Larry Colton

Here is Larry Colton’s MLC story as told to Jevan Williams:

I played the 1970 baseball season in Tacoma for the AAA Cubs team; the season ended, I was getting divorced, and my wife and daughter were living in Seattle. I didn’t want to live in Seattle but wanted to be nearby so I could see my daughter, and Portland was the next stop on the map. So without really knowing anyone, I moved there; initially I stayed at the Heathman Hotel because that's where we stayed when we played in Portland. I didn’t know my way around and just looked at the ads in the Oregonian and found a little one-bedroom house in Garden Home.

One day I think toward the end of September or early October I was sitting and reading at the Forecourt Fountain and a woman came up to me and we started talking. I got to know her over the next couple of weeks but I don’t remember her name now. One day we were talking about what I wanted to do and I said I was interested in education. One thing led to another and she told me you’ve got to see this place MLC that’s sort of like Summerhill. So, we went off to see MLC. We didn’t check in or anything. We were wandering around the halls seeing kids running wild and we ran into Abe Bialostosky who said something like “What are you doing here?” And when I said I was interested in education and we were just looking around, Abe said, come with me, and he took me to Amasa Gilman’s principal’s office. I talked to Amasa for a while and he said I think you should be an aide here.

Now I had no qualifications; I had graduated from Cal-Berkeley and had been a professional baseball player, but I didn’t know anything about teaching or curriculum. I didn’t walk into MLC looking for a job, but I didn’t have anything to do until baseball season. Amasa said, well, I think you should be our PE teacher; we need a PE teacher. My memory is that I started the next day, but it could have been the next Monday. Anyway, I started right away. I didn’t really know anything about anything but there I was and it was kind of a student-led experience; mostly we played prison ball [Editor’s note: we also played other versions of dodgeball; I specifically remember benchball and soak 'em, but it was the same general game]. And of course, you and some others liked to play basketball too.

Now at MLC we had students K through 12 with all sorts of abilities. Sometimes some of the older and more athletic students would get a bit carried away and start throwing hard at little kids. That kind of pissed me off, so sometimes I would jump into the game, and remember, I was a professional baseball player and still had a 98-mile-an-hour fastball. I wouldn’t really throw at people, but just over their heads or right at their feet. I would make it clear that it wasn’t going to work for them to bully kids in the gym because I could throw at them the same way and harder.

MLC was a fun time for me. I moved to a little flat at 21st and Glisan, so it was just across the street to go to work. I was only at MLC for maybe six or seven months but I remember a lot of the kids. The little kids were cute and some of the older kids were decent athletes. I had shoulder surgery sometime that year and I remember lots of MLC people visiting me in the hospital. I was still covered by my MLB insurance, which was good because I was only making something like $300 a month at MLC. PE and athletics were barely a thing there. I don’t think I ever taught any classes at MLC, but I went on a couple of field trips, maybe Eagle Creek for a picnic or something.

Thumbnail: Larry Colton in a recent promo shot.

IN ANY BIOGRAPHY of Larry Colton, his less than a full school year at MLC barely rates as a footnote. However he is fondly remembered, had an outsized impact—and the story he tells me here reveals that the moment he set foot in MLC was a moment that divided his life in half.

I could be wrong, but I believe I was the first student Larry encountered on the job. I had a key to get in and shoot baskets before Base Station and I ran into this guy opening the cabinet the balls were in. I said something along the lines of “Who are you?” and got “I’m Larry, I’m the new PE teacher” or maybe, “I’m Larry, who the hell are you?” After that, I have only fond memories of Larry as a teacher and storyteller. He was good at recounting the stories (PG-rated versions of them) that would become his book Goat Brothers. He certainly wasn’t in the traditional mold of “PE teacher,” but he was perfect for MLC in 1970-71. – Jevan Williams

A brief biography of Larry Colton:

According to the excellent baseball bio on the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) website, Larry Colton identifies with Dr. Archibald "Moonlight" Graham in the film Field of Dreams, whose professional baseball career lasted one day, just like Larry's in the majors. Asked what it was like to get that close to his dreams, Graham says it would have been a bigger tragedy if he’d only been a doctor for a day. “I’m much like that,” Larry told a Portland Art Museum crowd in 2015. “I was also a one-game wonder but it would have been a tragedy if I’d only been able to be a writer for one day."

Larry is the author of five books: Idol Time (1978, about the Blazers); Goat Brothers (the acclaimed 1993 account of his own and Cal fraternity brothers' younger lives, a Book of the Month Club selection); Counting Coup (2000, a Pulitzer nominee about life and basketball on the Crow Indian reservation); No Ordinary Joes (2010, about four survivors of a World War II prison camp); and Southern League (2013, about desegregation of the 1964 AA-baseball Birmingham Barons).

