister’s?

01:53 Fred Mack: Sure, my father was Charles Frederick Mack — he’d be the senior. My mother was Eunice Helen Mack, and my sister was Joanne Mack.

02:04 Nancy Emerson: Great, and was your sister older or younger than you?

02:06 Fred Mack: My sister was a year and a half older than I was.

1 02:08 Nancy Emerson: Oh, that’s right, okay.

02:10 Fred Mack: Yes.

02:10 Nancy Emerson: Good. And when you moved to Alto, that Alto area near the school, what street did you live on?

02:16 Fred Mack: Well, it’s interesting. When we moved to Alto, it was an unincorporated area, and it was only one street in and one street out, that was Tower Drive. The roads there were oil and gravel. There were no sidewalks and no street lights. You would come in off of Highway 101, which was a four-way stop — it was four lanes at that time — turn west onto Blithedale. If we had turned east, it would have been Tiburon Boulevard. We went down the hill not even a quarter of a mile on Tower Drive, which still runs into Blithedale now. It was the only street in and out of that unincorporated area.

02:52: Right at the corner of Blithedale and Tower Drive, there was a little store that you could almost call a “short stop,” which is long gone. That was the shopping market for the unincorporated area of the people in Alto. Alto, at that point, only had four streets. There was Tower, which you came in on, then Plaza was to the right, Meadow, which is only about four houses down because the swamp was there. It was valance there. It ran up Tower to the end, which was Lomita Drive up against the hill, which we called the Cow Hill. They call that Horse Hill now. But when we moved in there, there were range cattle up there. There had been dairy cattle in the ’40s, but they took out the dairy and they put range cattle up there from Highway 101 all the way down to Edna Maguire School now. That whole hill was range cattle. Lomita Drive made a loop. It ended at Shell Road because the swamp was there.

03:58 Nancy Emerson: Can you be more specific about where the swamp was?

04:02 Fred Mack: Well, it was called Sutton Manor, which we’d call it “sunken manor” because we knew what was gonna happen to those houses on that fill. This is what was happening down there. And then they backed up against Shell Drive. Lomita Drive ran into Shell, and that in turn came crossing back and linked up with Tower Drive, which was the only way out of Alto. There was a path; you would walk the railroad tracks, which still had trains running on them through the tunnel at Corte Madera.

04:34 Nancy Emerson: Oh wow.

04:35 Fred Mack: And that’s the way we accessed Mill Valley. There was a two-lane bridge. Blithedale ran right next to the hill, very similar to where it is now, but it curved up onto a two-lane bridge that went across the swamp that were there, the railroad tracks, and you’d drop into Mill Valley and Camino Alto.

04:52 Nancy Emerson: So this was in the ’50s, I’m calculating.

2 04:55 Fred Mack: 1950.

04:56 Nancy Emerson: Did you feel like you were a part of Mill Valley, or did you feel like you were in a separate town?

05:02 Fred Mack: Well, at 5 years old I didn’t think too much about that.

05:07 Nancy Emerson: As that decade progressed then, did you get a different sense?

05:10 Fred Mack: Well, it was rural. We had cows across the street, inside the barbed wire fence out in front. And there wasn’t a baseball field out there; there was a rock pile. I really didn’t get too much involved with Mill Valley as an individual until I got involved with the Little League, and that was in 1955. So the first five years I was there, it was mainly staying in that Alto unincorporated area. But we were rural kids; we ran the Cow Hill. We had sleds. Every guy had a dog, a BB gun, and a bike, and we had enough sports equipment to share with each other. The gals — I asked my sister, “What did you do?” She goes, “Well, I crashed on your rollercoaster.” We used to build our own coasters, and we went sliding together, and she’d go up on the hills. We’d fly kites, all those things. So, they did have girls’ activities. It wasn’t Girl Scouts; I think it was called “Campfire Girls” she participated in. There was a Cub Scout group out there that I did for a year or two. And a lot of activities we started amongst ourselves. I did not go into Mill Valley, and a lot of our kids didn’t. We just kinda hung out together as a group out there in Alto.

06:23 Nancy Emerson: Your school was the Alto School then?

06:25 Fred Mack: Well, that’s an interesting question, because I started at Alto School, but they really moved my class around a lot. So I was three years — kindergarten, first, second — at Alto. Then they moved us over to Strawberry. Third grade was Strawberry. Then we came back to Park School for fourth and fifth, then we went back to Alto School for sixth. Then we went over to Edna Maguire for seventh and eighth. So my class was bussed around, moved around quite a lot.

06:53 Nancy Emerson: Wow. And it was school buses at that time?

06:54 Fred Mack: It was school buses, yes, absolutely.

06:57 Nancy Emerson: Now, let’s see. I wanna go back. You said your mother was a school teacher.

07:02 Fred Mack: She was.

07:02 Nancy Emerson: How about your dad? What was he doing?

07:04 Fred Mack: Well, my dad was a lithographer — and don’t you dare call him a printer. There’s a big difference, and I could give you a lecture on that.

07:12 Nancy Emerson: Explain that, please, briefly.

07:12 Fred Mack: Well, a printer is gonna maybe use black and white, and they might get a second color in there, but a lithographer is gonna use six or seven colors on one press at one time. These presses would take up a city block of San Francisco, and to get the paints and the oils, everything mixed absolutely perfect on a job was incredible. I still have some of his work at home. The way the colors blended and faded, it was really an art to do that. My parents are interesting because my mother was an extremely bright student, a very good student. She graduated with honors from college and had shown in the family what the expectations were. My father was a street guy, and basically he was turned out as an 8 or 10-year-old in the streets of San Francisco. I’d say the guy was almost a punk or a hood. I know that they sent him out of San Francisco during the summers, because he got into so much trouble.

08:15: But my father, on the streets, learned people. He could make friends and get along with anybody, and that was his strength. He loved people, and when he came to town, he loved the people and he loved the kids. And there was my mother in town, the teacher, who had an extremely good reputation, a very conservative teacher, very strict. My mom used to joke, “We don’t need a front door, we should have a turnstile” — whether it was because of academics running through, which my sister was extremely good at, or kids would come by the house, or athletes coming through, it was like kids central out there. That’s what I grew up with.

