Lebanon
Then one weekend Matte was chugging through an Upper Valley road race and heard footsteps and hard breathing behind him. Next thing Matte knew, a compact man with a familiar short-cropped, salt-and-pepper haircut and wire-rimmed glasses materialized at his side and just as abruptly vanished up ahead.
“Until then, I had no idea Doug was a great runner,” Matte recalled last week. “I was 33, 34 years old and he had to be in his 60s, and he went by me so fast. I was so stunned.”
The Upper Valley and New Hampshire running fraternities shared a word for Matte’s experience, during the stretch between the late 1980s and the early part of this century, when MacGregor established multiple age-group records for masters runners at several distances, many of which stand to this day.
“We used to call it being ‘MacGregorized,’ ” said Dave Faucher, of West Lebanon, a former Dartmouth College men’s basketball coach. “A lot of us who were younger and generally a little faster might be having a tough day at a race, and the worst thing you ever wanted to do would be to hear that sound of him gaining on you: ‘Huh! Huh! Huh!’ You’d think, ‘Oh, no!’ because he was not going to let up. He just never stopped.”
Until Parkinson’s disease and, ultimately, bladder cancer caught up with MacGregor on Jan. 30, 11 days after his 78th birthday, his family, his fellow runners and community volunteers, his former students and his former teaching colleagues figured MacGregor just might go on forever.
“He had so much energy,” said Lebanon native Jim Vanier, longtime coordinator of the Carter Community Building’s youth programs and a student of MacGregor’s in eighth grade in the mid-1960s. “He never sat still. If the power went out, you could put him in a hamster cage and the lights would come back on. … In the classroom, it seemed like he was always moving. And you’d see him all around town at different events, especially sporting events. If you asked him to do something, he was always willing.”
At least as often, you didn’t need to ask, especially if you were taking junior-high science with him between 1964, the year MacGregor moved to town from his native Tilton, N.H., and the late 1990s, when he retired from teaching and began working part time as a custodian.
“When I got him in science in seventh grade (in the early 1970s), I knew some of my older friends had had him,” said Lebanon native Roger Carroll, now an editor for the Rutland Herald in central Vermont. “His reputation had preceded him. I probably even learned some things in his class. … I wasn’t terribly interested in school at that point in my life, but he was a good teacher. There was never any doubt that he was a kids-first guy.”
And even with his own growing children, son Paul and daughter Karen, MacGregor found time outside the classroom to help Carroll through a particularly rocky stretch of a difficult childhood.
Shortly before moving out of a group home, Carroll went to a New England Patriots’ football game with his foster father-to-be Jim Wechsler and with MacGregor. And over the ensuing winter, Carroll joined the intramural basketball team that MacGregor coached a couple of times a week.
“At the end of the year, we got to go to a tournament at Mascoma, which was a pretty big deal,” Carroll said. “We finished third in the division, and when the all-tournament team was announced and they called my name, I was as stunned by that as anything in my life, to this day. There was a picture of me and Doug and Teddy Hale that Jim put in the Granite State Gazette. I was pretty much conditioned by that point that that kind of thing happened to somebody else, so something was fundamentally different between my life after that photo and before. That was a life-changing moment, and Doug had everything to do with that.”
Ian Smith’s moment came during his eighth-grade year at the junior high, in the mid-1980s.
“One day Doug pulled me aside and was really letting me have it, giving me some perspective about needing to be a more considerate and kind young man,” said Smith, now principal of Lebanon High, from which he graduated in 1988. “It was a formative discussion, a one-sided discussion. I immediately recognized that this was serious business, that I needed to pay attention. He reminded me that the next year was going to be a different year for me at the high school. Even though he wasn’t my teacher, for him to notice that was pretty interesting, pretty impressive.”
MacGregor impressed his own children with his skill at managing his time, maybe more in retrospect than at the time.
“He just had a lot of energy, and it became kind of instilled,” Karen MacGregor, a 1991 graduate of Lebanon High School who now lives in her father’s hometown, recalled on Friday. “When you’re around it, it’s infectious. … We multi-tasked a lot. My brother played baseball and I played softball, and (Dad) made time for us with family practices. It helped that he was on the same school schedule as we were, and he had his vacations with us. So I don’t think we ever felt shorted in any way, sharing him with all these other people. At the same time, you don’t realize how spectacular this all is when you’re a kid, not until you’re a parent yourself.”
Around the time Karen was starting school and Paul, four years her elder, was making his way through the elementary system, MacGregor picked up an old habit.
In the mid-1950s, he’d led Tilton-Northfield High School to two state titles in cross country, then went on to excel for the University of New Hampshire.
