An Olympian Friendship

John C. Argue entered my life in 1972. The Times had a notice that he was named president of the Southern California Committee for the Olympic Games and would seek the bid for the 1984 Olympic Games. I wrote him a note of congratulations.

My father, Bill Henry, who had been sports technical director and announcer at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics and president of the SCCOG, died in 1970. When Los Angeles lost the bid for the 1976 Olympics, he was devastated.

Occidental College opened the Bill Henry Room at the library in 1971. I published a collection of his articles and letters titled “Behind the Headlines With Bill Henry.”

John invited me for lunch. I gave him a copy of the book. He told me that his father, Clif Argue, had been a pentathlete at the 1924 Paris Olympics.

My father wrote “An Approved History of the Olympic Games” in 1933, published it in 1948 and donated the proceeds to the USOC to send athletes to the London Games. John said maybe we should update the book. He said he needed something to give to the IOC and USOC as part of the bid. I gathered four Occidental graduates who had been to various Olympics, assigned each one a chapter, and we wrote the book in 1976. Some 5,000 copies were published.

In 1979 David Puttnam, a movie producer, read about Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams competing in the 1924 Paris Games in the Bill Henry book, and “Chariots of Fire” was made. It won four Academy Awards, including best picture of 1981.

John was almost like a younger brother to me since 1972, 30 years of sharing the Olympic dream I will treasure forever.

Pat Henry Yeomans

Los Angeles