Introduction

Tom Ecker was a teenager and needed a job. So he learned to balance an old push lawnmower on his chin, and people paid to see that.

Tom Ecker was put in charge of athletics programs in Iowa’s second largest public school district. He came up with a five-year plan to begin offering girls’ sports, showing the parents of daughters — and the nation — the way of the future.

Tom Ecker was captivated by word puzzles. So he created his own game, calling it Wuzzles, and spent the next fifteen years flogging the idea, trying to get someone to buy it. Finally, one newspaper did, then a syndicate. Thirty-five years later, the puzzles still are seen every day by millions of people around the world.

In reading this memoir, you’ll get to know a man who was a high school and college track star and who never quit running during his long, productive life.

You’ll meet the energetic showman who pursued challenges and packed enough living—and fun—into his eighty-plus years to merit a memoir twice the size of this one. In fact, the original manuscript was twice this long. An editor suggested it should be shortened, noting it was longer than President Bill Clinton’s memoir. “Well, I’m older than Clinton,” he shot back.

That’s our Tom, the toast on many a continent. He did cut the manuscript—with enough left over for a Volume II —but he still succeeds, in magnificent fashion, in summing up a life filled with energy, and accomplishment and a great deal of cleverness and wit.

This is the small-town Iowa boy who grew up to visit sixty-six countries on all seven Continents, who’s been at ten Olympic Games, leading tours to some, writing about others, and who, when he retired, figured out a way he and his wife, Carol, could cruise the world, for free.

This is the man who, as a college sophomore, bet a friend $10 he could hitchhike from Iowa City to South Carolina over the weekend and be back in time for class on Monday. He succeeded, of course, collecting the bet and a ton of news coverage along the way .

Ecker has those clippings, and thousands more, chronicling his adventures. He has the twenty-one books he’s written, the interviews and anthems he’s taped, the slides and pictures he’s taken. And, of course, the note a train conductor wrote for him in 1954 directing him to another train.

A history professor at Western Kentucky University, where Ecker transformed the track program, wrote this: “The renaissance of track and field came with the 1962 appointment of Tom Ecker, the twenty seven-year-old coach at Elizabethtown High School. Brash, energetic, unpredictable, and controversial, Ecker was a winner.”

Every life has its low points, and Ecker includes those, too, along with the surprising reason he has been able to get so much done. You’ll learn his thinking on religion—and the loss that prompted it—as well as his work on behalf of an Indian health clinic in rural Mexico. And you’ll find the mischief, the general merriment and creativity of clubs and bars, and a great story about an early, key moment with Bruce Jenner (now Caitlyn Jenner).

An attorney once called Ecker a Renaissance man. Ecker’s response:

“I’d rather not be something I can’t spell.”

Humor, love, and good jokes fill this joyful book but cannot disguise a life well and fully lived. It holds a takeaway for all of us: Grab life and wring every bit of laughter and fun out of it that you can, all while working hard and following that long brown path wherever you choose.

Mary Sharp
Cedar Rapids, Iowa
October 2019