REMEMBRANCES

Phil Kelsey 1938-2009

By Mike Waller

Several great athletes graced the playing fields of Durand High School in the 20^th Century but few were better or classier than Phil Kelsey, who died at age 71 recently in Chicago.

Phil, ever the quiet gentleman, was a superb all-around athlete, excelling at baseball, basketball, track and golf.

He was a terrific pitcher and he and his buddy Jerry Engelbrecht were the only seniors on the 1956-57 baseball team that had two juniors, six sophomores and four freshmen. The team finished the fall season with a record of four wins and one loss, tying Lena for first place in the Stephenson County Conference and forcing a playoff game on a neutral field in Freeport. Durand won the championship by a score of 4-3.

Phil had a great curveball and a fastball so wicked that it left his dad’s left hand so sore after playing catch with him that he could barely milk the cows the next morning.

Mo Ostergard, a freshman left fielder on the 1956-57 team, recalls the buzz you could hear from the opposing team before a game started. “Oh boy, Kelsey’s on the mound today” was the mantra, Ostergard remembers. “There was no fist-pumping or trash talk after he mowed them down. He just acted like he’d been there before. He was intimidating…it was a thrill just to play behind that guy.”

Phil pitched several no-hitters, including two as a sophomore. He beat Pecatonica 11-0 without giving up any hits (he got three hits himself, including a home run) and teamed up with senior Roger Sarver in a no-hitter against Winslow.

Phil also was a terrific hitter. Sid Felder, in his first year as head coach at Durand, remembers Phil hitting a long drive to left field against Orangeville. Felder, coaching at third base, waved Phil around third trying to stretch it into a home run. The left fielder threw a strike to the catcher and he hung on for the out as Phil barreled into him. “I thought, ‘what have I done?’” Felder recalls. “I nearly got our best player banged up!”

Phil, like his brother Weyburn, also was a very good basketball player but played only 17 games his senior year because of blister problems. Both Phil and Weyburn would have been great football players but Durand stopped playing football about 20 years earlier and didn’t field a team again until 1958.

Phil also was a track star, excelling at the 100-yard and 220-yard dashes and the broad jump. He was the anchor man on the 880-yard relay team that set the Durand record of 1:43.7 minutes in 1957.

The first time Phil ever played golf, he joined Roger Sarver, my brother Dan Waller and Jerry Engelbrecht at the Beloit municipal course. Standing on the first tee, “Phil looked high and low for the flag,” Sarver says. “When he finally spotted it—360 yards down the fairway—he laid down and started laughing,” thinking it absurd that anyone could reach the green that far away.

But it wasn’t long before he shed his novice cloak. When he was in Japan serving in the Air Force, Phil was invited to a golf tournament in the Philippine Islands. He played well, shooting a score of 71—unbelievable for someone who had played golf only a few years.

His sister Sally Kelsey Lawson recalls how much fun she and her brothers and sisters had growing up on the farm.

“We played so much softball in the front yard that we wore out the grass where the bases were,” Sally says. “We also would go swimming in the Sugar River and Mom would sit on the bank being eaten by mosquitoes while she supposedly was our lifeguard. Though I don’t think she could have saved us if she had had to!”

Sally and another sister, Kathy Kelsey Whitehouse, loved to tag along with Phil and Jerry (who died Oct. 1 at age 70 in Rockford), who took them to movies and county fairs.

After serving four years in the Air Force, Phil joined the Army in 1965. His health deteriorated and he was medically discharged a year later.

He lived at home a few years but was unable to work. He could drive a car, however, and he often took Sally’s two small daughters to the little general store in Harrison and bought them candy and anything else they wanted.

“Back home, the girls would get in his car, lock the doors and start honking the horn,” Sally says. “He would come out and holler at the top of his lungs…he and the girls loved every minute of it.”

Phil spent most of his adult life battling illnesses, in and out of hospitals and living in care facilities. His ailments, including a lung tumor and Parkinson’s disease, piled up over the years until the family moved him recently to a hospice in Chicago, where he died on Nov. 21.

But he left a remarkable legacy of athletic accomplishment and exquisite demeanor in his youth that won’t be forgotten.

Mike Waller, who grew up in Durand and played a lot of baseball with Phil Kelsey, is the retired publisher of The Baltimore Sun and lives on Hilton Head Island, SC.