McCallum’s track record at EV falls after 49 years

For 49 years, Dave McCallum held the record for the fastest 3,200-meter run in the history of East Valley High School.

At the Washington high school championship track and field meet in 1966, held at the University of Washington, McCallum, an EV senior, ran 2 miles faster than he had ever run them before.

“I had worked hard training and my coach, Howard Dolphin, and I thought I could run pretty fast that day,” McCallum recalled. “We talked about it and we thought I could run the 2-mile in 9 minutes, 12 or 15 seconds. Something like that.”

McCallum loved to run. Growing up on the family farm in North Idaho, between Stateline and Post Falls, he would run just for the fun of running. Running the 5 miles to Post Falls Junior High was a breeze and he did it often.

It wasn’t until his family sold the farm and moved to the East Valley School District that he really got into running as a sport.

Running was having a field day in the 1960s. Gerry Lindgren was setting national records while running at Rogers High School, and he went from high school to the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 to run the 10,000 meters.

But Lindgren, the race favorite, sprained an ankle training and finished ninth that day, leaving the door open for one of the most incredible finishes in the history of running – Billy Mills sprinting from off the pace to capture the gold medal.

“I turned out for the track team and Howard came over to me the first or second day and told me, ‘You’re going to be the greatest distance runner this school has ever seen,’ ” McCallum recalled, laughing. “He just had a way of saying things like that to inspire you. I worked so hard to prove him right.”

And on that May afternoon in Seattle, McCallum had his chance.

“I ran against Gerry Lindgren when I was a sophomore and I had trained with him,” he said. “I ran against (national 2-mile record holder) Rick Riley when he was at Ferris. I’d worked hard and put in the time to be good.”  

He ran the first mile in good time, 4:36, and was on track to meet the target time he’d worked out with his coach, but on the next-to-last lap he heard something he’d never heard before on the track.

“I heard the guy calling out times say ‘8:06,’ ” McCallum said. “I’d never heard that kind of a number before – that was way faster than I’d ever run. It took me about 10 yards to fully realize what he’d said and I decided right then that I needed to run just as hard as I could the rest of the way. And I did. I ran the last lap in 61 seconds.”

McCallum’s winning time of 9:07 was one of the six fastest 2-mile times in the nation by a high school runner. Once the state did away with miles and yards and changed all its distances to meters, it was converted to a school-record 9:03.6 for 3,200 meters.

And it stayed on the board listing the school records in every event at East Valley through what was left of the Johnson administration, through Nixon and the Watergate years, watched Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush come and go and was well into the Obama administration before it was seriously challenged.

“I’d moved away and had been living near Olympia for a while,” McCallum said. “I moved back here not long ago.”

McCallum’s track career didn’t do much after high school, but his connections to the sport remained strong.

His best friend growing up was Jim McLachlan, the longtime track and cross country coach at West Valley who married Howard Dolphin’s daughter.

It turns out that East Valley had two young runners the team hoped would challenge the longest-standing record on the EV books, and they invited the record holder out to meet the young chargers.

“I came out and talked to both Chad (Stevens) and Scott (Kopczynski),” McCallum said. “They were really nice kids and they wanted to know all about the record.”

But when it came to the record, McCallum said he had only one piece of advice to share.

“I told both of them that it was a record: Just go out and break it!”

At the Shoreline Invitational meet in North Seattle, Kopczynski did just that, finishing third in a stellar 3,200-meter field with a time of 9:03.29, before going on to repeat as state Class 2A champion in the 1,600 and 3,200.

“I was invited to attend the track awards dinner after the season,” McCallum said. “A friend of mine put together a photo montage of me from 1966 as a background, with a picture of Scott running in the foreground.

“We gave that to him that night. I thought it was a very cool photo.”

And it’s a memory 49 years in the making.