08:58 Nancy Emerson: So were you more like your mom or more like your dad?

09:01 Fred Mack: Well, that’s interesting. At about 17 years old, I was on a fast track with professional baseball. And at this point in time, I’d say that was almost out of balance. I was a pretty good player, and there was a lot of emphasis from my father, because he had not gone to college, and when professional teams were coming by sending you birthday cards and Christmas cards, and you’re 16, 17 years old, you get your head turned. It’s easy. And they starting to talk about some bonus money. There was no draft in those days, so it was all relationships. But my mother always said, “Just in case this doesn’t happen, you better keep your academics together.” And my sister, who was an outstanding student — a terrific student, she was the shining light with the academics going through the Mill Valley city schools. I knew I wasn’t. I wouldn’t say I got by ’cause I wasn’t just getting by. I did really well at what I wanted to do. I’d go, “Okay, I can get this done,” and I’d get it out of the way.

10:07: My mother always emphasized the academics at our house and pointed at my sister. My dad always emphasized relationships and leadership more than academics. So, I ended up being a balance of those two. An injury as a 17-year-old put things in perspective for me, how important the academics was, and going forward from that point, I always had a good balance of both, academics and athletics.

4 10:42 Nancy Emerson: I’m curious whether your association with professional baseball started when you were very young or when you came out of high school?

10:55 Fred Mack: Professional baseball really started coming to me when I was a 16- year-old at Tam High School. It became a factor, and that lasted for a period of time, I could say I sustained an injury early on, and I redirected my ability to pitch. It was really where it was.

11:17 Nancy Emerson: You’re a pitcher.

11:18 Fred Mack: I had pitched and caught, which is a horrible combination, but for being a better coach later in life, it was great. It taught me what to and what not to do for kids, people. At that point professional baseball [recruiters] were always kinda hanging around, wanting to know when you’re gonna pitch again, when are you gonna do this. I had some other skills as catcher, and I had an opportunity with the White Sox to go out as a catcher, but it was my first year of teaching at Tam. and I’d just gotten back to Tam High School, which to me was the place to be, and I said, “Jeez, where were you guys four years ago? I would have gone, but not now.” So, having the perspective of what the professional sports were, I was able to transfer that into my coaching.

12:03 Nancy Emerson: For sure.

12:04 Fred Mack: How to take care of young players and particularly pitchers. And it worked out; it worked out well. The kids always came first. I didn’t really go looking for professional baseball once I’d gotten into high school teaching and coaching, but it kinda got sent that way almost by mistake. I’d been teaching at Tam: I was an athletic director, I was a baseball coach, I was teaching two different sciences and physical education. And the principal came to me and said, “We need you to take another class.” It wasn’t a biological science, which is what my degree was in. It was in physical science, and I said, “That’s kind of a reach.” I said, “If you want me to do that, I’m a good little soldier here, I’ll do what I’m asked, but you gotta understand this athletic stuff has gotta go.”

13:04: I’m not saying I’m one-dimensional, but I’m gonna put my heart and soul into what I’m doing. So, I decided to get out of baseball and the Athletic Director’s job. Now, the way I got involved in professional baseball, when I was a coach, I used to send out letters and keep contact with all the major colleges in the professional teams for my players. I worked hard for my players to be drafted, receive division one or division two scholarships. The last player to be drafted out at Tam was in 1980. That’s the last year I coached. There’s a way to make that happen. I knew the way, and I worked hard at it. So, since I was having these communications, written communications, with the pro clubs, I sent out my last letter to the colleges and said, “Thanks for all the help you’ve given me. Extend it to my players.” They had done favors for me and my players. “That’s it. The new coach is gonna be — this new fella’s gonna take the job over.” And I thought that was the end of it, ’til three days later when I got a phone call from the Philadelphia Phillies offering me a job.

5 14:04 Nancy Emerson: And what job was that?

14:06 Fred Mack: That was to work as a part-time scout for the Philadelphia Phillies, in Northern California, just as a local scout, but that job expanded to where I was going into four or five different states. Actually, I became a catching instructor. I’d had always pitched and caught, and I had made up slide shows for my players, as teaching tools, so I took these to these professional training camps and tryout camps. They saw that stuff, and they go, “Wow.” Professional baseball was not doing those kinds of things then. So we started in California, and before I was done, I was going into Oregon, Washington, Nevada, and actually other professional teams were sending their players here to Marin, as well as coaches, and ex-major league players, to learn how to teach catching. And all that I did was organize it like a science teacher. [chuckles]

15:05: They didn’t do things like that in pro ball then. So, I was an extremely organized guy, and I had this, like I said, slide show — which are now PowerPoints — that I took with me when I did international baseball, but that’s what got me started. I wasn’t looking for it; I just worked hard at it like I do everything else, and it just kept going.

15:22 Nancy Emerson: So, just circling back for a minute, it sounds like the injury that you got as a 16-year-old forced you to redirect your —

15:33 Fred Mack: Absolutely.

15:34 Nancy Emerson: Future. Yeah?

15:35 Fred Mack: Absolutely.

15:36 Nancy Emerson: And how did you feel about that?

15:37 Fred Mack: That’s a good question. That’s the same one my mother used to ask me.

15:40 Nancy Emerson: Yeah.

15:40 Fred Mack: It was a difficult blow, particularly when everybody’s looking to you to be the guy that — ut as a pitcher, I was pretty good, and I was invited by Major League teams to go to Candlestick Park and throw batting practice for them. When that comes down, well, you take some deep breaths. But I’m not the kind of guy that just folds my tent when things that don’t work out well. So, I said, “Okay, we gotta retool here.” And I could always hit, even though I couldn’t throw, I could hit, so I made a position change where I went and I played first base. I could hit, and my arm didn’t come back, I didn’t even take infield during the week, ’cause it hurt so bad. But I was good at that, and it carried me all the way through college, and then eventually things worked themselves back out.

16:30 Nancy Emerson: So did you play baseball then in college?

16:32 Fred Mack: Oh, yes.

16:33 Nancy Emerson: So tell me about where you went to school, and what you studied, and how you played baseball.

