Ray Latchford, one-time marathoner and beer truck driver, has a sardonic, profane outlook on life.  As Commissioner of the Manhattan Beach senior softball league, he rules with a shrug of iron.  His mettle was tested recently by the unexpected death of Ronni, his wife of 45 years.  Yet he has soldiered on, bringing his inimitable brand of hopeful fatalism to our games.

Ray was born in Jersey City, NJ, on Nov. 30, 1932.  “I was a shrimp as a kid,” he says, but weren’t we all?  But he has the stats: “My senior year in high school, 1949, I was 5’1”, 105 pounds.  So, no sports.  Nine months later, I was 5’8”, 145.  Later I grew two more inches and a few more pounds.”  I’ll say!

“In 1936, when I was three, my mother, who was 100 per cent Kraut, took me to Germany for the summer, a village near Mannheim called Bockingen.  They taught me to say ‘Heil!’  In September, when I came back to Jersey, I couldn’t speak English.  My father, who was Irish, couldn’t understand me.  Later, working for Northrop, I went back to Germany, and I got to tour there playing softball in 2000.  I couldn’t count past eins, zwei, drei.

“My mother came to America in 1915, when she was 17.  My dad was tending bar in New York City.  He was already 40 by then.  I don’t know how they met.  When I was growing up, we lived in North Bergen.  The Palisades was part of our playground.  We swam in the Hudson, which was a sewer.  My father, who had gone through the sixth grade, had some involvement with Jersey politics.  Politics, you know somebody, you get a job.  He had a lot of jobs, street sweeper, plumber, the Ford assembly line.

“I can’t believe how he scraped up enough dough to send me to a Jesuit school, St. Peter’s, which cost $200 a semester in 1946.  I picked up some money for candy and sodas by delivering the Hudson Dispatch, starting about age 10.

“At the Jesuit school, if you got an 85 average, you got an Honor pin.  I had one my first two years, then I fell by the wayside.  I had four years of Latin and irritated my father by taking chemistry instead of Greek.  One of the priests called him and said I should be taking Greek.  He got all pissed off, and I had to go and cry.

“I was still a shrimp when I graduated in 1950, which is when Korea happened.  We didn’t have enough money for me to go to college, so I had to go to work.  My father got me a job in a bank.  I was a bookkeeper.  Then it was time to be drafted.  For a guy with two Honor pins, I wasn’t too smart.  I thought if I went in the Army, I would go to Fort Dix, somewhere in Missouri or Indian Gap, NY, for two years.  If I joined the Marines, I’d be in for three years but I’d be warm in the South.

“I got to Parris Island and froze my ass off!  But I wound up at El Toro in June, 1953.  There were drafts  to go to Korea.  I got on the draft for September.  I said, OK, I’ve never been anywhere.  A week later I was deleted from that draft.  Your life is controlled by things you don’t know about—some PFC at HQ sits at his typewriter and boom, I’m off the list.  By the time the next list came out, I was a short-timer.  I made sergeant in 22 months in the Corps.  They said, ‘Ship over, we’ll give you staff sergeant.’  I said, ‘I think I’ll get out of here.’

“I went home and got a great car, a ’49 Merc convertible, for $450.  It was a cherry car, man.  Of course, I wrecked it.  It junked out for $20.

“I worked on the Ford line for awhile and on their freight dock.  In those days, every spring the beer companies put out bock beer, and Ballantine was hiring.  I drove a truck for them in Manhattan.  I took the truck driving test, which was taking a little box van one time around a parking lot—‘OK, you got the job.’  Then I found out I had to drive this giant truck all over New York.  You learn quick.  The taxi drivers holler at you, so what?  The end of the summer, you get fired along with all the other temps who weren’t in the Teamsters, which cost a couple of bucks a week that I wouldn’t pay.  A week later, I was a college kid in Illinois.

“The idiot Marines had told me I had to get into engineering, aeronautical engineering.  I applied to Purdue, got accepted in June and sent in the housing deposit.  That’s when they wrote and told me they had no housing, we can’t take you.  I looked at Rutgers, but they wanted $450 a semester.  I looked at the University of Illinois, that only cost $200.  They said, ‘Come on down, we’ll take anybody!’  The GI Bill paid.

“I found out quick that I couldn’t draw.  I had to cheat my way through to get a D.  I needed to take advanced drawing for aeronautical, but I didn’t for electrical engineering, so I switched to EE.  The GI Bill would only keep paying if you switched just once.  If I couldn’t cut it in EE, I was out.  I maintained a C-plus, so I was OK.

“Turns out, I wasn’t suited for engineering.  But I graduated and worked 28 years at Northrop, starting in 1960.”  Ray is nothing if not persistent.  “Weapons systems came and went, I never got laid off.  Skybolt didn’t work, the missile they were going to shoot from B-52s, but some other division was always hiring.  I worked on the SR-71’s navigation system for two years.  I lived in Lancaster for weeks at a time.  I was on the C5 navigation system for a couple of years, which meant spending time in Atlanta.  Our system was so fragile, they threw us off and bought Litton’s commercial airliner system for a song, $100,000.”

