A City Loses One of Its Best Friends

Don Klosterman, former Los Angeles Ram general manager, died Wednesday morning at Cedar-Sinai Medical Center a few days after suffering a heart attack. He was 70.

Klosterman was much more than a former football executive. He was a Los Angeles sports institution, and not only because he was an All-American quarterback at Loyola who led the nation in passing in 1951 and later a backup to Bob Waterfield and Norm Van Brocklin on the Rams of the mid-1950s.

Klosterman’s countless friendships are what made him stand out. It seemed he literally knew everyone, and everyone knew him.

“He was a friend to everyone from the lowly to the mighty,” said Eddie Merrins, the longtime golf pro at Bel-Air Country Club, where Klosterman was a member since 1974 and the greens committee chairman the last 10 years. “He was loved and admired by everyone he came in contact with.”

Robert Kennedy’s widow, Ethel Kennedy, whom Klosterman met through his good friend Frank Gifford, was among those who called Klosterman a dear friend.

Jim Mahoney, the legendary Hollywood publicist, said, “When I think of the word friend, I think of Don. He wasn’t one of my best friends, he was my best friend.

“We played golf two or three times a week, and when we weren’t playing golf, we talked on the phone four or five times a day. He’d call and say, ‘Turn on Channel 7 or Channel 6 or whatever,’ and hang up. And I’d do the same.”

Mahoney visited Klosterman in the hospital Tuesday night.

“He was not responsive,” Mahoney said. “He was in a coma.”

Klosterman was injured in a skiing accident in 1957 and was hospitalized for a year. He was paralyzed from the waist down but somehow managed to walk again, albeit unsteadily and with a cane.

The injury weakened his heart, and he first had heart surgery in 1976. Six weeks ago he had major bypass and valve heart surgery.

“I’ve got a 7:40 tee time,” he told a friend the night before the surgery, cheerful as always.

Klosterman seemed on the way to recovery. He had visited Bel-Air and told his friends there that it would be a few more weeks before he could play golf.

Mahoney said Klosterman, along with a couple of friends, went to a high-rise condominium in West Hollywood on Sunday morning to pick up some clothes from a friend in the clothing business. On his way out of the building, Klosterman got stuck in an elevator.

“I’m sure that was a stressful situation,” Mahoney said. “From my understanding, when they got the elevator going, it went down to the basement and he had to walk back up a couple of flights of stairs.”

That’s when he had the heart attack. He was taken to Cedar-Sinai but never regained consciousness.

Klosterman’s two adopted children, Kirk, 38, an executive with a limousine service in Bevery Hills, and Katie Fenton, 37, who along with husband Richard is in the restaurant business in Bath, England, were among the family members at Klosterman’s side when he died at 1:15 a.m. Wednesday.

Fenton came to Los Angeles to nurse her father after his surgery. She returned home about a week ago, then came back to Los Angeles on Sunday.

The news of Klosterman’s heart attack spread among his many friends.

Gifford was one of his closest, first getting to know Klosterman when both were high school football stars, Gifford in Bakersfield and Klosterman in Compton.

“We were in the same class,” Gifford said. “Later, we hung out together when I was at USC and he was at Loyola. But what solidified our friendship was when we roomed together at the [1951] East-West Shrine Game, where we started in the same backfield.”

In 1976, Gifford wrote a book, “Gifford on Courage,” about the 10 most courageous athletes he knew, including Klosterman.

“Don may have been the most courageous person I’ve ever known,” Gifford said Wednesday. “When I wrote the book, I interviewed his doctors and learned firsthand what he went through. I think I’m a pretty tough guy, a gutsy guy, but I couldn’t have handled what he went through.

“Whenever I get down, when things in my life aren’t going well, I always think of Don and what he’s been through.

“Don was a great guy who made everyone around him feel better. He could light up a room just by walking in.”

Almost as close to Klosterman was Gifford’s former “Monday Night Football” partner, Al Michaels, who was among Klosterman’s Bel-Air golfing buddies.

“Don was dealt a bad hand early on, but it made him one of the toughest men on the planet,” Michaels said. “Still, he had a heart of gold and a hall of fame sense of humor. God, will I miss laughing with him.”

Said Dick Crane, another friend: “He was the older brother I never had. He was bigger than life. He represented honesty, integrity and courage, all the virtues that made him the man he was. He was as good as it gets.”

Another close friend, former Times editor in chief Bill Thomas, said, “That was a horrible, debilitating injury that Don suffered [on the ski slopes], but in all the years I knew him he never complained.

“Only once do I recall him mentioning it. We were playing golf and I had a severe case of bursitis and was complaining all day. Finally, he said, ‘What are you complaining about? I’m the prince of pain.’ ”

Although the skiing accident left him with little strength in his legs, Klosterman maintained an 18 handicap.

