As a junior high school kid, he prowled his Marion south side neighborhood, begging the bigger boys to let him into their vacant-lot football games. He was so small they were afraid they might hurt him. But he persisted, and when they finally let him play he was so fast they couldn’t catch him.

Ron Altenberg was never afraid of the bigger guys, said his sister, Audrey Thompson.

When he was a sophomore in high school, he stood only about 5 foot, 3 inches, and his mother was concerned he wouldn’t be big enough to play on the varsity teams. She knew it would break his heart. Assistant coach Lynn Brown told her the kid could play no matter how tall he was.

But Altenberg sprouted eight inches over the next two years and grew into one of Marion’s greatest all-around athletes. And one of Iowa’s. And one the nation’s.

Ron Altenberg was blessed because he was good at all sports and he loved them all. It was also his curse in a way, because his love of basketball almost surely prevented him from achieving his potential in track. And if he had never run track, he could have been an even greater basketball player.

This is track season, so let’s go back 55 years to the spring of 1956 and the Wamac Conference meet, held on Marion’s crushed-cinder track. Altenberg, standing 5-11 and weighing 155 pounds, is entered in four events, the most allowed any competitor.

Altenberg wins them all: the 100-yard dash, the 220-yard dash, the 180-yard low hurdles and the long jump (called the broad jump then).

But he doesn’t just win four events. He sets a conference record in each one, a feat described at the time as “unquestionably the greatest” ever to occur on the Marion track. Setting four conference records in a single meet is an accomplishment that probably has not been matched in the half century since. (Records of Wamac track meets appear not to have been preserved past 1981.)

Newspaper accounts said Altenberg ran the 100-yard dash that day in 9.8 seconds, matching the fastest time turned in by any Iowa schoolboy that year. But he’s in the Marion record books for an even faster time—9.7 seconds—which he might have run at one of the many invitational meets he entered.

Marion records show his best time for the 220 at 21.9 seconds, nearly a full second faster than his Wamac record.

These times are so fast that they beg to be compared to those of today’s athletes. Cross-generational comparisons of athletic abilities are always contentious matters because so much has changed. This is especially so when comparing players in team sports. But times and distances in track present fewer variables than, say, comparing great hitters in baseball from different eras.

Track distances today are run in meters, not yards, as they were in Altenberg’s day.  Using some of the simpler formulas for recalculating dash times in yards to meters, Altenberg’s best time in the 100-yard dash is the equivalent of about 10.7 seconds for 100 meters. The current Marion record for the distance is 10.66 seconds, set by Grayline Ross in 2006.

In other words, Altenberg, running on cinders and wearing thin leather track shoes, would have finished in a virtual dead heat with Ross, who ran on a springy, rubberized track and had whatever advantages were conferred by high-tech, modern footwear.

In the 200 meters, Altenberg (finishing in a recalculated 21.8 seconds) would have defeated Ross and Michael D’Hooge (2008), who are tied for the record at 22.37 seconds.  Altenberg’s times would have been faster had he run on today’s track surfaces, said Marion Coach Chad Zrudsky.

Altenberg was fast, but he was also versatile. In football that year, he led the Indians to an undefeated 9–0 season as he rushed for 1,105 yards. His average of 10.7 yards per carry places him second on the all-time Marion list, just behind Mike Kalkwarf, who averaged 11.02 yards on only 55 rushes in 1994, and just nosing out Lonnie Rose, who averaged 10.67 yards on 61 carries in 1989. (The great Carey Bender averaged 9.68 yards and 8.92 yards on 131 and 196 carries, respectively, in 1988 and 1989.)

Altenberg is also among the all-time Marion leaders in single-season touchdowns, extra points kicked,  total points scored and punting average, to name a few of his other accomplishments.

In basketball, he was a star on teams that twice won the Wamac championship, finishing with an overall record of 44–5.

It is unlikely that any Marion athlete has ever enjoyed so much success in so many ways.

The best was yet to come—but only after a false start.

Altenberg was lured to New Mexico by Dick Clausen, who took over there as football coach after considerable success at Coe College. The Marion flash was slated to be a wide receiver and kick return specialist.

After one unhappy semester there, Altenberg came back to Iowa, conferred with his high school coach, Les Hipple, and chose Cornell College, where the entire athletic department must have fainted in surprise and joy.

Altenberg became one of Cornell’s greatest athletes and an inaugural member of its athletic hall of fame. Because of his transfer, he lost some eligibility to participate in sports. He took part in three track seasons and won nine individual Midwest Conference championships. His dash times converted for 100 and 200 meters would still be college and conference records today.

He participated in two and one half basketball seasons and broke the career scoring record.  (He still owns several Cornell scoring records, including average points per game in a single season: 26.2.)