Ray met Ronni in 1959 and they married on Saturday, Nov. 16, 1963.  She was a PE major, a swimming jock, but went on to work in software for Bendix and TRW.  Ray recalls their honeymoon.  “Ronni had a red Sunbeam Alpine two-seater.  I had a VW.  We drove the Sunbeam back to California from our wedding in Illinois.  It broke down in Cheyenne.  We got it going and went to Colorado to stay with a friend of mine.  We took my friend to dinner and the car wouldn’t start.  This car had a crank.  The mechanic was 200 pounds and he couldn’t turn it.  This was Wednesday.

“We stayed in my friend’s house with his three dogs and a horse while they were fixing the car.  On Friday, we were bored, and my friend took us in his car into Denver.  We were in this department store looking at TVs when whatever was on the TVs went off and the news guys came on.  After that, the whole country shut down for about eight days and nobody worked on our car.  That was our Colorado honeymoon.”

Ask Ray about children, and he gives it to you straight between the eyes.  “We had three or four or five.  None of them lived.  The first one came when I was up in the desert in a facility where you couldn’t use your real name.  If anyone called asking for you by name, they would hang up.

“Ronni was pregnant five months when her water broke.  She didn’t know where I was—stupid security.  She drove herself to the hospital.  Finally I got there after driving two hours.  It was a little girl, just too little to live.  Ten or 20 years later, a baby like that would have survived.  Ronni had three or four miscarriages after that and had to have one abortion.  So we didn’t have any kids.”

Ray was always involved in sports, though he didn’t play team sports as a kid because of his size.  Stickball and punchball were about it.  He had fun with intramurals in college.  “I played basketball and once I took a rebound away from Ray Nitschke (the future Green Bay Packer all-star linebacker).  Dirty?   He hammered the shit out of me!”

Ray took up running while at Northrop.  “A friend and I used to go to Hawthorne High, change in the car and run a lap or two on their track.  We got up to running a mile, which I could do in 6:30.  I said, ‘I got an idea.  Let’s run two miles!’

“Then I got into longer distances.  I never ran a 10K, I just jumped into the Palos Verdes marathon in 1978.  I ran it in about 4:05.  I got very into marathons.  I ran Palos Verdes eight times, Long Beach four, New York four.  I stopped in 1988, I can’t remember why.  Same with skiing—10 years, then I stopped.  Sailing, 1970 to 1980, even took three trips in the Caribbean, then I stopped.  I did play golf for a little longer, 40 years.

“In 1997 I went on a softball trip to New Zealand.  Kiwis are a lot like Texans, big BS-ers.  I said, ‘While we’re here, we might as well do a bungee jump,’ but I was the only one on the team who did it.  I went free, being over 65.  They had the jump rigged up at Skipper’s Canyon Bridge, where they had an old gold mine.

“It was scary.  Not the jump, getting there.  This mountain road, driving on the right, your tire on the edge of the cliff.  The jump itself was routine, but there were some young girls there jumping, and they were screaming.  You got weighed in before you left Queenstown.  I had 97 written on my hand, my weight in kilos, so they could adjust the length of the cord.

“They had two ropes, one for 70 kilos and one for 90 kilos.  I asked, ‘Don’t you have one for 100 kilos?’  They said no.  ‘What happens if you weigh more than 90?’  They said I’d just go further down than the others.  Okay.

“One guy in front of me did a great swan dive.  Just in front of me was this girl.  They won’t push you if you get cold feet.  They just coax you.  She wouldn’t go and she wouldn’t go.  She started to cry.  Finally she went.  She screamed all the way down.

“They tie the cord to your ankles and you wear this harness that isn’t hooked up to anything.  The bridge you jump off is 71 meters high.  I tried the swan but stalled on my left wing, so I wasn’t so great.  You yoyo up and down until you come to rest, hanging upside down.  They lower a rope and you hook it onto your harness.  You’d think there would be a winch.  No, they’ve got a compact car parked on the bridge.  They drive it and up you come.  I took the video back to the other ballplayers and they loved playing it over and over.  But nobody went back the next day and jumped, though.

“I ran into these guys”—Manhattan Beach senior softballers—“in 1992.  I was walking to the library on 15th St. when I went past the field here and talked to Jim Munday.  I went home and got some old soccer shoes and a very small Japanese glove and came back and played for 17 years, although after the first day I could hardly walk.

“The Manhattan Beach league started in 1993.  Dick Neitz had some pull with the city.  We had four teams.  I was still semi-strong and fast back then.  I could even play a little shortstop, then third, then my arm went bad, so I wound up at first.  I don’t think I’m as bad as Neitz was.  He had legs of concrete.  Any ball 10 feet away, he’d yell, ‘Yours!’”