Amazing life of Gene 'Ace' Forman, 1944-2023

GENE ‘Ace’ FORMAN

The amazing life of Gene 'Ace' Forman, ended Aug. 20, 2023.

He died at 79-years-old in a Salem, Oregon, assisted living home from a variety of health complications.

Floyd Eugene Forman Jr., was born June 22, 1944, in North Bend, Oregon. At age 5 he moved with his family to Toledo, Lewis County, Washington, where he grew up working on the family farm.

Gene graduated from Toledo High School in 1962.

In 1967 he earned a B.S. degree and in 1968 a M.Ed. degree from Linfield College, McMinnville, Oregon.

Gene’s Toledo High football coach was the legendary Ted Hippi, who graduated from Toledo in 1932 and Linfield in 1940.

Gene’s friend and Toledo High teammate, M. Gary Olson (Linfield B.S. 1964, M.Ed. 1965), attended, graduated and played football at Linfield.

Both Coach Hippi and Gary encouraged Gene to attend Linfield. Gene was forever grateful he did.

Competing for Toledo, Gene lettered in football, basketball and baseball (outstanding pitcher and hitter) as a freshman, sophomore, junior and senior. In basketball he was a district all-star first teamer and played at state as a senior. He even competed in track when it didn’t conflict with baseball.

At Linfield, Gene was a 6-foot-5, 255-pound starting tackle (and punter) winning All-Northwest Conference and Little All-American football honors. His Linfield football coach was Paul Durham. The Linfield Wildcats won conference championships Gene’s two seasons, 1964 and 1965.

In 1965 he was a starter on the Wildcats team which played for the NAIA national championship in Georgia. Gene was the biggest player on the offensive line and, tackle to tackle, considered the team’s best offensive lineman, said then Linfield sports information director George Murdock Jr., Toledo High and Linfield (M.Ed. 1966) grad, in a Longview, Wash., Daily News story.

In 2010, when the 1965 Linfield football team was enshrined in the Linfield Athletics Hall of Fame, Gene spoke for it at the enshrinement banquet.

Sports Illustrated magazine said Gene Forman of Linfield was “big and fast.” Professional scouts had their eye on him. But, Gene’s dream of playing professional football ended at age 21 in an August 1965 McMinnville auto accident which paralyzed him from the waist down. He was in a wheelchair the rest of his life.

After the 1966 Linfield football season — in which he did not play due to his paralysis — he shared the Linfield football team’s most inspirational player award with teammate Odis Avritt, a running back.

‘AC’ was a nickname given to him by Linfield classmates who, like Gene, lived in the McMinnville Fire Department “fire hall.” In return for room and board, those living there were volunteer firefighters. AC stood for Alley Cat. Many shortened AC to ‘Ace.’

His career as a football coach and teacher was amazing and inspirational. He did not let his dream of coaching and teaching be sidelined by his disability.

Gene’s first teaching job was at Riddle High School in southern Oregon’s Douglas County. He was an assistant football coach there for one year. The second year he became the head coach and led the Riddle football team for 19 years.

After Riddle, he was head football coach for 14 years at Days Creek High School. Days Creek, also in southern Oregon’s Douglas County, is about 12 miles from Riddle.

His 1981 Riddle team played for the state championship as did his 1996 Days Creek team.

He was an assistant coach of the winning East team in the 1982 East-West Shrine All-Star football game played in Baker.

In 2000-2001, he served as president of the Oregon Athletic Coaches Assn.

Gene’s friends said he was a great person, a great coach and a positive role model. His players were taught valuable life lessons on perseverance, positive attitude, goal setting, tolerance and a strong work ethic. He loved his players and the players loved him.

Gene is the namesake of Linfield’s ‘Gene Forman Inspiration Award.’ Established in 2015, the award honors a current or former Linfield student-athlete or coach who demonstrates profound perseverance in the face of adversity.

In September of 2015 he moved from his beloved Riddle to Dallas, Polk County, Oregon.

A true testament to Gene was that he was a collector of friends wherever he was. Those friendships became lifelong.

He kept friendships with high school classmates, Linfield teammates, players, coaches, staff members, and those living in a 55+ community in Dallas where he lived. He had friendships, too, with  caregivers from various assisted living homes in which he lived in Salem and Keizer, Oregon.

Gene was loved and respected by so many. Those who  knew him never forgot him.

