By Gary Fauber/assistant sports editor
Jerome Van Meter didn't just leave a lasting impression on the many athletes who benefited from his combination of benevolence and discipline.
And the man known simply as "Coach" to most everyone was not limited to good deeds on the field.
His giving nature expanded to other venues.
"Because of his childhood, he knew the importance of trying to help people," said Dr. Ellen Carter, pastor at First United Methodist Church in Beckley, during Van Meter's funeral Saturday.
More than 100 former players, family members and admirers gathered in the church to pay their final respects to Van Meter, who died Wednesday at The Greystone Inn in Beaver. He was 102.
The coaching legend won three state football championships and six basketball titles in nearly 30 years at Woodrow Wilson High School.
Carter said Van Meter's name was one of the first mentioned by the outgoing pastor when she arrived at the church.
"The first thing he did was take me to the Sunday school classroom downstairs and show me a picture and article about him," Carter recalled. "He said, 'If you haven't (met him), you must go at once and see him.'"
Van Meter and his wife, Aline, came to Beckley from Point Pleasant in 1929, and his involvement in the church was immediate. With the area, like the rest of the nation, feeling the harsh effects of the Great Depression, Van Meter became the chairman of the church's finance committee and helped it emerge from severe economic problems.
He also did all he could to help struggling families.
When Van Meter was a young boy, his father left their Illinois home for the California Gold Rush, never to return, so the man who would come to be known as the "Gray Eagle" always felt he could relate to those less fortunate.
"He took turkeys to those who had nothing," Carter said. "He said those turkeys were their Christmas."
Carter was not alone in remembering Van Meter.
Howard Hurt and Lew Webb - just two of Van Meter's many "boys," as he called his former players - gave tributes to their mentor and friend.
"He was a good friend, a dear friend for so many years," Webb said.
Webb also took the opportunity not only to remember Van Meter, but also to respect those who were close to him, some who even preceded him in death. Webb and Hurt both made special mention of Jack Groseclose, who passed away last year.
"We know he's waiting for Coach up there," Webb said.
Hurt admired how faithful Groseclose was to Van Meter.
"Jack did something we all should have done - he became Coach's son," Hurt said.
Webb also mentioned the late Jo Lee Daniels, who organized Van Meter's 100th birthday celebration at Daniel Vineyards in August 2000.
"He is either traveling around heaven with his wife, because they liked to travel, or at Captain D's eating oysters with Jack or dancing on his 100th birthday with Jo Lee," Hurt said.
Among those in attendance were former Woodrow basketball coach and current Mountain State University assistant Dave Barksdale, retired basketball official Pat Fragile and WJLS radio personality Bill O'Brien.
Also, Marshall University athletic director Bob Marcum was there to pay his respects. Van Meter indirectly helped out when Marcum, a Huntington native, went to Marshall in 1956.
"He (then-coach Herb Royer) kept talking to us about coach Van Meter, and so we told him, 'We played at Huntington High School, not Beckley,'" Marcum said.
"And he said, 'Well, he recommended you, and that's good enough for me.'"
Van Meter was buried later Saturday next to his wife in Point Pleasant, her hometown.
'I wish he could have been my real father'
The Register-Herald
April 27, 2003 | By Mannix Porterfield/REGISTER-HERALD REPORTER
Tears coursing down the cheeks of his normally happy-go-lucky face, Dwayne Wingler talked in somber tones about the greatest man in his storied athletic life.
For players like him, Jerome Van Meter was more than a no-nonsense coach of bigger-than-life status.
In a real sense, Van Meter was a surrogate father, not only to Wingler, but to many of his young charges left with a single parent by war or the perils of coal mining.
Driving back to Beckley - the City of Champions, a moniker born in the heyday of Van Meter and Co. - the reality of life, and death, finally set in. Wingler gave vent to his emotions.
"I thought, you know, how you daydream sometimes," he related, sitting on a couch at Melton Mortuary at Van Meter's wake Friday evening.
"You wish you had the biggest house in the neighborhood. You had plenty of money. You have all the material things. You'd be the greatest athlete ever."
All that, however, Wingler would have been willing to surrender for one change in fate.
"If I had one wish, if he could have been my real father, I'd let all that else go," Wingler said.
"It's OK to have those things. But I never had a real father. He was the closest I had."
Children can be cruel, at a young and insensitive age, and Wingler often felt the sting of his taunting peers.
"They'd say things like, 'Ha, Ha, Ha, you don't have a daddy,'" he recalled.
"Well, I took it serious. I said to my mother, 'One of these days when I grow up, I'm going to whip so and so's a--.' Then she'd whip me for saying that word."
Wingler never got even with his fists, but he certainly carved his niche in Woodrow Wilson High School athletic lore, all the while cementing a relationship with Van Meter closer than many of his classmates enjoyed with their natural fathers.
A court magician who often toyed with opponents, Wingler built a reputation that endures to this day. Van Meter considered him his finest all-around athlete.