16:37 Fred Mack: Well, any offers I’d have for scholarships were pulled back as soon as I hurt my arm. That was a great lesson for me, a great lesson for me. At 18 years old, I’m getting a real dish of what the world was like, and that was a good lesson. So, I went to College of Marin, and I played two years of baseball there. My sister had gone there too, and academically it was a great college then. All our units were transferable. We took things that weren’t just easy courses; we took things that were transferable.

17:05 Nancy Emerson: Prep, yeah.

17:06 Fred Mack: And so my sister went on and transferred to San Francisco State — eventually she got her PhD — and I transfered on to Chico State, where I played both baseball and football, and I had a number of coaches. I was kind of a quiet guy, and I would watch the coaches, and I would evaluate who I had, and how would I incorporate that into what I was gonna do.

17:32 Nancy Emerson: You knew at that point that you were gonna be a coach?

17:35 Fred Mack: Well, I knew that was a strong option to be doing that. And, like I said, I had some very good ones and I had some very bad ones, but it made me who I ended up being. I’m not sure I ended up being a good one; some people would tell you I’m a bad one. But the fact of it is, it gave me a lot of insights, and it molded who I ended up being in the end here.

17:56 Nancy Emerson: Wow. Let me see, just fact-wise, I think I read that you graduated from Tam in 1960.

18:04 Fred Mack: ’63.

18:04 Nancy Emerson: ’63?

18:05 Fred Mack: Mm-hmm.

18:06 Nancy Emerson: And then from Chico in ’67?

18:09 Fred Mack: Let’s see, Chico was ’68.

18:11 Nancy Emerson: ’68?

18:11 Fred Mack: ’68.

7 18:12 Nancy Emerson: And you immediately came back to teach at Tam?

18:15 Fred Mack: Yeah, that was really good.

18:16 Nancy Emerson: Pretty cool.

18:17 Fred Mack: That was a good deal, yeah. They actually made a spot for me. They moved some faculty around so I could come back, and I came back as a varsity football coach. I was pretty young for that, 24. [laughs] I had a lot to learn — and also as a freshmen baseball coach. I think the reason it happened the way it did is because of my mother and my father. They had a reputation in this town. I’d been involved with the high school with recreation, and I think they saw this might not be a bad guy to get back at the school. The high schools do that a lot, the high schools all over, they have alumni they think they are gonna end up being good teachers, and they bring them back. There’s still people like Ben Cleaveland at Tam, he’s one of my ex-students, and there’s others. A lot of high schools do that though, and that’s what they did for me. I was very lucky.

19:05 Nancy Emerson: And do you think Tam was interested in you for your science or for your athletics?

19:09 Fred Mack: I think originally they wanted me as a teacher-coach.

19:14 Nancy Emerson: So both. They wanted to combine them.

19:16 Fred Mack: Well, I was teaching physical education and coaching the teams, and they saw me as a varsity coach, in baseball and football, both eventually. And then the athletic director thing, that just kind of evolved into that too. So, I was really heavily committed to that for a number of years.

19:36 Nancy Emerson: I’m curious when you decided that you needed to give up something whether it was harder for you to give up the coaching and athletic director in order to focus on science.

19:47 Fred Mack: No, that wasn’t a problem. In fact, and I think back now that throughout my life — oh boy, here we go — every four or five years something made me change, and I think that’s good for you. When I first went back into teaching science, it was like I’d been out of it for a number of years, and now here comes genetics, incredible changes, so I had to really gear it up, and it was good for me. Then they gave me a course that I wasn’t even prepared for, so I had to study and gear up for that. And all those I see as good changes for me. When I’m committed to something, I’m really committed to it. So, I worked hard on that, and that was very good for me, very good for me to do that.

20:34 Nancy Emerson: You have a great perspective, I think. [chuckles]

20:39 Fred Mack: I’m a hard guy to discourage, I’ll tell you that. [chuckles]

8 20:41 Nancy Emerson: Just what you wanna be.

20:43 Fred Mack: Yeah.

20:45 Nancy Emerson: Let’s see, so you worked at Tam until — when did you retire?

20:48 Fred Mack: Well, I worked at Tam ’til 1995, then I transferred over to Redwood. There were some things going on at Tam. I thought the school was going the wrong direction, and I had an opportunity to go to Redwood with one of my friends who transferred over there, another teacher. The principal at Redwood actually was a wrestling coach I had hired at Tam; I knew him. So, I went over there and I was surprised as I was even talking to him, but they made me feel very welcome, and it was another good change for me. Now I go to another school, and I gotta gear it up and get going again in a different environment. That was a good change. So, if you look at my history, every five years or so, I had to make a change, and for me, making the change was not a problem. I’m making the change; I’m going after it. I would do it. So those changes were all good for me all along the way.

21:41 Nancy Emerson: Okay, and then how long did you stay at Redwood?

21:43 Fred Mack: I was there for five years.

21:44 Nancy Emerson: Okay, and then —

21:45 Fred Mack: And then I retired from there. That was 30 years in the district. It was great.

21:50 Nancy Emerson: It was good that they were both schools in the same district, so you could —

21:53 Fred Mack: Right.

21:55 Nancy Emerson: Keep all your benefits and everything.

21:57 Fred Mack: Yeah, it was.

21:58 Nancy Emerson: Alright, so one last question about that time: where did you live? Were you living in Mill Valley?

22:08 Fred Mack: No, I lived in Terra Linda. I started in Petaluma. My wife got a teaching job in Petaluma, so I commuted down to Mill Valley. And in those days it was a half an hour. It was a fast commute, and I drove it fast, so it wasn’t that bad. And then we moved to Terra Linda in ’74, and I’ve been there ever since. That was an easy commute for both of us.

22:31 Nancy Emerson: Yeah, great. In ’74 you were still teaching.

22:36 Fred Mack: Mm-hmm.

22:36 Nancy Emerson: Before we leave that time of your life, any reflections about the schools, or Mill Valley in particular, or the times?