Always a team player willing to distribute the ball, he took on more responsibility for scoring late in his senior year. Often pouring in more than 30 points a game, he led his team in a late-season surge to tie for the conference championship. This led to a berth in the national small college tournament. Cornell finished in the final four, and Altenberg, one of the top small-college scorers in the nation, was named to the Little All-American team.

Then he put down the basketball and tied on his track shoes. By his senior year, he had run the 100–yard dash at least twice in 9.5 seconds, a scant two-tenths of a second off the world record set by Mel Patton in 1948.

In invitational meets, he raced against the top sprinters in country, finishing as high as third. There was talk of him trying to make the 1960 Olympic team that summer, but an injury, probably sustained while broad jumping, prevented him from training.

To summarize: in the winter of 1960, Ron Altenberg was an All-American basketball player. That spring he was a sprinter with Olympic potential.  He was named the Outstanding Amateur Athlete in Iowa.

What might he have achieved if he had dedicated himself to a single sport—either basketball or track?  Here is the way his college roommate, David Adkins, answered that question:

“Basketball was Ron’s favorite sport. He definitely could have played Division I basketball and would have been an outstanding player in nearly any conference. His game, his skills and athleticism are timeless.

“He would have been a starter and scored in double figures at the University of Iowa. Their guards, Dave Maher and Ron Zagar, could not contain him in preseason scrimmages. Ron could get a shot any time he wanted and was so blindingly fast that no one could stay with him.

“The University of Iowa never had a basketball player with his combination of leaping ability, speed and offense skills.  (Altenberg had a standing leap of more than 40 inches.) There have been 40-plus verticals on various teams, but never, never combined with 9.5 speed.”

Roommate Adkins, in addition to being a basketball star at Cornell, went on to a career in sports that included coaching professional teams in Australia and placing basketball players on professional teams internationally.

What about Altenberg’s potential as an Olympic sprinter?

“Ron winged his 9.5 time on natural talent without much hard work and minus good coaching and good facilities,” Adkins wrote.

“If he had been serious, he would have gone to a school in a warm climate with a strong sprint program, like Abilene Christian. There he would have two-a-day workouts 12 months a year and would run against the best in the country every day in training. Olympic athletes have to totally dedicate themselves to improvement.”

But Altenberg wasn’t driven in that way, Adkins continued. Like the kid playing sandlot football with his neighbors, he was instead having fun.

“He stayed sharp, knew himself, took good care of himself and turned it over to his natural talent and instincts,” Adkins wrote. “Ron wasn’t really concerned about getting better.

“He was just happy doing what he did naturally. On cold spring days at Cornell, he’d skip track practice to play pool. That’s just who he was—even-tempered, easy-going, stable, a little aloof and playful.”

Altenberg’s natural talent led him to the next level in sports. Finishing his degree work at Cornell but ineligible for athletics, he was recruited to play on a team assembled by Sanitary Dairy of Cedar Rapids. It traveled to Fort Dodge to play in an exhibition game against one of the most famous teams in basketball—the Phillips 66ers, perennial power in the national industrial league and the Amateur Athletic Union.

The 66ers easily won the game, but Altenberg dazzled the spectators and the opposing coaches by scoring 28 points in three-quarters of play and bedeviling the taller 66ers on defense.

He was immediately recruited to join the team, which included several Division I All-Americans, including Gary Thompson from Iowa State and Bobby Plump from Butler.  Playing for the 66ers was considered by many stars to be a better option than the National Basketball Association, where salaries had yet to be enriched by television. A spot on the 66ers guaranteed a career with Phillips Petroleum after the playing days were over.

Altenberg played two years on the 66ers, during this time the team won two national AAU titles and compiled an overall record of 85-11. Altenberg was a reserve. He had some good games, but didn’t get as much playing time as he wanted.  Basketball wasn’t as much fun anymore.

Altenberg gave up basketball and pursued a career in the oil industry in the Southwest, had four children with Francis Parton, a Marion girl he married in 1959, and remained active in sports on many levels. One day he injured his shoulder playing basketball. When a doctor examined him, he discovered Altenberg had lung cancer. Less than three weeks later, in December 1988, he died at the age of 50.

In the spring of 1989, the board of education received a petition signed by more than 300 citizens urging that the high school track be named after Ron Altenberg. One board member had reservations. Although Altenberg had been a great athlete, the member said, he had not really contributed anything to Marion sports since then.

Jay Kacena, one of the organizers, disagreed. Ron Altenberg, he said, stood for a level of excellence that was extremely rare and powerfully inspirational. Honoring the memory of this great and modest athlete would serve to motivate hundreds of young Marion athletes for generations to come.

The motion carried, and in the spring of 1989, the track was named for the Marion boy who had run on it with speed, power and grace that took your breath away.

(This article was adapted from Dan Kellams’s book, “A Coach’s Life: Les Hipple and the Marion Indians.”  To learn more about the book, go to www.acoachslife.com.)