He is working on his sixth book, a follow-up to Counting Coup, a memoir of his reunion with its subject, tentatively titled Last Stand.

Born in 1942 in the LA suburb of Westchester, Larry Colton grew up there playing baseball and basketball. In 1958, he and his dad attended the first Dodgers game ever played in LA. With a full-ride baseball scholarship to the University of California at Berkeley, Larry graduated in 1964 and played professional ball for six years. This included his legendarily brief stint with the Philadelphia Phillies, revealed in the SABR bio to have been cut short by an injury in a fight—standing up for a friend.

The writing career that followed his baseball career, his teaching career, and a marketing stint at Nike, in addition to the books, generated hundreds of national magazine articles in Esquire, New York Times Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Ladies Home Journal, and elsewhere.

Larry is featured in the two movies he mentions above, notably riding bikes to the Oregon Coast with Bill Walton: Fast Break (1978), described by Willamette Week in 2018 as "trippy," and The Luckiest Guy in the World (2023), an ESPN 30 for 30 docuseries directed by Steve James (Hoop Dreams) that dives deep into Walton's hippie-and-bicycle-riding days in Portland, his love for the Grateful Dead, and his basketball career. Larry also appears in The Battered Bastards of Baseball, a 2014 documentary about the Mavericks.

Still living in Portland, locally Larry is particularly beloved as the founder and one-time director of the Community of Writers (1997), a nonprofit improving writing instruction and student achievement in Oregon schools, and of Wordstock (2005), the acclaimed annual literary extravaganza now known as The Portland Book Festival and operated by Portland Literary Arts.

Fascinating additional biographical information (Larry is very present online) can be found on his Wikpedia page, on his professional website, in this 2010 review of No Ordinary Joes by his golfing pal John Strawn, and in this wonderful June 2024 reminiscence by Larry himself, with an introduction by Willamette Week's Aaron Mesh.

He called me Peppermint, and made me, a very quiet, awkward kid, feel seen. – Patty McDevitt

I remember when his students and MLC parents went to visit him in the hospital when he had his shoulder surgery. Check out the documentary about the Mavericks, The Battered Bastards of Baseball. – Jacqueline Hoyt

Larry and I had lunch duty together on the playground at MLC. He was a great guy to work with. I remember his connection with baseball. – Michele Earley

I recall he hurt his arm in an after-hours brawl after playing ONE GAME with the Phillies, bless him, which helped make him humble and droll. He, his girlfriend Susan Morse, Lee Gordon and I did an overnight backpack up Eagle Creek; he was kind and funny. I remember him resting at our creekside lunch stop with his head downhill so blood would flow to it. Last time I saw him was at a book signing for Counting Coup. I think his Wordstock evolved into today's Literary Arts. – Sam Lowry

Larry wrote the script for Pillars of Portland. He came over to my place to watch the show, which was on CBS during prime time. We were so disappointed with the result. – John Morrison

Hello Larry. I have only good memories of you. You were my English teacher at John Adams. I was probably one of your worst students. It is good to know you are still above ground. – Nelson Daggett

My one memory of Larry Colton was him coming on an MLC field trip to Eagle Creek. He told me and other kids of his baseball days and I remember him throwing rocks from the bottom of the creek at High Bridge to what seemed to me an impossible height. I also remember David Chelsea's mom going down the rapids below High Bridge. – Lee Gordon

I certainly remember the name and I know I had a few conversations with him; once we were standing outside what is now the library on the first floor talking about pets and animals. – Dave Borden

Love Larry! He helped me with a writing project I was working on years ago. One day I took him to a spin cycle exercise class. He rode through it like a champ! It was funny! – Drew Hedges

I loved Larry Colton. – Barbara Mutnick

Toward the end of the school year my shoulder was healed and it was time for me to head back to baseball. I was still under contract for professional ball. I'd had the shoulder surgery so missed Spring training, but I was healed by the end of April and the Cubs told me to report to AAA Tacoma to start the season. The day before I was going to leave, I was at MLC, in the teachers’ lounge, and I told someone I was getting ready to take off but my idea was to play professional baseball to make money to get my teaching certificate [Editor’s note: the money you could make playing professional sports was different in those days!]. A guy named Roscoe Gerard was listening in; I think he taught at Couch, and he told me about a program where you'd get your teaching certificate while you were teaching, earning 2/3 pay and a year of teaching credit.

I thought that sounded like the greatest thing in the world and I looked into it. They told me they weren’t accepting applications until Fall and I thought, okay, I’m gonna have to go play baseball. I was leaving the next day. I called and talked to the guy in charge of the program; he told me they weren’t accepting applications for the 1971 program yet, but I could apply later, like in May.