22:54 Fred Mack: Well, personally I have to say, I got to do exactly what I wanted to do with my whole life. Now, I think with some of the things that I had to deal with, I can still say it’s exactly what I wanted to do. I mean, I controlled my life all the way through planning and hard work. That’s the way it was. I feel very blessed to have what I’ve had. Coming back to Tam High School, coming back to Mill Valley, it was incredibly easy for me. Kids were calling me Freddy, and I had to tell them, “No, it’s Mr. Mack, coach or sir.” The same thing my wife calls me, you know. [chuckles]

23:33: And they would say, “Oh, you’re Mrs. Mack’s son.” And I’d say, “Yes, I am, but if you think she is tough, you haven’t seen anything yet.” And they’d go, “Oh my God, if he’s tougher than Mrs. Mack is, this is going to be a challenge over here at Tam.” So, it was a perfect fit for me. The kids were great. I grew up in homes in Sausalito in Marin City, you know, Muir Beach, I was every place as a kid. It was like coming home, and it was just perfect fit, just all worked. There was no adjustment for me.

24:02 Nancy Emerson: One of the things that just occurred to me is when you were a teenager in Mill Valley did you have a car?

24:07 Fred Mack: Well, that’s good. No, I didn’t have a car. There was a couple of us riding bikes in town, that was it. My parents didn’t want me to have a car, but they always wanted me to drive if kids were going some place. We had a family car; we had two family cars. My mother drove one, and my father the other one, and they didn’t want me to own a car. Like I say, I rode a bike. Kids weren’t riding bikes back in those days, but I rode a bike to work in Mill Valley wherever I went, and it didn’t bother me any, kept me in shape, I thought. If anything ever came up where I needed a car, I got to use the family car, and it came back a lot cleaner than when I got it. That was who I was, you know. I didn’t feel the need for a car because my parents made sure I had access to one, as well as my sister too. They did not want us riding with other kids, because they trusted us well and not so much the other kids, and they knew that I was not into partying. I was not into drinking whatsoever or smoking; that’s not who I was. So, if we went to parties and stuff — and I did — and there were kids smoking and drinking and carrying on, I might be the last guy home, because I drove everybody home. But my parents had complete trust in me and my sister. That’s the way it was done.

25:32 Nancy Emerson: And did your friends also appreciate that?

25:34 Fred Mack: Well, I guess they did. [chuckles]

25:38 Fred Mack: They knew they had a ride home. [chuckles] Their parents may have appreciated that I was driving and not their own kid.

25:47 Nancy Emerson: I’m just imagining that sort of push-pull of adolescence where you want your buddies to be doing the same things you are, but probably also appreciating the fact that they’re getting you home safe.

26:00 Fred Mack: Well, my mom and my dad, particularly my dad, he was really big on being your own person, and “You don’t need to be like these other people.” He was huge on that, and he was huge on leadership. I grew up in an OCS School, an Officer Candidate School, because between my mother and my father, I knew what a good leader was and what was expected of a good leader. If you’re a leader, you’re not gonna get down with the troops or the other guys. You always have to be a cut above. Now, I know that sounds bad or egotistical, but my father would say, “If you don’t think you’re good, you’re not going to be good. Now, just think you’re good and don’t let the other guys know you’re thinking that.” That’s the way I got brought up. So, I always thought I was a cut above. They didn’t know that, but being a team captain, being a team leader, being a leader in the community, that was always number one on my mind. That’s who you are. That’s what led me into teaching, too.

26:56 Nancy Emerson: Great parenting, it sounds like, I have to say.

26:58 Fred Mack: Absolutely. The best.

27:00 Nancy Emerson: Okay, well, we covered a lot of your professional life in Marin, but then you went beyond that as you introduced us to pro baseball.

27:12 Fred Mack: Right. Now the baseball thing, it blossomed. I had opportunities there, and it needed to be kept under control, because opportunities to move away from Mill Valley, you get involved in coaching and pro ball, I knew that wasn’t a good deal. There’s a lot of coaches that are divorced and don’t have their families. That was not gonna be me. So, I picked and chose what was good for me to do. Eventually, people came to me, outside of professional baseball, and that’s how I got involved with international baseball. I had a reputation, and my first opportunity came when I was asked to go to Japan — twice. The first time I was taken over there, it was two-fold. I was taken over by the people that were sponsoring me, the USA team over there, to see how the Japanese play baseball.

28:03 Nancy Emerson: Okay, this is in the Olympic program?

28:05 Fred Mack: No, this was not the Olympics, no.

28:07 Nancy Emerson: Okay this is baseball.

28:08 Fred Mack: This was our national high school team. So, over there I went and watched them play, and I learned a lot the first time. I also went over and made a presentation about training gloves, which weren’t used much in professional baseball at that time, but I had a coaching philosophy on how to train catchers. A lot of people would

11 teach them about their footwork, which is extremely complicated when you get into it — weight-shifting and steps and that. I’d learned that stuff, but I didn’t necessarily learn it by being told what to do. I had learned another way. And I said, “How did I learn this? What were the keys to make me learn this where I didn’t have my mind in my feet?” I said, “Okay, I was told basically to catch with both hands and the frame of my body, and to use the old-time gloves that forced you to do these things.” So, I said, “Okay, what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna develop a training program for catchers to where we don’t talk about feet at all. We talk about hands and shoulders and let those be your guides, ’cause that’s the business part, catching and throwing. I don’t want your mind on your feet; I want it in your hands.”

29:21: And with that, I started using the old time gloves that I had learned to catch with, which nowadays are like training gloves, but people weren’t doing that back when I started it. Actually, when I went to Japan, I went out with the CEO of the SSK Corporation and he said, “I wanna learn your catching program, how you do that, and how we could develop gloves that would make your job easier, or how we could do this.” So, the first time I went over there, it was two-fold. One to introduce the training method to the Japanese and the importance of training gloves, which they bought into. The second thing was to see how their teams played at their international championships, so that when we went back a couple of months later, we could beat them. [chuckles]

30:03 Nancy Emerson: You were a spy. [laughs]

30:04 Fred Mack: Oh, they knew I was there. [laughs]

30:07 Fred Mack: So, I had done that, plus I had been to Australia. There’s a big difference in baseball attitude between Japan and Australia. When I went to Japan, they kind of sold me as a high school coach that was a really bright guy and had developed these things on the high school level. Because professional baseball in Japan takes a backseat to high school baseball. But when I got the Australia, it’s, “Here comes the professional baseball guy, and this guy is gonna help us, train our players and deal with our Olympic coaches and our Olympic catchers.” So, as I went there with the United States team and toured Australia, I also went to the Olympic training centers, and they were waiting for me when I got into town. And off I would go to teach their coaches how I taught my catching and also their players, put them in the basic drills and things. So, I did that. They had three training centers, one’s in Sydney obviously, then another one was at Adelaide, and another one was at Perth. So, I went all the way across Australia with my catcher’s training gloves and a plan that people wanted to hear.

