My daughter Janet played basketball for him, and dearly loved him. One Christmas he gave her a toy suitcase, with a note saying he thought this might be helpful to her, since she got whistled so often for traveling with the basketball.
The late Claude Bradley told me of the time when Jim was teaching a math class and picked up a student, held him upside down by the ankles and said, “This is an example of an inverse fraction.”
The year my daughter played for him, he was coaching both the boys’ and the girls’ team. One day I asked him if there was much difference between the two.
“Not a whole lot,” he told me. “The main difference is that you have to remember when you substitute for a girl, you don’t pat her on the fanny when she comes back to the bench, and say ‘Good job!’ like you do with boys.”
He is a great man, who my daughter says was a tremendous influence in her life.
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