High School Football: Ed Laulainen's legacy looms larger than the stadium bearing his name
Saying Goodbye – Kelso continues paying tribute to Hall of Fame coach who put K-Town back on the map
Sam Barbee for Blast Zone Media / blastzonenews@gmail.com
High School Football / In Memory
There was a stillness that hung over Tam O’Shanter Park.
Named for a Scottish hero (or the obviously Scottish cap that is named for him), the park is about as Kelso as Kelso gets. Nestled right up tight against the Coweeman River, it touches the high school baseball, softball and the football fields, the last of which dominates in collective identity of the town.
Across a picnic table sat Pat Hymes, the man who had the honor (see: challenge) of replacing Ed Laulainen as coach of the Kelso High School football program, to talk about a man who he called his best friend; but also so much more.
Dad. Mentor. Boss.
“My wife went through some real serious medical things and, shoot, the guy who comes is Ed,” Hymes said. “Ed brought the dinners. I mean, he cares. And I think that’s probably the piece that most individuals didn’t see.”
Ed Laulainen died on Sept. 22, at the age of 88.
And so a conversation that began with smiles and laughs turned into an emotional one. Loss and grief pick their spots to manifest, and you never know when they’re going to arrive.
And boy, did the emotions arise.
Still, through all of the grief, there is something poetic about the last couple of weeks. Loss is never easy, but it can be made tolerable. It can fit into a larger context, one that gives meaning and support and, in a strange way, some gratification.
When a legend goes, the legend grows. It’s impossible to miss. It looms and it hovers and lurks, but never nefariously. At least this one didn’t. It’s a reminder, not a threat. A connection point. An indication of a shared reality that spans decades, giving generations of people something to which they can relate.
The word we’re looking for here is culture. Shared beliefs and rituals. It’s almost a religion. If you add in football, it certainly comes close to fitting the description in Kelso.
“From my perspective, his fingerprints are still on this program,” current Kelso head coach Darin Gardner said. “Stepping into this position, it’s a whole heck of a lot easier to try to maintain culture than it is to build culture from the ground up. And everything that we know about the culture here stems from Coach Laulainen. So yeah, it’s an emotional time.”
This story is about a football coach. The football coach, if we’re being honest. And the game Ed Laulainen loved was woven into this story like laces on a football. Because it is impossible for most, if not everyone who knew him, to separate the coach from the man.
In the days following Laulainen’s death there were two high profile visits from old Hilanders to Kelso football practice. The news hung over like a fog, and there were logistics to consider as plan went into the works for a series of memorials and tributes.
There were middle school football games to plan around, there were professional football games to plan around, and there were high school games to plan around. And there were other former Hilanders to remember in the meantime.
At every step, football was present. At every step, there was the game central to the little logging town straddling the Cowlitz River was present. Kelso’s first play from scrimmage after his death, ran with wide receivers and running backs in three-point stances, nearly went for a touchdown on the ground. And the home crowd roared.
Everywhere there was football. The town uses that field, and that stadium, as hallowed ground. It’s a place to grieve. It’s the funeral yard. It’s where you go when you need to be together, when you need the people at your elbows to be there with you, to do the same thing as you — cheer on the Scotties.
That’s how grief is done where the Coweeman River bends around the base of Mt. Brynion.
And Coach Laulainen wouldn’t have had it any other way.
But football has always been a mechanism through which we arrive at larger, more important ideas. Under proper instruction, it can be the mode, the medium, the engine that drives the car of a person’s life. Or so the philosophy goes.
So much of the thoughts given for this story surround which word to use, which word is best, which word captures the idea I’m trying to express. It’s the nature of language, and especially the nature of this one.
But certain words kept coming up. Repeatedly. These are the ideas that matter. The ones that have created something so special that’s it’s remained a constant in K-Town, essentially unchanged for half a century.
Why is Kelso football the way that it is? Why, after all these years, do people still care so much about a man who stepped away from the sideline in 1995?
Let’s find out. Together. As he would’ve wanted.
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