31:13 Nancy Emerson: Wow. And approximately when was this happening? What year was it?

31:17 Fred Mack: Well, that happened, oh boy, that was — oh God, I’m gonna have to think back here.

31:21 Nancy Emerson: After you retired from high school?

31:23 Fred Mack: Yeah, it was after I retired. So, it’d be late 2000.

31:32 Nancy Emerson: Somewhere in there, in the 2000s?

31:34 Fred Mack: Yeah, in the middle of late 2000, I was there.

31:35 Nancy Emerson: And are you still involved with coaching and training?

31:38 Fred Mack: Well, what happens is that ex-players bring their kids to me. So, now I’m dealing with like second generations — no third generations yet, but they might be coming, I don’t know. They come back and they ask for help.

31:51 Nancy Emerson: So, you’re a private coach in that way?

31:53 Fred Mack: Well, that’s interesting. I like the way you said that because I have a thing about coaching. Now they have a lot of these AAU programs out there and people are paying all these coaches to teach these kids how of play. That’s not the way it was when I grew up here. The fathers in town would take kids out for nothing. A lot of the ex- players in town, high school guys, the guys that played pro ball — there was an elder, a guy named Wensloff, Charley Wensloff, who had played for the New York Yankees in the Major Leagues. And Charley Wensloff came out a couple of times and he helped me with my baseball. I’m sure my dad bought him a beer after he went back to the bar, and that was it. So, I grew up with that, and that’s the way I am. I’ve been offered money, and I won’t take a cent for anything I do.

32:40 Nancy Emerson: Wow.

32:41 Fred Mack: But by that way, I control my own schedule, too. So, if you’re not paying me, I don’t know owe you anything. [laughs]

32:49 Fred Mack: I still do things and kids come to me. That’s the way it works.

32:54 Nancy Emerson: And you like it that way? It sounds like that’s your philosophy.

32:58 Fred Mack: Oh, absolutely, yeah. I’ve done well with my life. We’ve done well. I don’t need anything. I would rather help a kid — I’d rather help somebody for nothing. It makes me feel good helping them. And I know that’s the way I was brought up, so that’s the deal.

33:09 Nancy Emerson: That’s great. Now, let’s see, you just reminded me that we haven’t introduced your wife or your family yet.

33:16 Fred Mack: Oh, yeah.

33:16 Nancy Emerson: Tell us about them.

33:17 Fred Mack: My wife, well, she was a blind date at College of Marin. I had to take her to lunch. It was an expensive lunch, here after 50 years. [laughs] She was from Tiburon, went to Redwood High School. It was too bad they didn’t have girls’ sports then because she was an athlete, a really outdoorsy person and an athlete, and we connected on that pretty fast. Her father was a school teacher, mother was retired. She worked; later on she was a housewife. We both went to College of Marin, and we both went to Chico State. And eventually we got married in ’69, August 9. I better not forget, or I’m in big trouble.

33:57 Nancy Emerson: Wait, ’69, that’s a magic date here. [laughs]

34:01 Fred Mack: Yeah, so that was the deal. She’s great; she’s a lot like I am. She’s a really hard worker, and she’s a really giving person. A lot of her time now goes to guide dogs. She’s at the Novato Free Library right now today, stacking and shelving books That’s what she does.

34:22 Nancy Emerson: Is that a volunteer or is she —

34:23 Fred Mack: As a volunteer there, and then she helps a lot of people in the community. If somebody needs help, she is right there on the spot. And that’s the way I am too.

34:31 Nancy Emerson: Was she a teacher?

34:33 Fred Mack: She was a teacher. She taught 30 years in the Petaluma High School District. And we lucked into that. I went up for an interview just to cover myself, ’cause I knew I was at Tam. So, I went to the interview and the principal, he finally fessed up, he said, “Well, we’ve got another guy here,” and he gave me the guy’s name. I knew him and I said, “That guy is really good.” I said, “By the way, I’m just backing myself up, because I’m probably going to Tam.” We kind of laughed about that. Well, my wife Carol had come up and she’s out there sitting in the sun dress and some sandals, and I introduced her. And he asked her if she was a teaching candidate. And she goes, “Yes,” she was a psychology major with child development specialty. He goes, “We need to talk right now.” So, she got the job on the day that I went to cover my rear end.

35:11 Nancy Emerson: ’Cause she happened to go with you. [chuckles]

35:13 Fred Mack: It just happened. We landed two teaching jobs 30 miles from each other our first years out of college. So, it worked out really well for both us.

35:19 Nancy Emerson: As a psychology major, did she get a job as a classroom teacher or —

35:23 Fred Mack: Child psychology. It was classroom teaching. She taught home economics also.

35:29 Nancy Emerson: Great.

35:29 Fred Mack: So, we both got our 30 years in.

35:30 Nancy Emerson: Okay. Wow. And you have children?

35:33 Fred Mack: I have one son, Eric. He teaches at U.C. Santa Cruz. He went there, and Santa Cruz did much the same that Tam did for me. As soon as he graduated, they kept him on there. And he’s a theater techie. He teaches classes in sound and lighting design, and he runs the theaters down there. Early on, I could see he was an awfully nice kid, and to be an athlete sometimes you have to flip your switch and get after people. And that was not his makeup. I’m not saying that’s not my makeup either, because it takes a while, but I will flip my switch and get after you. Where he just wasn’t that kind of person. I saw he had music talents — he played with the Marin Youth Symphony. He was a very talented musician, and he was really big into theater, very big. He was doing summer stock and working with adults at a young age. So, he went to U.C. Santa Cruz, and he got a Theater Arts major and a specialty in sound and lighting design. And now he’s been there, oh boy, probably close to 15 years, on the staff there at U.C. Santa Cruz.