Fan sentiment ran in two opposite poles - Beckleyans worshipped him, and opponents despised him with a relentless fury.
In fact, in Wingler's celebrated final season of 1953-54, Van Meter left his star pupil at home rather than face a hostile crowd in Mullens after a hard clash with the Rebels weeks earlier in Beckley. The worried coach actually feared someone would carry out one of many death threats.
But better than a Hollywood scriptwriter could devise, the two rivals squared off in the state championship game at Morgantown, and Wingler exacted his revenge.
He pumped in a then-record 44 points - and that was before fouling out in the final three minutes - to hand the Eagles their fourth straight basketball title.
Van Meter was all smiles, telling Wingler, "Well, you saved your best for last."
"I was determined to play my best for him," he said.
"He always brought out the best in a player. Playing for another coach, I probably would have been 50 or 60 percent. Since I wanted him to be my Dad, I played harder."
Van Meter and his wife, Aline, were childless, but the couple "adopted" his players across the years.
"My boys," he referred to them in a 1995 interview, even though by then many had succumbed to paunches and receding hair lines and were themselves doting grandfathers.
The venerable Gray Eagle had been a substitute father to others, among them Lew Webb, who forged one of the nation's largest car dealerships in Southern California.
"I lost my father when I was three," he said, weeping unabashedly at the wake. "He was the only real father I had."
To men like Wingler, there was no secret to Van Meter's ability to bond with players of that uncomplicated era. He meant what he said and never crawfished on his stated values.
"Athletes today make millions of dollars - tens of millions of dollars- but they don't have any respect for anybody," Wingler reflected.
Men of Van Meter's genre worked early on to instill enduring values.
"When I walked down the street, I never called anybody by their first name," Wingler said. "I called them Mr. Lewin, Mr. Lewis and Mr. Ragland - that was just the way we were brought up," he said. "That was the way we were brought up by teachers in grade school. If we didn't do it, we got disciplined very bad for it."
Wingler and Van Meter were an unlikely duo, given Wingler's cool, hip and worldly attitude and the coach's rock-ribbed conservative values. Yet, the chemistry was there.
Their first meeting appeared to set the tone.
After starring as an eighth-grader at the old Skelton Grade School, the versatile athlete advanced to the ninth grade, and Van Meter told him, "Dwayne, if you keep shooting that ball, you're going to play for me next year."
A sophomore starting varsity ball was virtually unheard of back then, but starting guard Bill Turner was sickened with the measles, opening the door for the young upstart.
"So me being cocky as I was, I said, 'I told you I could have been playing all year. That was no hard job.'"
Van Meter eyed Wingler up and down and shot back playfully, "I got two more years to put up with you, boy. Get out of here."
Wingler often returned to his hometown to check on Van Meter and look up other friends. In their last get-together late last summer, Van Meter seemed his old self.
Then came a call Wednesday from Howard Hurt, another one of the Gray Eagle's stars.
"You better get yourself up here to see Coach; he's been asking about you, and you haven't been up here in a few months," Hurt admonished.
While they spoke, the legend slipped into eternity.
"It didn't hit me until today (Friday) when I was coming in, emotionally, right now," Wingler, who now resides in Richmond, Va., said.
"You expect those things, but they don't actually hit until it's there."
At funeral home, colored photographs of Van Meter were placed around his casket, along with a familiar maroon jersey of the school he made famous.
And now, as one sage once observed about a fallen president, he belongs to the ages.
WWHS Field to be Renamed for Van Meter By Adam Treadway
REGISTER-HERALD REPORTER When the Woodrow Wilson High School football team moved into its new stadium in 1985, many were surprised a name synonymous with Beckley athletics didn’t come with it.
Now, 21 years later, the name has arrived.
The Raleigh County Board of Education voted unanimously Tuesday to rename Flying Eagle Stadium on the WWHS campus after the late Jerome Van Meter, who won three state championships in football and six in basketball during a 30-year coaching career at Woodrow that ended in 1959.
Van Meter died in 2003 at the age of 102. He is generally regarded as the greatest coach in West Virginia high school athletic history.
Van Meter’s name had been affixed to the 70-year-old field on Park Avenue formerly used by the Flying Eagles.
The high school — now Park Middle School — was next to the field until the current WWHS opened in 1967.
The Woodrow football team continued to play its home games there through the 1984 season.
Since then, the field was used by junior high and youth league teams until the school board closed the field to fans last August, saying the bleachers were not safe for spectators.
Future plans for the new Van Meter Stadium could include an artificial surface. With Beckley having a good location to host playoff games, turf would keep the field in good playing condition.
If the turf is purchased, Beckley could also bid for the state championship games.
The board also decided to name the entire sports facility at Woodrow Wilson the Flying Eagle Sports Complex.
Copied and pasted from The Register-Herald's web site, Wednesday, July 26, 2006.
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