He Helps Others Achieve Higher Goals : Track and field: Ed Caruthers, silver medal winner in 1968 Olympics, is one of a group assisting financially disadvantaged college students.

Ed Caruthers recalls several times as a young man when a helping hand guided him along the road to Olympic glory. Now he devotes some of his time lending a hand of his own.

Caruthers, 46, was Track & Field News’ No. 1-rated high jumper in the world in 1967 and ’68. He finished eighth in the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo and won the silver medal in the 1968 Games in Mexico City.

Now, Caruthers is active in Gentlemen West of Orange County, a group of 10 black professionals and businessmen who assist young people in clearing today’s formidable financial hurdles.

Originally founded to pool financial resources for investment opportunities, Gentlemen West branched out and started investing in financially disadvantaged community college and college students in Orange County.

“Nobody gets any place without help, assistance and advice,” Caruthers said. “We decided to pool our knowledge.”

As one might expect from a group consisting mostly of ex-athletes, the idea for the investment pool was hatched in a sports environment--a pickup basketball game.

“We’ve all known each other for a long period of time,” Caruthers said. “After everyone goes away and comes back to Orange County, we’d get together to play basketball. One day we were sitting around and talking about investments. I had just lost money in apartments.”

If there was strength in numbers on the athletic field, they decided, why not translate it to the financial arena? Under the leadership of Myron Brown, women’s basketball coach at Rancho Santiago College, they plunged into the stock markets in 1981.

But it wasn’t long before they decided to expand into philanthropic activities.

“We were all middle-class African-Americans who had worked hard but had help,” Caruthers said. “We appreciated and valued the assistance we had to get where we are and would like to return the help we had--to help young persons get to where we are.”

The most successful of their fund-raising ventures is the annual “Oldies but Goodies” dance, featuring music from the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, on the third weekend in March in Fullerton.

“We’ve had about 150 to 200 people--couples and singles--show up dressed in the styles of that era,” Caruthers said. “We’re thinking next year about getting up to 250 people. We’re also thinking about getting into golf tournaments.”

As a result, more students are receiving a helping hand.

“We started out in our first year (1983) just raising a couple of hundred dollars for books,” Caruthers said. “Now we’ve grown to the point where we give $600-700 to the United Negro College Fund and we fund two $200 scholarships at the local colleges (Rancho Santiago, Fullerton College and Cal State Fullerton). We help out on an individual case-by-case basis.”

Since 1970, Caruthers has taught physical education classes for physically handicapped students at various schools in the Garden Grove Unified School District.

But before he realized his athletic potential, he thought the only way he would be able to get his slice of the American Dream would be through a military career.

Ed Caruthers’ stepfather was a janitor and his mother was a maid. In 1958, when he was 13, his family moved to Orange County from Oklahoma City.

“You pretty much stayed in your area (in Oklahoma City),” Caruthers said. “It was a pretty frightening kind of time to grow up. The (civil rights) demonstrations had started, but it was still a segregated city in the mid-1950s. The lunch counters and restaurants were segregated. When I traveled with my folks to Texas, we couldn’t get served in a lot of places.”

Those experiences would traumatize Caruthers for years.

“Naturally, you’re thinking there’s something wrong with you, that you’re not considered to be a regular person,” Caruthers said. “It causes you to view yourself in a negative way. My black schoolteachers would try to tell you that you are good and positive, but you had these other experiences pulling you in other directions.”

At Peters Junior High in Garden Grove, a withdrawn and introverted Caruthers had to make the transition from an all-black elementary school in Oklahoma City to one that was nearly all-white.

“It was quite an experience to be thrown into an all-white school where I was the only black kid,” Caruthers said. “There were some Hispanics, but there was nobody I could identify with. It caused me to be even more introverted.”

Caruthers attended Bolsa Grande High as a freshman and sophomore, but after his parents moved to Santa Ana, he transferred to Santa Ana Valley, at that time the only county high school with a significant number of black students.

“I started picking up some black friends for once,” Caruthers said. “Those were pretty decent kids from good family situations, mostly families of career military people who were living decent lives. But my contact with black adults (were) mostly people with janitorial or lower-end jobs. I had no contact with black doctors, teachers or lawyers--I never saw a black administrator or anything like that in high school or junior high school.”

Caruthers decided if were going to get anywhere in life, the military was his only avenue.

“I started thinking about what I’d do after high school and thought I would join the military,” he said. “The kids who were living decent lives had fathers who were career military. I thought that’s what I wanted to do.”

While Caruthers was struggling to overcome shyness and difficulties in the classroom, his athletic ability ultimately pushed him in a different direction.

As a junior, Caruthers played defensive end on Santa Ana Valley’s unbeaten (12-0) 1961 Southern Section 3-A championship team, led by running back Charlie Shaw. He also was a starting center on the Freeway League championship basketball team and high jumped a best of 6-3 for the league champion track and field team.

As a senior, Caruthers, a 6-4, 190-pound defensive end, was first-team All-Orange County in football, second-team All-Freeway League in basketball and was an All-American in track and field. He won the high jump at the State meet in Berkeley with a leap of 6-8 1/2, the best high school mark in the nation that season.

“It made me feel real good,” Caruthers said. “Still, track and field wasn’t something I considered for the future. I thought football would get me further in life, and second was the military. I wasn’t doing that well (in the classroom) in high school. If you’re not doing well in high school, how can you expect to do well in college?”

Caruthers’ future, however, would include soaring over the crossbar against the world’s elite high-jumpers, not low crawling underneath barbed wire on a military training base.