36:37 Nancy Emerson: Great. And does he have a family as well?

36:39 Fred Mack: He does. In fact, we have a granddaughter who’s having her first birthday a week from Friday.

36:45 Nancy Emerson: Oh, brand new. Yeah, that’s great.

36:45 Fred Mack: Yeah, brand new. So, it’s exciting. It’s another change for us. [chuckles] A good one.

36:51 Nancy Emerson: I imagine you make a few trips down to Santa Cruz. [chuckles]

36:53 Fred Mack: Yeah, we do. But it’s good. It’s far enough that we’re not there all the time, ’cause my wife would be on the front porch. But we do get down there when they need us or call us. [chuckles] And they come up. There’s a balance.

37:05 Nancy Emerson: That’s wonderful. So, let’s see, you retired from your day job, you continued with the coaching and training and consulting, kind of. What else are you doing in your retirement?

37:20 Fred Mack: Well, I’m really big into fishing. And it’s interesting, ’cause we talked about the blind date with my wife, well I found out that we both fished the same creeks in Northern California, and that was an instant connection.

37:30 Nancy Emerson: Like fly fishing?

15 37:32 Fred Mack: Yes, I’m really into that. So, it took me into Trout Unlimited. I’m a past president of that. In fact, I’ve held all the offices in Marin County here at Trout Unlimited. And I still work with their Trout in the Classroom program, which brings eggs into the classrooms, and the kids actually rear them in the class and plant them here at the local streams and lakes in Marin. So, I’m involved with that. And I also do a thing for veterans and kids. A friend of mine who has a large ranch out in Petaluma — it’s a winery — where we bring out the veterans twice a year. I ask for the people that never get out. So, we get the people out of the clinics of San Francisco VA, the clinics out of Yountville, and the clinics out of Santa Rosa — these are people that are in wheelchairs, walkers, or completely blind — and we have them out for a day of fishing. My friend has some ponds out there; he plants the ponds. So, it’s not fishing, it’s catching. And then I have friends that come out to assist with the fishing and cleaning the fish.

38:42: I also have friends come out to give a free luncheon. And this thing started with 10 volunteers and 15 vets. In the last outing, we had 130 people from the VAs. I had the U.S. Air Force marching band come in and make a presentation for us. Yeah, it’s just an incredible day. It’s all volunteer, it doesn’t cost anybody anything. Well, it cost my friend and I originally, but now people are just donating because they wanna help. We do that twice a year for the veterans. So, I do it and then two days later, I follow the exact same thing up for the Big Brothers and Big Sisters of Marin. And the same thing: I bring a Boys & Girls Club over from San Francisco. So, we host veterans twice a year on Thursday, and then the following Saturday, I host Big Brothers and Big Sisters.

39:37 Nancy Emerson: The same sort of fishing derby thing?

39:39 Fred Mack: It’s exactly the same thing, yeah, it’s exactly the same. Some of these kids coming out of the city have never caught a fish before or seen a ranch, so it’s just good for them.

39:48 Nancy Emerson: And you’ve been doing this for how long?

39:49 Fred Mack: Oh, at least 10 years. Yeah, and we have help now. The Sunrise Rotary out of Corte Madera helps us out. They send out volunteers for us. It is basically friends of mine that just feel the urge to help people. So, it’s a heck of a deal.

40:05 Nancy Emerson: It sounds like it’s also a leadership on your part on getting your friends interested.

40:09 Fred Mack: Well, I don’t know. [chuckles] It’s pretty easy, ’cause if you extend yourself and help people, then all of a sudden when you ask for some help they’re there. And the thing just has grown. I have friends, and their friends, coming to help. People I don’t even know want to get involved in it. When you leave, your heart’s singing. It’s really a good deal for your soul. [chuckles] So, that’s what I do in my spare time.

40:31 Nancy Emerson: That’s fantastic. Well, let’s see. What else should we talk about?

40:37 Fred Mack: Well, some of these things that are outlined here. I’m really big about who helped me in town here — that’s really important. And the people that built these fields, there’s people using them now, which is great.

40:54 Nancy Emerson: The baseball fields?

40:54 Fred Mack: Yeah, but they weren’t always there, the athletic fields. The first Little League field in town, Sycamore Park was donated by Eggers Nursery, which they had to take back over. But there was a guy named Al Von der Werth who was a landscape gardener, he came in and he built a Little League field at Sycamore. That was done by him and there was another fellow back then, name was Red Maguire.

41:16 Nancy Emerson: And when was this approximately?

41:17 Fred Mack: This is 1954 — ’53, ’54, yeah. They built the field, and then Red Maguire and some other dads were really instrumental in town getting Little League going and making those fields available for us. Actually, there’s a field over there by Edna Maguire and that was called Alto Field. My dad built that field with the coordination of the Mill Valley School District, the 2 AM Club, the Brother’s Tavern, and my parent’s fortune. ’Cause what didn’t get covered by whatever needed to get done to get that field built for kids, my dad did it, and I know he was writing checks for it.

42:04: Well, somebody had a connection down at Sausalito, Schoonmaker, the old dry dock. So, we went down there with blow torches and cut the pipes off the old dry docks to build that Alto field that’s out there. Those guys did that, and I was with them, and they built all the fencing, complete fencing, put in a complete field, all grass, and running tracks. It was just the Mill Valley pulling together. Where they put the field, that used to be a dairy down there, and there was a big mound of dirt in the back. A guy named Tom McGaffrey had a bulldozer, and he bulldozed a road out to that field, which still might be there, bulldozed that area flat, so the Pony League field could be put in there. It’s great to go out there now to see that Mill Valley has taken good care of that field. My dad would be really happy to see that that it’s still there, and it’s well kept up, and there’s a lot of kids playing on it. That would make my dad really happy. It makes me happy to see it.

