To honor what would have been his 60th birthday, TrackFocus presents Pre Week, Jan. 23-39. Seven days of untold stories and new interviews centered around Steve Prefontaine and his enduring legacy.
There have been occasions when people have met Linda Prefontaine and reflexively asked:
“So, are you Steve Prefontaine’s mother?”
It takes considerable patience for his younger sister to calmly explain away the confusion.
Steve Prefontaine died at 24 and that’s the way almost everyone still remembers him. He remains frozen in time while everyone that was around him as grown older by 36 years.
Pre has two sisters. Linda played varsity tennis at Oregon and later was an accomplished racquetball player. There are aspects of his character and personality that are alive in her.
Linda, a Eugene resident, is enormously proud of the Steve Prefontaine legacy and understandably protective of her family’s privacy. That privacy has been trampled at times – sometimes by well-meaning fans. She is also a stickler for the accuracy of details of her brother’s life.
“It’s important to me that stories about him are honest and truthful,” she said.
She places her brother into perspective in a way that few people pause to think about.
“I miss not having my brother,” Linda told me. “Sometimes people talk about how the sport of track and field lost Steve Prefontaine. Well, my parents lost their son. I lost my brother.”
The decades that have come and gone were filled with reminders of that numbing loss, and particularly for members of a family who bear that distinctive last name.
“You learn to live with it,” Linda said.
From time to time, people approach her with a story they want to share or a question they can’t suppress.
“Someone will come up and say ‘I’ve never told anyone this, but …’ and go into a story about the time they met my brother,” Linda said. “Listening to those stories is never a burden.”
The Prefontaine family has roots that trace to Eastern Canada. Linda’s father, Ray Prefontaine, was born on a dirt farm in the Dakotas before moving to the Oregon coast. He met his wife, Elfriede, at the close of World War II in Germany.
Ray Prefontaine, who died in 2004, supported the family as a carpenter. He built the house where his three children grew up.
Coos Bay holds a collective memory of Steve Prefontaine that differs somewhat from that of Eugene. This is where his origins are. It is the town that shaped him. The Coos Bay/North Bend area honors its native son every fall with a 10K road race. The Prefontaine Memorial Run Committee also funds a scholarship for local high school students.
Linda Prefontaine is about to release a new book, a runner’s journal, that is loaded with history and information about Pre. (We’ll have more about that soon).
She also has a website, www.PrefontaineProductions.com, which offers Steve Prefontaine-inspired art and jewelry.
