Dr. Donald Holst

Dr. Donald Holst, 83, died Saturday, November 2, 2013 at Chadron, NE. A Celebration of Life Memorial Service will be 7 p.m., Monday, November 11, 2013 at Kinsley Mortuary Marysville, Kansas. By CON MARSHALL One of the Chadron area’s most colorful and talented individuals, Dr. Don Holst, died early Saturday, Nov. 2 at his home south of Chadron. He was 83. Holst had many interests and accomplishments. He had been an athlete, a Marine officer, a high school and college teacher, a coach, an artist and an author, among other things. In November 2007 when Holst was to speak at the Graves Lecture Series at CSC, the late Milton Wolf, director of the Reta King Library, introduced him as a “a Renaissance jock” and “an unusually gifted person.” Several friends have noted that Holst was definitely “unique.” He was outgoing, had definitive opinions and a wide cross-section of friends. Holst initially came to Chadron State in the fall of 1965 as the head track and field coach, assistant football coach and to teach physical education. He remained at the college through the 1972-73 school year, completed work on his doctorate in education at Montana State University the following year and served on the faculty at McKendree College at Lebanon, Ill., (near St. Louis) from 1975 until he retired in 1991. In 1999, Holst returned to the Chadron area and built a cabin near the City Reservoirs. “I came back to Chadron because I didn’t like being around the city. I loved this area for its beauty and I’ve always loved fishing,” Holst told a member of The Eagle, the Chadron State student newspaper, which ran a four-part series on his life in 2011. Holst was born and raised in Marysville, Kan., during an era he described as “ornery times” that included the Great Depression and World War II. He said at age 5 he began playing the drum in the city band directed by his grandfather. He was an outstanding high school athlete, helping the Marysville High School football team go undefeated in 28 games from 1944 through 1948. He also lettered all four years in both football and track and field at Emporia State University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1953. He was inducted into that school’s Athletic Hall of Fame in 2010. As he was graduating from college, Holst enlisted in the Marine Corps. After going through officer’s training, he was on active duty in Central America for two years and then remained in the reserves. He was the commanding officer of the Third Engineer Maintenance Company based in Lincoln and consisting of about 135 members early in his employment at Chadron State. Holst earned a master’s degree from the University of Missouri in 1957 and taught and coached at Northland College in Wisconsin and Midland Lutheran in Fremont before coming to CSC. All of the Eagles’ track and field records had been set during his eight years at the college when he left in 1973. He was known for some unusual training methods. Among them was pulling athletes while they held on to bicycle handlebars that were attached by ropes to his pickup as he drove it down the street. “I was one of those he pulled behind the pickup,” said Jack Needham, an Imperial native and now a minister in Arthur, Neb. “He asked me how could I expect to win a race if I had never run fast enough to get first. He was innovative and had some unusual ways of doing things. As far as I know there weren’t any other coaches like him. He made us work hard and it made us better men.” Needham has a special memory of one of Holst’s actions. It occurred at a meet in Rapid City when Needham was a senior in 1968. “He went to the pressbox and asked the public address announcer to tell the fans to focus on the long jump because Jack Needham of Chadron State was going to attempt a 24-foot long jump. The announcement was made and a few seconds later I jumped exactly that far. He told me afterwards he wished he’d had the announcer say 25 feet.” As it was, Needham’s jump was a school record for 32 years and is just 2.5 inches shy of the current CSC outdoor record. Another of Holst’s protégés was John Sides, a rancher at Smithwick, S.D. “He used some training methods that were ahead of the times,” said Sides, who set the CSC school record in the 880-yard run and the Nebraska College Conference Meet 440-yard record while Holst was his coach. “None of the other teams were warming up or stretching before they competed like we were at that time. Now all the teams do that. “I have so much respect for him and have always felt I owe him a lot,” Sides continued. “He demanded a lot and ever since then I have never known the meaning of the word ‘can’t’. He did some unconventional things, but they worked.” Needham and Sides recall that Holst took them to several indoor meets, a first for the CSC track and field team. “We either made the trips in one day or sometimes slept on a gym floor the night before the meet,” Sides added. “We always