43:05 Nancy Emerson: Yeah, I bet. Little League’s a really big deal in Mill Valley, so it sounds like you and your dad were in at the beginning of —

43:13 Fred Mack: Pretty much at the beginning, yeah. But that’s another thing, too, and I need to stress that as a coach, a lot of these high school coaches get credit for these teams they have. But I knew, as I got older, I understand this even more, that the guys that were coaching in Mill Valley, that brought me along and brought the other kids along, deserve a lot of credit. They’re just dads that are out there, guys from the bar, or whoever they were, that taught these kids how to run the bases, to do the relays, to do the basic baseball stuff. So, when they got to a guy like me, I didn’t have to go back. I could take the next jump. And I was jumping for a professional baseball or division one

17 scholarships. But there’s no way I could have done that if all this hadn’t been done by these people that had come before. There are still guys in Mill Valley doing that right now for these kids, and the impact of what they’re doing, you won’t see that for maybe 20-30 years, but they’re doing it.

44:04: So, I just wanna make a point that I really appreciate those guys that did the work for me, as both a player and as a coach, and I probably can’t remember all the names. But Red Maguire was one of the guys in town that was instrumental — Mike Maguire’s dad — getting the Little League going; he was big with the kids. But the other dads in town stepped up.

44:27 Nancy Emerson: It’s interesting too that a lot of those dads probably didn’t have any particular training in baseball or coaching, right? [chuckles]

44:36 Fred Mack: They didn’t have formal training, but most of them were players. A lot of them had come out of Mill Valley or had moved in. There’s a notation about the people in Mill Valley. The people were a lot different in Mill Valley than there are now. Mill Valley was a blue-collar community, that was it, and you get your professional athletes, particularly baseball, out of those blue-collar communities. There were these guys that played, and came back, and they were living in town. So, we were getting some pretty good help from the dads, and it wasn’t about them, you could tell. They were in there to help kids get along.

45:17: It didn’t matter what kid it was; not just their kid. They were helping all of them; it was kind of like my dad. So, they were a great resource. Now, there’s one in particular I need to mention, and you’re gonna kind of chuckle about this, but there was a guy who was a Tam graduate, and his name was Red Taylor. When the old guys get together, like me and older, Red’s name always comes up. Now Red Taylor loved three things: he loved baseball, he loved kids, and he loved alcohol. To put it another way, Red Taylor was the town drunk, and he hit the Brothers, the 2 AM, and the Old Mill. But when Red Taylor was sober, which he was most of the time with kids, he loved coaching baseball, and he loved the kids. He would give you a hug, and you could tell what he was drinking the night before. [chuckles]

46:15: But it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. And I remember my dad explaining that to me, that this is the way it is with Red, and people were not that judgmental. They looked at what he was doing for the kids. I’m sure my dad bought him a couple of drinks at the bar. Red showed up sober to most of the practices, probably all of them and most of the games, almost all of them. But the kids and the parents knew what was in his heart. Red died young from cirrhosis of the liver. He lived in town with his mother, Ma Taylor.

46:55: Now, semi-pro baseball used to really be big in Mill Valley. In fact, it was big all across the United States. Every little town had a team. You pick a town in California, they had one, and Mill Valley had their team. And Red coached a lot of us kids when we were younger. When he passed away, we knew his mother, Ma Taylor. I don’t know her

18 first name, Ma Taylor. I think she lived in Catalpa down here. I think that was the street she lived on. Anyway, she loved baseball.

47:22: So, as we got older, the guys on the semi-pro team — this went on till when you got into college — would go to the house, pick up Ma Taylor, take her to the Sunday semi-pro game, and bring her back after the game was over, because of what Red Taylor had done for us. That was old-time Mill Valley. That was pretty special what the kids were doing. Frank Dittle was one of the kids that helped me do that, a kid named David Perlis, but there were others. Ma Taylor got taken to games and brought back, because of the town drunk [laughs] who was really a great guy.

47:55 Nancy Emerson: Tolerance of that kind of a shortcoming, I guess, probably doesn’t exist anymore.

48:05 Fred Mack: I think people are pretty quick to judge people instead of just backing away and taking a look at the situation. That’s one thing that helped me with professional baseball: “loose lips sink ships.” Just back away and be quiet. They’re paying you for your opinion and nobody else’s. That was judgmental, obviously, but prior to that, my parents were really good about that. My dad particularly, he was a street guy, and he understood people. He said, “You can’t tell a book by its cover. You gotta back away, and then once you back away — ” He used to say, “Walk in that person’s shoes for a while, then you’re gonna know what’s going on here.” That’s the kind of training I got as a youth.

48:51 Nancy Emerson: Well, are there other stories about —

48:55 Fred Mack: I think the one thing I should of mentioned here that’s really important is that when I went to Tam High School the teacher and coaches I had down there were absolutely incredible, I mean incredible. Now, Ray Bell lived in town here, but there were other coaches there. There were Ed Chavez, Jim Hanretty, Hank Marshall, Pete Beldon. And through athletics, I spent a lot of time with those guys on the field, and they were teachers. They were coaches like my dad and teachers like my mother. I saw they weren’t my parents, but they were a lot like my parents. And they were really high standard, high quality people. You could tell it wasn’t about them — they had been great athletes — it was about athletes and kids.

49:41: One in particular, a fella Hank Marshall, once asked me, I guess I was a junior, he says, “If this baseball thing doesn’t work out, what are you gonna do with your life?” And I think I’m 16 years old at the time, I said, “Well, coach, if the baseball thing doesn’t work out, I think I wanna be a school teacher.” And he says, “Well, what do you want to teach?” I said, “Well, I’d like to teach and coach, so that’d be physical education.” And I said, “I’d like to teach history.” And he goes, “Oh, you don’t wanna teach history.” He said, “History teachers are a dime a dozen.” That’s just what he told me. Sorry about that, history teachers, social science. He says, “How are you in science?” I said, “Oh, I’m pretty good.” He said, “Well, get yourself a science degree, it’s gonna be worth more in the long run. It’s gonna be harder to get,” he said, “But get it.” So, off of his advice that’s

19 exactly what I did, and I ended up being at one time a full-time science teacher back at Tam High School. So, I had great mentors. I listened to what people said, and I thought about what they said. My parents were great mentors and so were those teachers at Tam. More or less, I kind of followed the examples they set. I made decisions, but they were great examples for me.

