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Honor Dan Kelly

Written by Baker City Herald Editorial Board December 10, 2009 12:05 am

He was perhaps the most accomplished athlete ever to hail from Baker City, yet for decades hardly anyone here knew his name.

We didn’t.

Not until Gary Dielman, a local historian, offered us the story he wrote about this forgotten star who set world records in two events and won a silver medal in the Olympics in a third.

His name was Dan Kelly.

And now that his legacy has been revived thanks to Dielman’s work, it’s time for the city to honor Kelly’s achievements in a more permanent manner than a newspaper article.

At a minimum Kelly, who graduated from Baker High School in 1904, ought to have his name and photograph displayed on the wall outside the BHS gymnasium along with many other past Bulldogs.

Erecting a plaque in his memory at the BHS track would be appropriate, as well, since it was on the track where Kelly excelled.

Kelly has been a member of the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame since 1980. He was among the first group of nine track and field performers inducted into that Hall of Fame.

We shouldn’t, though, feel ashamed because Kelly’s exploits had over the decades slipped from the city’s collective memory.

More than a century has passed, after all, since Kelly, who competed for the University of Oregon, broke the world record in the 100-yard and 220-yard dashes during a track meet in Spokane on June 23, 1906.

During the summer of 1908 Kelly won the silver medal in the broad jump at the Olympic Games in London.

Although his victories garnered quite a lot of publicity in newspapers at the time, sports in general was hardly the international, multi-billion-dollar extravaganza that it is today.

There was of course no ESPN in 1906; no TV of any sort, come to that.

The relative insignificance of even a world-class athlete in those days is exemplified by what Kelly did after the Olympics.

He didn’t retire to a leisurely life bankrolled by product endorsements, ghostwritten memoirs and the occasional motivational speech fee.

Instead Kelly returned to Baker City to work in his father’s blacksmith shop.

Around 1918 Kelly went to work as a logger in British Columbia. There he contracted pneumonia, and died, on April 8, 1920.

Kelly was buried in his family’s plot in the Catholic Circle of Mount Hope Cemetery. That should not be the only lasting reminder of a local boy who for a time was best in the world.