I went home to my little flat on Glisan. I had a typewriter and typed a letter to the program. It was called B2 and was for minority teachers, but I was persistent enough to try anyway. My car was packed to move to Tacoma. I went to John Adams High School where the program was based and I talked to the guy in charge and gave him my letter. He said the Board is going to look at applications and talk about things and I’m gonna bring up your letter. I told him I was driving up to Tacoma the next day and he said okay give me a call in the afternoon. My letter was all about how much I wanted to quit professional baseball and become a teacher.

The next day, I headed up the road to Tacoma. When I got to the ballpark, I knew there was a payphone down the right-field line so I didn’t even go to the locker room or anything. I called him and he said he'd showed my letter to a couple of other guys and they wanted to accept me into the program. I was so f***ing excited! I didn’t want to play anymore, but I'd needed to make money to go become a teacher. I literally walked from the payphone into the manager’s office. He was sitting at his desk. I told him I wasn’t going to play anymore and I was going to be a teacher. At that point, as you might remember from MLC, I had long hair and a beard and kind of looked like a hippie, and in those days, you couldn’t have long hair as a baseball player, but I hadn’t cut my hair or shaved yet and the manager was kind of a military guy and I think he thought I was a malcontent and was kind of relieved to see me go.

I drove back to Portland and was able to move back in because they hadn’t rented my flat yet because I'd only been gone a day. So, I went through the program and got assigned to teach at John Adams, maybe because I had experience with an alternative school, MLC. I taught at Adams during the program and met people and they decided to hire me as a full-time teacher after my year of studies.

So then I had summers free and one summer I joined up with the Portland Mavericks baseball team and that was something else. I pitched a few games, not very well, but I was hitting well and they made me the designated hitter and I was hitting very well, better than ever, and leading the team in batting average. I thought it was great and then we were on the road in Walla Walla and the manager Frank Peters called me into his hotel room. I thought maybe a major-league team wanted to sign me or something. Frank said, hey we’re releasing you. And I was like, what? I’m leading the team in batting. And he said well, the rules only allow us to have one player who played Major League ball and we just signed this new guy, Jim Bouton. Now Jim was a much better pitcher than I was in his Major League career, but then he wrote the book Ball Four and was blacklisted. Of course the Mavericks were the Mavericks and they didn’t care, so Jim Bouton became their ex-Major-Leaguer and I got sent home to Portland. I said to Peters, okay, how do I get home? And he had a girlfriend there who had a car and she loaned me her car to get home.

I wrote an article for the Oregonian about my time with the Mavericks and got paid a few bucks and then they, the Willamette Week, and other places started asking me to write other pieces and all of a sudden I’m a freelance writer making more money than the Mavericks paid. It’s funny that after the Oregonian published my first-person account of being a teacher and washed-up ballplayer hoping to resurrect the glory of my youth, it led to regularly publishing articles on a wide variety of subjects.

At that time the Blazers were at their peak and I started hanging around with them, Bill Walton and others, and I ended up writing a book about their 1976-77 season called Idol Time and a couple of weeks after they won the NBA championship I got filmed riding bikes to the Oregon coast with Walton and that became the film Fast Break and later The Luckiest Guy in the World. I was still teaching at Adams but when I started writing a book called Goat Brothers and got an advance, I decided it was time to be a full-time writer.

And so I quit my “lucrative” $9000-a-year teaching position with benefits, a move that may not have made sense at the time, considering I had a young family, had never taken a writing class and flunked dumbbell English at Cal Berkeley. But writing worked out okay for me. My books have been optioned as movies that didn't work out, but I have a nice house and guess if I’d made it as a screenwriter I’d have a nicer house, in the West Hills. Oh, well! I have a great life, and I love writing.

Philadelphia baseball card; at home, late '60s.

From Larry Colton's June 2024 article in the Willamette Week, detailing his time with Bill Walton and the 1976-77 Portland Trailblazers, featured in the 2023 film The Luckiest Guy in the World.

Larry with the Mavericks,1975, looking, as he has been known to put it, "like Charles Manson."

Former MLC students and co-workers' recollections!

Larry was a gifted teacher. He always knew when it was time to play baseball during English class! He was also the “burn” master: you paid the price if you got too lippy during his classes! He taught a class, “Death and Dying,” while at Adams, teaching in [the] Quincy [alternative program]; he had invited Steven Weed, his college roommate, also Patty Hearst’s boyfriend at the time she was abducted, as a guest speaker; unfortunately the FBI escorts were too much for the school board, so it was blocked. – Charles Barton

He had a baseball card of himself. He pitched for Philadelphia, I believe, before injuring his shoulder. Larry was my next-door neighbor. He took me to a Portland Beavers baseball game once. He knew the players and one of them tossed me a baseball. He is a good guy. See Larry in the Netflix documentary The Battered Bastards of Baseball. You’ll be glad you did. – Don Francis

The second book, which made his career; dedication in a copy of his third book.