NIGHT OF PRE'S DEATH CHANGED ONE MAN'S PERSPECTIVE.Byline: WHERE ARE THEY NOW By Bob Welch There are a number of famous people of this name including:
EDITOR'S NOTE Editor's Note (foaled in 1993 in Kentucky) is an American thoroughbred Stallion racehorse. He was sired by 1992 U.S. Champion 2 YO Colt Forty Niner, who in turn was a son of Champion sire Mr. Prospector and out of the mare, Beware Of The Cat. Trained by D. : "Where Are They Now?' is a Monday column that updates readers on local newsmakers from the past. Have ideas? E-mail Bob Welch at bwelch@guardnet.com. THEN: William Alvarado, 38 at the time, was the first one at the scene of the accident that killed distance-running great Steve Prefontaine Steve Roland Prefontaine (January 25, 1951 – May 30, 1975) (nicknamed Pre) was an American Olympic runner who inspired a running boom in the 1970s along with contemporaries Frank Shorter and Bill Rodgers. , 32 years ago this Wednesday. Prefontaine's 1973 MGB MGB Mini-Gastric Bypass MGB Minor Groove Binder (molecular biology) MGB Manual Gearbox MGB Matthew Good Band MGB May God Bless MGB Medial Geniculate Body MGB Medium Girder Bridge MGB Motor Gun Boat MGB Microsoft Global Briefing had pinned him to the pavement. "I hate to say it, but I couldn't do anything," Alvarado told The Register-Guard in 1975. "I couldn't lift the car." NOW: Alvarado, struggling with diabetes, died in October in Oakridge at age 70. And died convinced that Pre had died not because he'd been drinking, which nobody disputes, but because another car forced his car into a rock embankment. "He was convinced of it," says the youngest of Alvarado's three sons, Jeff, now 46, then a 14-year-old Roosevelt Middle School student. The accident took place about 12:30 a.m. on May 30 on Hendricks Hill, only hours after Prefontaine had run the second-fastest 5,000-meter race in American history. The Alvarados lived in a house on Skyline Boulevard, just west of where Pre died. William Alvarado told The Register-Guard he heard a screech of brakes, then a "thunk In a PC, to execute the instructions required to switch between segmented addressing of memory and flat addressing. A thunk typically occurs when a 16-bit application is running in a 32-bit address space, and its 16-bit segmented address must be converted into a full 32-bit flat address. ." He raced outside, heard a car going up Skyline beyond his house, and gave chase in his own car, without seeing the vehicle. He circled around, then came upon the accident. His father died, Jeff says, believing that someone in a car turning right from Birch birch, common name for some members of the Betulaceae, a family of deciduous trees or shrubs bearing male and female flowers on separate plants, widely distributed in the Northern Hemisphere. Lane onto Skyline swung wide. "Pre saw the guy's headlights in his lane, swerved left to miss him and hit the rock embankment." At the time, William Alvarado worked in advertising sales for The Register-Guard. Jeff wonders if Pre's death was something of "an epiphany Epiphany (ĭpĭf`ənē) [Gr.,=showing], a prime Christian feast, celebrated Jan. 6, called also Twelfth Day or Little Christmas. Its eve is Twelfth Night. " for him about life being short. He'd always wanted to run his own restaurant, and soon after the accident quit his job and opened a restaurant on Willamette Street called the Quarter Deck. He later divorced and moved to Mexico. He bought, remodeled and reopened a resort hotel. And remarried. He moved back to Oregon about four years ago, said Jeff, settling in Oakridge. He died Oct. 18, 2006. |
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