Caruthers enrolled at Santa Ana College (now Rancho Santiago) in 1963. He played football but almost fell by the wayside after the Dons’ dismal 3-5-1 season.

“It almost caused me to drop out,” Caruthers said. “My grades that first semester were not that great. My coaches, counselors and teachers were really trying to help me out. I was going to class, but I wasn’t getting it. I didn’t know how to study. I wasn’t focusing in that much.”

After forgoing basketball, Caruthers’ fortunes in the high jump started to rise again. He managed to maintain his eligibility for track and field at Santa Ana and jumped 6-10 at the Mt. San Antonio College Relays in 1964. But his pivotal meet was the Compton Relays, where he cleared 7 feet for the first time and defeated Charlie Dumas and John Thomas, the 1960 Olympic silver medalist.

“I was just walking on Cloud 9,” Caruthers said. “I said to myself, ‘God, I’m pretty good.’ I could hear my coach (Orville Nellestein) yelling from 10 blocks away.”

Caruthers won the State community college championship, then went to New Brunswick, N.J., and won the 1964 National AAU championship at 7-1. Suddenly, a 19-year-old freshman from Santa Ana was an Olympic prospect. At the final Olympic trials at the L.A. Coliseum, Caruthers placed first at 6-11, clinching a spot on the team.

“When I was in the Olympic Village in Tokyo, it was like I’m here, but I’m not here,” Caruthers said. “This can’t be me. I should be in the military, in boot camp someplace.”

After socializing for a week with the other athletes in the disco and the dining hall, Caruthers discovered he had gained 10 pounds. With competition only a day away, he went on a crash diet. He finished eighth with a leap of only 6-10 1/2.

“If I would have had a coach who would have prepared me more for that, my results at Tokyo would have been different,” Caruthers said. “The coaches were good, but I needed someone to tell me what to do (for preparation). I was too young. But the experience made me much more ready for the next one.”

Caruthers missed the 1964 fall semester--and football--because of the Olympics, but his successful athletic career accelerated in 1965. Santa Ana won the State community college track and field championship, and Caruthers set a national community college record of 7-1 3/4 that stood for 11 years. He finished second in the national championships at 7-1 and was rated No. 4 in the world by Track & Field News. More important, he started improving in the classroom.

“I started coming around in the classroom,” he said. “I was studying more and becoming more focused. I had good enough grades to get into a lot of colleges.”

Caruthers transferred to Arizona but was ineligible to compete in 1966 because of the semester at Santa Ana he missed to compete in Tokyo.

In 1967, Caruthers won the NCAA indoor championship and tied for first at the NCAA outdoor championships in Provo, Utah, jumping 7-1 in each. At the National AAU meet in Bakersfield, he took second with a jump of 7-2. Caruthers then won the gold medal at the Pan American Games in Montreal with a record jump of 7-2 1/2, a mark that stood for 12 years.

He toured with the U.S. team in Europe and won every meet. Caruthers was on top of the high jump world.

The height of Caruthers’ career--a silver-medal performance at the 1968 Olympics--was also the beginning of the end of his high jumping.

Caruthers, who used the old straddle method, jumped his personal best of 7-3 3/4 in Mexico City. But he lost the gold medal to Oregon’s Dick Fosbury, inventor of the revolutionary Fosbury Flop, who jumped an Olympic record 7-4 1/2.

“(Fosbury) had never beaten me until the Olympics,” Caruthers said. “I had first seen Fosbury in 1966 using that style. He was doing about 6-8 or 6-10, and it didn’t look like it was going to be anything. But he was getting better and better. I could see he was perfecting this thing. The word out was that it was a dangerous thing to do. You needed foam (rubber) pits to land on the back of your head or neck.

“When he got that Olympic win, more people started trying it, and the foam pits started getting more affordable. Floppers have more speed coming in and less movement at the top of the bar than a straddler. There are more critical points for a straddler--the chest, the knee, the foot. A flopper just has to get his butt or his heel out of the way. The more I watched it and with the introduction of the portable foam pits, I saw the handwriting on the wall.”

Caruthers experimented with converting, but he was a confirmed straddler.

“I thought it was too late for me to convert,” he said. “I tried it a couple of times in practice, but it was too late for me. I was near the end of my career. I was 23 years old and you couldn’t make enough money (in track and field) in those days.”

Caruthers had played football at Arizona as a senior and was a 12th-round draft pick of the Detroit Lions in 1968, but he elected to compete in the Olympics. In 1969, Caruthers spent the season with the Lions, moving back and forth from the taxi squad. After a back injury, he retired and returned to Orange County, where he accepted a position with the Garden Grove school district.

Now living in Fullerton with two grown daughters--Jonne, 23, and Chara, 22 (he was divorced from his wife, Frankie, in 1982), Caruthers closely follows the Olympic movement. In 1984, he was a volunteer for the Olympic Spirit team, promoting the Los Angeles Games. He has also been involved in the Special Olympics.

Last month, Caruthers traveled to New Orleans to watch the U.S. Olympic track and field trials.

“It was the first Olympic trials I’ve been to since I competed in 1968,” he said. “I had a strong urge to go back. Things came back to me about the days I competed. It was disappointing that Dan O’Brien didn’t qualify, but it was exciting to see people make the team who weren’t expected to. It reminded me of ’64 when I came out of nowhere.”

Caruthers now finds his Olympian-type goals closer to home.

“The second greatest day of my life was June 13, 1992, watching my daughter, Chara, receiving her civil engineering degree at UCLA,” he said. “Jonne is working on her nursing credential.”

Getting them to that spot, he said, was an Olympic-sized challenge.

“One of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” he said “is raise two teen-aged daughters.”