Then for the better part of two decades, he banked his competitive fires while starting his teaching career at Sanborn Seminary in Kingston, N.H., then moving to Lebanon, where he married and started a family with his UNH sweetheart Olive Swan.
On the brink of 40, he started MacGregorizing his peers as if he’d never left.
“He used to come down to races in the southern part of the state, when I lived in Kingston,” Faucher said. “He always liked me, because we weren’t in the same age group. We were exactly 10 years apart, so I wasn’t trying to take anything away from him. Competitive? Competitive’s not the word. He finished races totally exhausted. There was nothing left in the tank when he finished. He just gave his all.”
MacGregor started smelling serious blood in 1987, running the Fred Hackett Autumn Run in 33 minutes, 54 seconds, a time that still stands as the record for 48-year-old Granite Staters at the distance of 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). A year later, his 34:35 at the same race became, and remains, the standard for 49-year-olds.
And after he turned 50 in January of 1989, the meter clicked and he dominated his division for the next decade and beyond. At five kilometers (3.1 miles), he remains the state record holder for ages 53 (16:57), 54 (16:57), 55 (16:35), 56 (16:35), 57 (16:55), 59 (17:41), 60 (18:15) and 65 (24:38).
MacGregor also holds eight age-group marks for eight kilometers (just short of five miles), seven for 10K, two at 12K (7.4 miles), two at 15K (9.3 miles), four at 10 miles and seven in the half marathon (13.1 miles).
“When he was in his 50s, his times were unbelievable,” said Faucher, whose sons Mike and Joe took science with MacGregor at the junior high and played basketball at the high school. “Unbelievable. He just loved to compete. People would see him in the classroom, such a nice guy, but when he got out there on the roads …”
And while he could talk running with fellow runners until the cows came home, MacGregor said little to nothing about his achievements with civilians.
At school and around town, he could hold forth with uncanny precision on the plants in the garden he and Olive maintained at their house in the Riverdale neighborhood, on pro-sports statistics, on his adopted city’s heritage as a member of Lebanon Historical Society, and on the protection of the planet in general and of Lebanon’s natural resources in particular as a member of the Sierra Club and of the city’s Conservation Commission.
“When I went back to Lebanon as a coach (in the mid-1990s), it was always special to see him at the table running the clock,” Carroll said. “I’d talk with him not because I had to, but because I wanted to. You always learned something from him.”
In addition to learning science from MacGregor in the classroom in grades 7 and 8 in the mid-1990s, Steve Reynolds learned how to win friends and influence people one observation and one compliment at a time.
“He’d watch our (junior high) games from the top balcony of the stands,” recalled Reynolds, a 1998 Lebanon High graduate now living in New Jersey. “He was kind of quiet, but always giving you a ‘great game’ or ‘tough loss’ afterward. He was always paying attention.”
And MacGregor didn’t forget after you moved to the high school.
“At our games, I would go to the scoring table, wipe my feet and say, ‘Gentlemen,’ to him and to (scorebook keeper) Bob Townshend. And he’d say, ‘Go get ‘em, Steve.’ He was always giving you little votes of confidence.”
Matte particularly treasures such moments from 1997-1998, his first season coaching the Lebanon boys. After the retirement of hoops legend Lang Metcalf, many in town and in the program had rooted for the hiring of a coach who’d grown up in Lebanon.
“It was pretty controversial at first, but there were a few people who were nice to me right at the start,” Matte said. “Jim Wechsler was one, and Doug MacGregor was definitely one of them. It helped because everybody knew him and respected him.”
Matte’s respect grew over the years.
“He loved to help,” Matte said. “He would do anything for any of the kids. He also wanted to be behind the scenes. He stayed away from the spotlight.”
For a guy who shunned attention, MacGregor drew throngs to the funeral-home calling hours on Feb. 3, and to a memorial service at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Upper Valley’s church in Norwich the next day.
“Doug’s son told us how hard Doug tried to get well enough to come see KJ (Matte’s son, then a Lebanon High junior) score his 1,000th point (in January 2016),” Kieth Matte said. “There were so many stories like that. You went to his service, and there’s so many people there, unbeknownst to everyone else, there was someone he knew, someone he’d touched in some way, someone he’d done something kind for and not told anyone else about.”
Among the mourners and celebrants who grew up in Lebanon, many couldn’t help observing that Doug MacGregor was among the last of a generation of mentors.
“I went over to CCB the day of the wake and talked with Jimmy Vanier and some of the kids,” Roger Carroll said. “After a while, I looked up, and it’s an hour and a half. The stories and the memories are so warm. That was a common thread among the guys of that generation — the Pat Walshes, the Lang Metcalfs, the Jim Wechslers. None of them was ever inclined to call attention to themselves. It was the same with Doug.
“He’s one of the people who makes Lebanon Lebanon.”
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304