When you get old enough, you wind up outliving some people that you have gotten to know. Two such people passed away this past week.
Ted Ramoundos, in his adult life, was an artist and singer of some local reknown in southern New Jersey where he grew up. We went to high school together, and he graduated a few years after I did in the midst of some turbulent changes after the death of our headmaster in April of my graduating year.
But where Teddy and I had an unshakable bond was through our time on our school’s basketball team. And, let’s face it, we weren’t all that good. We had one win my junior year — and given the fact that your Founder was the team’s center during those years in an era where you were seeing 6-foot-9 point guards coming through the system, I wasn’t playing to become a college or pro athlete.
The value, for me, was being able to be part of a team and working together towards a common goal — a goal which we didn’t reach all the time, so it was especially sweet when we did manage to outscore a team over the course of 32 minutes. When you take long rides on a bus during the late fall and winter months, you create bonds with the other guys on the bus. They are unshakable, part of the memories you never forget.
I’m convinced that he might not have been able to find his creative and musical self without lessons learned on the basketball court. If you look him on on YouTube videos, he is actually quite the frontman.
Teddy wasn’t the only acquaintance I lost this past week. And, as it turns out, it was a member of a sports team.
Back in my formative days of covering field hockey for our daily local newspaper, the best team in the capital region was The Lawrenceville (N.J.) School. One of the players was a defensive midfielder named Karen Weber. She was a good athlete with a great stick, and someone who worked really well with a group of excellent players.
Consider the time when I got to know Weber and various members of the Big Red team. It was, of course, the days when there was an actual newspaper war in central New Jersey. It was years before the school joined the Mid-Atlantic Prep League, It was also years before artificial turf.
The turf — natural turf — was a topic of conversation the day I did a Lawrenceville game. It just happened to be the New Jersey Prep “A” championship game, which was always held at a neutral site. But that site, for this year, was at a local public school, Pennington Hopewell Valley Central (N.J.), which had one of the best grass pitches in the entire county, if not the state.
However, the people in charge decided that the game would not be played on the varsity field, which was located on a terraced back lot behind the high school. Instead, it would be played on the outfield of the softball diamond, a few years downhill from the varsity pitch. It was the first time that the outfield would be used the entire season for a field hockey game, which meant that the grass was full and a bit springy.
On the day, Smith played great hockey, and she had to. That’s because a first-half collision with an opponent meant that her teammate, Megan Smith, had to leave the pitch with concussion-like symptoms.
Weber would be an extremely successful athlete in field hockey, ice hockey, and lacrosse at Lawrenceville, and matriculated to Hamilton College. She became a successful marketing executive, and one of her most prominent clients was the world-famous Grand Central Terminal in New York City.
If you saw news of a public event there, she probably had a hand in attracting it to the space, whether it was a jazz band or the Story Corps recording booths that collect personal life accounts in 40-minute intervals for the Library of Congress and National Public Radio.
I reconnected with Karen Weber a few years ago through social media. She was still working even while facing some health challenges. She posted pictures of her dogs as well as posting thoughtful sayings of women’s empowerment.
I’m convinced she would never have been such an outspoken, creative, and caring person without her life on the athletic fields of the Northeast.
Sports does change people and makes great lives. Ted and Karen had lives that were well-lived. Rest in peace.