50:45 Nancy Emerson: You had good coaches, good mentors.

50:47 Fred Mack: They were good people, yeah. And the academics was in the family. My sister ended up with a PhD. She taught at Notre Dame. She taught archaeology there, and she’s just retired from that. So, the academics was always a push for our family. And she did pretty well for herself too. [chuckles]

51:04 Nancy Emerson: Is she local?

51:05 Fred Mack: She’s moving back. She’s been living there. They’re moving back to San Francisco in about six months.

51:09 Nancy Emerson: Oh good.

51:10 Fred Mack: So that’ll be good to get her back closer here.

51:11 Nancy Emerson: It seems like you’re pretty close. That way you can get together more often.

51:14 Fred Mack: Well, that’s good. It was a good family.

51:19 Nancy Emerson: Did your parents pass away while living in Mill Valley, or had they moved away?

51:22 Fred Mack: No. They had moved to Sebastopol. And then my mom, when my dad passed away, eventually I moved her down to Terra Linda, where she was very close to me. We saw my mother every day for the last three years of her life. We just never missed. We were there, that’s family, it’s what it’s about. And we were there. So, it was really good for my mom. It was great for my mom. My son was a student then, involved with the music and the theater.

51:46 Nancy Emerson: She could participate —

51:48 Fred Mack: Absolutely, yeah. We did all that. It was good.

51:51 Nancy Emerson: That’s great. Alright, one last chance. Any other pictures about Mill Valley — that’s not really the last chance, you can post as many pictures as you want to, but are there any other experiences that you’d like to include?

20 52:06 Fred Mack: Well, downtown looks to be the same. The train’s not running uptown anymore. It ran uptown when I was there, but basically Mill Valley is Mill Valley. There’s been more building expansion on the hills. Enchanted Knolls was not there, Scott Valley, none of those places were there — this was rural. This was dairy cattle and range cattle country out there. And that has changed. As for the people, the socioeconomic level or success of the people, that’s changed a lot. As to how the people are to work with, I can’t pass judgement on that. Who they are is who they are, and who I am who I am. Take it like that. But I think it’s a good place to live. The schools are still really good, so that’s important.

52:49 Nancy Emerson: It’s a pretty nice community in spite of maybe the fast growth and the changes.

52:55 Fred Mack: Yeah, congestion.

52:56 Nancy Emerson: Congestion.

52:57 Fred Mack: Yeah.

52:58 Nancy Emerson: It just occurred to me that you were a teacher at Tam in the really kinda rocky ’70s.

53:03 Fred Mack: Oh yeah. Well, you know what? That was interesting. Because when I came back to Tam, one of my science teachers said, “Fred, you made a big mistake coming back here. This is not the same school you left.” And it wasn’t. I took a deep breath by some of the stuff that was going on, but the athletics were still gonna be the same, though it was smaller. I didn’t get involved with the politics of the stuff. I was a pretty conservative person, and I still I am. I didn’t see myself as a crusader. I see myself as a teacher coach and a mentor to the kids that came to me, like these ones I had. I still think Tam is the best school in the county because of the diversity and because of the thinking that goes on down there. Some people might be uncomfortable with that or be challenged by it and not want any part of that. That’s the strength of Tam High School.

54:06 Nancy Emerson: Yeah.

54:07 Fred Mack: My son went to Terra Linda, and all of those kids were out of the same cookie cutter. They were all the same. I just enjoyed the students at Tam. There were a lot of different kinds down there, and it was a great place to come and teach and a great place to grow old.

54:25 Nancy Emerson: So, you have good memories. It doesn’t feel like it was a rocky time, as I said.

54:30 Fred Mack: Well, there were a lot of social issues going on. And the only thing I’d say is that I might have been afraid that some kids got so wrapped up in the social issues that they weren’t necessarily involved with their academics or really getting all of

21 what they needed to get on with. You want kids to be thinkers and get involved in the activities, and they did. I just hoped they wouldn’t go too far. Just like with the kids at athletics, I’d say, “No, no, no. This is only a vehicle to get to where you’re going. The athletics is not an end. So how are we gonna help you get down the road of this stuff?” That’s the way I approached it. And as for the kids having marches and voicing their opinions and things going on like that, I just listened and that’s fine. Things just went on. We had good administrators back then who could handle things like that, and it was a good place. In fact, it’s interesting, because I’m going to dinner or lunch next week with the so-called radical contingent of the school, the teachers. We’re all going to lunch next week. We’re all friends. [chuckles] So, this thing all blended and worked out well together. It was a great place to teach. It looks like a good place to go to school still.

55:48 Nancy Emerson: Yeah, I think it is.

55:49 Fred Mack: Yeah.

55:49 Nancy Emerson: Good. Okay, anything else?

55:52 Fred Mack: I don’t know.

55:53 Nancy Emerson: We covered it all?

55:54 Fred Mack: I just wanna emphasize my parents and my family. That’s the absolute key to who I am today. And with my sister, it was a good family unit, good extended family. And without that, God knows where I’d been, where I’d go.

56:10 Nancy Emerson: And you paid that forward — [chuckles] played that forward — and helped out others, so they got a good start, too, I think.

56:17 Fred Mack: Well, that’s at the end. I’ve always remembered my parents, whenever I do things, how they’ve impacted my life, and that’s the deal. I think I’m a mix of my two parents. I’m a little academic, I’m a little bit athletic, and that’s who I am.

56:29 Nancy Emerson: And then the philanthropy piece of it as well.

56:34 Fred Mack: Yeah. That was good, too.

56:38 Nancy Emerson: Well, thank you so much for sharing your experiences and also making this generous donation to our collection of oral histories. It’s really been a pleasure talking with you.

56:47 Fred Mack: Thanks for the opportunity. I hope I’ve been able to make a good tribute to all the people that helped me.

56:53 Nancy Emerson: Absolutely.

22 56:53 Fred Mack: That’s the key of being here today.

56:55 Nancy Emerson: It’s a good story. Hopefully, they’ll read about themselves or their parents. [chuckles]

57:00 Fred Mack: Hopefully so. Okay, thank you very much.