This May, Grandview Heights fifth- and sixth-graders will go away for a few days to outdoor camps – just as they have done for 46 years. There, they’ll be counseled by 20 volunteers, mostly high school seniors, and attend classes conducted by their teachers.
And right there with them, at Camp Oty’Okwa in Hocking Hills and Camp Ohio near St. Louisville, will be Larry Larson. Larson helped start the camps and still helps run them, even after 28 years as a teacher, retirement and a move to California three years ago.
This year, tacked onto to Larson’s schedule between camps is one added event. A school in which he once taught will be officially dedicated as the Larry Larson Middle School on May 16.
It’s an honor he says he never expected or deserves.
“I don’t feel I’m deserving of this. All I did was do my job: teaching young people,” Larson says via a phone interview from his new home in California.
Larson started as a physical education teacher in Grandview Heights. He was middle school school football coach, then high school coach. After a couple years, he took the athletic director’s job as well for another five years.
“For 24 of the 28 years, I taught physical education. I loved it,” Larson says. He says he turned down an offer to leave the elementary school job to work full-time in high school athletics.
Moving from teaching elementary to coaching high school athletics was easy, he says.
“I knew all of the students.”
With no hint of complaining, Larson mentions how, when he was coaching at both levels and serving as the athletic director, he often worked 14-hour days. When athletic director became a separate, full-time position, he kept it until he retired.
All along, the camps continued – with Larson at the helm.
Ed O’Reilly, who is retiring as Grandview Heights superintendent at the end of July, met Larson while O’Reilly was a principal at a Hilliard middle school. Larson had started a “stand and deliver” program that brought in high school athletes to talk to the students. The speakers were leaders, good students and role models, O’Reilly says.
When Larson decided to retire after a near-fatal pancreatic illness that kept him out of school for 70 business days, he was asked what he would miss. He said it would be the camp program.
“You don’t have to give this up,” then-Superintendent Ted Knapke told him. Larson was given a supplemental contract to remain the camp director.
In the meantime, his fledging career in radio had taken off. He had worked part-time for WOSU and WBNS, reporting on high school athletics. In the early 1990s, WTVN radio’s afternoon team of John Corby and George Lehner wrapped Larson into their reports on all sports and he was dubbed “Mr. High School Sports.” It’s a moniker by which he still is widely identified, although the station expanded his reporting to college and professional level sports as well.
The camp program continued, but the 2008 death of Jeanne, Larson’s wife of 25 years, moved Larson toward a lifestyle change he had contemplated. In 2011, he left his radio position and moved to Ladera Ranch, Calif., near his married step-daughter, Liza Cassidy, and his grandson, Jack, 8.
Melanie Lolli, who had attended the camps and was a counselor, essentially took over the program, beginning while she was still pursuing her undergraduate degree from Ohio Dominican University. Lolli, now a math teacher at ODU’s Charles School, a charter, handles all the camp preparation, from interviewing prospective counselors to conducting classes for them to overall coordination.
“(Larson’s) impact has reached across the district,” O’Reilly says.
In its brief report, the committee that recommended the naming honor said, “His oversight of the (camp program) over the past 40 years has had a major impact on the growth and development of hundreds of (students).
Larson modestly says an estimated 5,000 students have gone to the camps and another 500 have been counselors.
He’s happy in the 10-year-old West Coast community that was designed for younger people, not retirees. He’s a young 70. Larson says he body surfs in the nearby Pacific Ocean three days a week. On Sundays, he works as a tour guide at Mission Basilica, a Catholic shrine in nearby San Juan Capistrano.
Larson says he was “unbelievably fortunate to teach in Grandview.”
At this stage of his life, “I’m still teaching in Grandview” with no plans to quit working at the camps, he says.
“Buildings should be named after heroes,” Larson says, and names a personal hero – Christa McAuliffe, a teacher who died in the January 1986 explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. “I never thought of myself as a hero. I would never use that as a (word) to describe what I did.”
Larson plans to attend the dedication ceremony along with his family. Besides Liza and her son, Larson has a stepson, Matt Studer, and granddaughters, Sarah, 15, and Madeline, 14, both Upper Arlington High School students.
“It’s wonderful for my family, my grandchildren,” Larson says of the honor. “I’m glad they did it while I’m still around” for his family to share the honor with him.
Duane St. Clair is a contributing editor. Feedback welcome at laurand@cityscenemediagroup.com.