A few years ago, he was playing at Bel-Air with Merrins when he had his best round ever, a 76.

Klosterman, a tremendous all-around athlete, was nearly a scratch golfer before his accident.

As a quarterback at Loyola, in the years when the Lions played a big-time football schedule, he set NCAA marks for passes thrown (63), passes completed (33) and yards gained in one game (373) against Florida in 1951.

That year, in a nine-game season, Klosterman completed 54.6% of his passes for 1,582 yards and 19 touchdowns. One of his receivers that year was future NFL star Gene Brito.

At Loyola, he carried the nickname “The Duke of Del Rey.”

In later years, friends called him the “Duke of Dining Out” because of his penchant for having dinner with celebrities.

In 1952, he was the Cleveland Browns’ third-round draft pick.

He was luckless in the NFL. First, he found himself behind Otto Graham at Cleveland, then later behind Waterfield and Van Brocklin with the Rams.

After six weeks, Cleveland traded Klosterman to the Dallas Texans, who then shipped him to the Rams. He played in two games for the Rams, then departed for Calgary of the Canadian League in 1953.

It was while he was playing in the CFL that Klosterman had his skiing accident near Banff.

A woman skier fell in front of him, and Klosterman, trying to avoid her and spare her serious injury, sailed off a cliff. He suffered a broken back, a broken leg and numerous broken ribs.

He underwent eight surgeries and became so ill while suffering from two staph infections that he was given last rites three times within 16 months.

Klosterman often told the story of the doctor who entered his room one day to tell him he’d never walk again.

“I picked up a flower vase and as he was running out of the room I hit him in the back with it,” he said in a 1985 magazine interview. “My legs may have been paralyzed, but there was nothing wrong with my arm.”

It was several years before Klosterman walked again.

In 1959, he was well enough for former Notre Dame coach Frank Leahy to hire him as a player recruiter for the Los Angeles Chargers of the new American Football League.

He was the Houston Oilers’ general manager in 1966 and ran the 1970 Baltimore Colts, who won Super Bowl V. The next year, Colt owner Carroll Rosenbloom, in a no-cash swap, obtained the Rams from Robert Irsay, who had bought the team from the estate of the late Dan Reeves and ended up with the Colts.

Rosenbloom brought Klosterman to L.A. as executive vice president and general manager of the Rams. After Rosenbloom drowned in 1979, Klosterman’s relationship with Rosenbloom’s widow, Georgia, became rocky. It deteriorated to the point where he was eventually banned from the Rams’ practice facility.

In 1983, he became president of the USFL’s Los Angeles Express, but two years later that ended badly too, as it did for everyone connected with the short-lived league.

Klosterman signed Brigham Young rookie Steve Young to a $40-million contract in early 1984.

Klosterman was riding high then, freely spending the money of California financier and team owner William J. Oldenberg. But when Oldenberg’s company came under federal scrutiny in the spring of 1984, no more money came to Klosterman’s budget. Attendance was falling and the league took over Klosterman’s team, leaving him to recruit a new owner for a money-losing team and fighting off creditors at the same time.

In his later years, Klosterman was active in Loyola Marymount alumni affairs and the California Special Olympics.

Donald Clement Klosterman was born in Le Mars, Iowa, one of 15 children of a farmer, Clement Klosterman. According to Klosterman, the No. 12 child in the brood, when his father missed one payment in 1938 on his 1,200-acre farm, he was foreclosed by a bank and the family moved first to Whittier, then Compton, where his high school friends included Duke Snider and Pete Rozelle.

Funeral services will be held Monday at 10 a.m. at Loyola Marymount.

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In Reflection

The Rams under Don Klosterman as general manager:

*--*

Year Record Playoffs 1972 6- 7-1 None 1973 12- 3-0 First round 1974 11- 5-0 NFC title game 1975 13- 3-0 NFC title game 1976 11- 4-1 NFC title game 1977 10- 5-0 First round 1978 13- 5-0 NFC title game 1979 11- 8-0 Lost Super Bowl 1980 11- 6-0 First round 1981 6-10-0 None 1982 2- 7-0* None Totals 106-63-2 8 appearances

*--*

* strike-shortened season

Don Klosterman at Loyola

NCAA passing leaders in 1950s:

1950--Don Heinrich, Washington

1951--Don Klosterman, Loyola

1952--Don Heinrich, Washington

1953--Bob Garrett, Stanford

1954--Paul Larson, California

1955--George Welsh, Navy

1956--John Brodie, Stanford

1957--Ken Ford, Hardin-Simmons

1958--Buddy Humphrey, Baylor

1959--Dick Norman, Stanford