took sack lunches that the food service had packed for us. He was stretching the budget. It was quite an experience, but we appreciated the chance to compete during the winter.” In 1968 while he was at Chadron State, Holst spent a couple of weeks working with decathletes who were training for the U.S. Olympic team before returning to the college to help coach the football team. He also coached blind athletes at the International Games in New York in 1983 while he was at McKendree College. Also when he was at McKendree, Holst began conducting research for two books that he eventually published. The first was “American Men of Olympic Track and Field.” It was co-written by Marsha Popp, a McKendree colleague after Holst had traveled throughout the nation to interview 16 Olympians, including middle distance runners John Woodruff, Glenn Cunningham and Wes Santee, decathlon champions Bob Mathias and Bruce Jenner and high jumper Dick Fosbury. The second book was “Famous Football Players in Their Fourth Quarters.” It probed the lives of 19 renowned gridiron stars, including six Heisman Trophy winners and eleven players who earned all-pro honors. The interviews were conducted from 10 to 40 years after they had ended their football careers. “All of them were easy to talk to. I mostly just turned on the tape recorder and let them talk,” Holst said in a 2008 interview. “They told me how they got interested in sports, about the coaches who influenced them, what their parents thought about them playing sports and their lives after their playing days were over. Most of them also told how sports had helped them develop their philosophy about life.” Another of Holst’s endeavors was trying to keep what he called “Olympic oak trees” alive. He became interested in the trees while attending a reunion of the U.S.’s 1936 Olympic team in Columbus, Ohio, in 1986. He learned that the 24 Americans who won gold medals at the Olympics, which were in Berlin, also were given a small oak tree that was native to northern Germany. Holst’s immediate question was, “Where are these trees today?” He found that five of them in the U.S. were still alive, but that only one of them produced acorns. That tree belonged to John Woodruff, the 800-meter champion, and was planted at Woodruff’s high school in Connellsville, Pa. He eventually collected about 15 acorns from the tree, but he planted them just a few inches below the surface and squirrels dug up most of them. The next year, the school secretary sent him about 50 acorns from the tree and Holst grew about 35 seedlings, most of which he tried to transplant strategic locations involving athletics. Because of his efforts, Holst received the International Arbor Day Award from Arbor Lodge at Nebraska City in 1987. One of the seedlings was planted on the Chadron State campus, but it apparently was the victim of an insecticide used to control weeds in the adjacent lawn and did not survive. Later, Holst received hundreds of acorns that were produced by a tree that was given to Jack Lovelock, the 1500-meter champion from New Zealand. Although the first batch of about 600 was made sterile when they were sprayed by bromide at the California port where they arrived, he succeeded in getting several from a much smaller shipment to produce trees, including one that at last report was still flourishing at his acreage south of Chadron. After moving back to Chadron, Holst used his art talent produce a 3x6-foot oil painting of 38 cowboys from six states who gathered in Deadwood, S.D., in 1905 to board a train so they could attend Theodore Roosevelt’s inauguration. He sold the painting for more than $11,000 to the Wild West Casino in Deadwood and used the proceeds to help build the cabin that became his home. He also donated several oil and acrylic paintings that hang in classrooms in the Math and Science Building at CSC in memory of his friend, Dr. Ron Weedon, a professor of physical and life sciences at the college for nearly 40 years. In recent years, Holst had experienced heart problems and spent considerable time at Veterans’ Administration clinics and hospitals. He told a friend that he often tried to cheer up the patients by telling them jokes and stories. He was born April 24, 1930 to Elmer and Hilda Holst in Marysville. While they were seniors at Emporia State in 1953, Holst married Beverly Markel, who continues to live in Chadron. They have been divorced for 40 years, but remained friends. They had two children, Chris, a teacher at Metropolitan College in Omaha, and LeAnn Robbins and her husband Ron of Chadron. Other survivors include four grandchildren, Adrienne Lurvey of Lincoln, Jim C. Manternach of Rapid City, Joe Manternach and wife Kathleen of Chadron and Melissa Manternach of Chadron, three great-grandchildren and a sister, Joan Berg, of Rialto, Calif To order memorial trees or send flowers to the family in memory of Dr. Donald Holst, please visit our flower store.