Westmont Magazine Jim Klein, Founding Father of Westmont Track and Field, Crosses His Finish Line

Track and field legend dies at 90 after a life competing against and coaching the world’s greatest decathletes.

by Mark Patton, Noozhawk Sports Columnist, July 31, 2022

A pair of thick-rimmed glasses gave Jim Milor Klein a distinct Clark Kent look.

But behind those spectacles was Superman.

Dennis Savage was shocked when even a spear couldn’t pierce the steeled chest of his Westmont College track and field coach.

“He walked into a javelin that was still stuck into the ground at an angle,” Savage recalled. “If he hadn’t been so well-muscled, it would have gone right into his heart.”

But even the saga of Superman must have an ending.

Klein, who literally built the track along with the track and field program at Westmont College in Montecito, died July 24, “Peacefully, surrounded by family,” according to daughter Leslee. They had all celebrated his 90th birthday just six days earlier.

Klein, a graduate of Glendale Hoover High School and Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington, was only 19 when he burst upon the national decathlon scene by placing 15th at the 1952 U.S. Olympic Trials. He took 11th in 1956 even while serving in the military.

Superman was leaping tall buildings with a single bound — winning the high jump at that year’s U.S. Air Force Championships.

When in Rome

Klein rose in the decathlon as high as No. 4 at the 1960 Olympic Trials. That earned him a spot as the alternate on a U.S. team that gold medalist Rafer Johnson led to Rome as America’s flag bearer.

A year earlier, Klein came to the Central Coast to complete his graduate studies at UC Santa Barbara. He soon began training with Westmont freshman Paul Herman, a fellow decathlete who finished several spots behind him at the 1960 trials.

Klein was hired a few months later as Herman’s coach at Westmont. He guided him to a national Amateur Athletic Union decathlon championship in 1961 as well as onto the 1964 U.S Olympic Team. Herman placed fourth at the Tokyo Olympics with 7,787 points, coming within 22 of a bronze medal.

“When I arrived at Westmont, I had two things: ‘The ‘Green’ and Paul Herman,” Klein once said. “It was all anybody needed to have a track program.”

The Green, he explained, was a weedy meadow on the sloping Montecito campus that had been commandeered as the college’s track. More than six decades later, it’s been groomed into a glittering sports complex with modern facilities for track and field as well as Thorrington Soccer Field.

“It had been rough-graded, and grass seed had been thrown out,” Klein said of the track’s humble beginnings in the late 1950s. “During my years at Westmont it was undulating, never really leveled. Water would accumulate six inches deep after a rain. But it’s what we had.”

Ruth Kerr, one of the college’s founders, gave Klein enough money to buy clay and lumber to build a track and field oval at The Green. The coach and several of his athletes, including his future Olympian, provided the labor.

“Paul worked many hours driving stakes and nailing 2-by-4s to make a very homemade track,” Klein recalled. “A Westmont professor surveyed the quarter mile, which had to accommodate two drains that were at each end of the oval. That it came out even close to the necessary 440 was something of a miracle.”

Wheels of Fortune

Klein became the master of improvisation. He once transported Westmont’s cross country team to the NAIA National Championships in Omaha, Nebraska, by converting a rented Volkswagen van into a makeshift recreational vehicle.

Savage, a star middle-distance runner from San Marcos High, heard tales of that journey after getting recruited to the private, Christian liberal arts college during the fall of 1966.

“It is an example of the attitude of doing a lot with a little that still pervaded the school when I attended,” he said. “When I was the first guy to actually fly back to the Nationals, I felt an enormous amount of pressure to do well.”

Savage, who remained in Santa Barbara as a biology teacher after graduation, represented Westmont well. He won three NAIA National Championships in the mile — two outdoor and one indoor — and set Westmont’s school record in that race with a time of 4:00.7.

He earned nine NAIA All-America awards — three in cross country — and also won the mile at the 1970 NCAA College Division Track and Field Championships.

Klein coached several nationally ranked decathletes at Westmont. After Herman came the late Dave Thoreson (1962-63), George Pannel (1966-69) and Bill Bakley (1971-72).

Klein also molded the careers of many elite athletes in various events. They included distance and middle-distance runners Doug Wiebe (1962-65) and Rick Tussing (1970-73); weights throwers Dan Bryant (1969-71) and Jim Howard (1975-76); high jumper Ron Coleman (1969-72); pole vaulter Steve

Hughes (1971-75 and 1976-78), and sprinters Jean-Louis Ravelomanantsoa (1971-72) and Paul Brown (1976-77).

Ravelomanantsoa became Klein’s second Olympian when he represented Madagascar at Mexico City in 1968 and at Munich in 1972. He qualified for the 100-meter finals both times. By the end of the 1971 season, Track & Field News had ranked him as the world’s No. 2 sprinter.

The Adams Family

Klein also helped Sam Adams, his former decathlon rival during the 1950s, in coaching some of the world’s top athletes at their multi-event training center in Santa Barbara. Bill Toomey, the 1968 Olympic decathlon champion, was among those who flocked to their camp.

“We spent a few summers at Olympic training camps because he was coaching there,” said Leslee Kinman, Klein’s eldest daughter.

Klein grew Westmont’s program to the point that it even scored several dual-meet victories over Adams’ NCAA Division I teams at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB).

“He did an amazing job of creating a powerhouse small-college team that was the object of a short story in Track & Field News in the early ’70s,” said Russell Smelley, who has coached the Warriors since 1979.

Klein left Westmont in 1977 and spent a season assisting Adams at UCSB before becoming the head track and field coach at Idaho State in Pocatello, Idaho. He won the Big Sky Conference championship in his first season with the Vandals.

Boise State hired Klein in 1982 to head up its women’s track and field program. He had worked with female athletes as a physical education instructor at Westmont long before the Warriors started their own women’s program. He even inspired a Westmont coed, Donna Fisher Bronzan ’69, to become a track coach herself.

“Much has been said about the influence that coach had on the lives of so many young men, [but] there are some young women that he influenced as well,” Broznan told Noozhawk. “He taught us much more than how to perform in the various events.

“We learned about the magnificent way that our bodies were designed to manage those feats. We learned about the history of the sport. And we learned to love the sport and to appreciate the talent and hard work required to be successful in any of the events.

“He was patient, so very kind. He was an educator, an instructor, a mentor, and I praise God for that experience and so many more experiences at Westmont.”

Klein guided Boise State’s women to four Mountain West Conference outdoor championships. He was voted NCAA District VII Coach of the Year in 1988. He also reconnected to his Westmont roots.

“Jim and I became friends over the years,” Smelley said. “He brought his Boise State women’s team to the Easter Relays in the 1980s.

“The Sam Adams-Jim Klein Combined Events we host each year is a tribute to two great track and field coaches who were decathlon rivals in the ’50s at the Olympic Trials and then college rivals between Westmont and UCSB.”

Klein retired from coaching in 1993 and resettled in Goleta to watch his many grandkids excel in their own sporting ventures.