He was eternally grateful to those who donated funds to pay for needs related to his paralysis. A key fundraiser for Gene soon after the accident was Hal Laycoe, head coach of the Portland Buckaroos professional hockey team. Hal’s son, Bob Laycoe, was one of Gene’s Linfield football teammates.

Gene Forman is survived by his ex-wives Jackie Sochin and Valerie Johnson.

Dying before him were his father, Floyd Eugene Forman Sr. (1913-2003); his mother, Alice Rachel Eickworth Forman (1912-1984) and his sister, Joan Forman (1946-1973).

All are invited to a celebration of Gene’s s life. It will be held on the Linfield campus in McMinnville after conclusion of the 1 p.m. Oct. 14, 2023, Homecoming football game.

Memorial donations to the “Gene ‘Ace’ Forman Fund” are suggested. Donations may be made to Linfield University Advancement, 900 SE Baker St., McMinnville, OR 97128. If you have donation questions or questions about the celebration of life please contact Bob Haack, Ace’s Linfield teammate and friend: hawkstein@aol.com, (503) 706-7060.

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 https://gene-ace-forman.blogspot.com

Famous author AMY TAN attended Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon

 

Linfield's rebel writer returns 

by Ron Cowan, March 14, 1990, Salem SJ

Amy Tan plugs into 'Secret Senses' 

by Dan Hays, Oct. 19, 1995, Salem SJ

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AMY TAN'S `SENSES' LEAP INTO THE OTHER WORLD

By Ellen Emry Heltzel, Oregonian, Oct 15, 1995 

Amy Tan's popularity is easy to figure out. Her novels are simply written and her themes universal, with the charming overlay of East meets West. Read Bobbie Ann Mason if you want meatloaf and chips; if you prefer dim sum and green tea, take Tan.

Tan's newly released book, ``The Hundred Secret Senses'' (G.P. Putnam's Sons, $24.95), is to ``The Joy Luck Club'' as a religious holiday is to a family vacation. ``Joy Luck'' focused on mother-daughter relationships; ``Senses'' takes a leap to the ethereal world.

This time, Tan has picked a subject that's more difficult for her to get her arms around, both literally and figuratively. But given Tan's loyal legions, the book has the sensibility and storytelling style to become her third best seller.

Do you believe in ghosts? Does Tan? In a recent phone interview, the Bay Area writer hedged her bets, noting that the term ghosts has such bad connotations.

But Tan fans can find out more when Tan speaks Thursday evening Oct. 19, 1995, at Linfield College in McMinnville, where she'll make her second stop on a two-month tour promoting her new book. The Oregon Independent Booksellers Association will sponsor the 8 p.m. event, and the $5 admission fee will benefit the Kidney Association of Oregon.

``The Hundred Secret Senses'' is not a ghost story in the traditional sense, and the metaphysical questions it poses are wrapped around a love story that also embraces Tan's favorite topic, the joy and burdens of family relationships. In her latest offering, the ties that bind most tightly are those between the narrator, Olivia, and her older half-sister, Kwan. Kwan, Olivia's father's only progeny from his first marriage in the old country, comes to America to join Olivia's family after the father dies. Olivia's initial thrill at gaining a sister fades quickly: Instead of being the exotic princess the young girl had dreamed of, Kwan is a dumpy peasant woman who doesn't subscribe to the same rules of logic as her much-cherished, American-born half-sister.

Kwan, in fact, believes she possesses a sixth sense; put in cultural context, she claims to have ``yin eyes'' that allow her to see ghosts. In her own mind, at least, Kwan is in continuous communication with the afterworld, the other world and whatever, to the extent that the young Olivia helps get her temporarily committed to a mental institution -- an act of disloyalty that causes her great guilt later in life.

As an adult, Olivia either becomes more tolerant of Kwan's strange ways, or at least finds them more useful (after all, there's the ghost of her boyfriend's former girlfriend to banish from his thoughts). Building from that base, Tan spins a tale of how Olivia's skeptical, thoroughly American self evolves into a person more receptive to the powers of that which cannot be seen, heard or felt.

``I've always been like Olivia,'' said Tan, who was 200 pages into another novel and stricken with writer's block when ``The Hundred Secret Senses'' began to take shape in her head. ``But I've actually seen things I can't explain and had prophetic dreams. . . .

``My mother has always believed that I had the gift of seeing and talking to ghosts. I've always discounted it. This was my opportunity to let go.''

The background for Tan's spiritual framework is complicated. She started with by-the-book Christianity: Her grandfather had gone to missionary school in China and her father was an ordained minister.

When Tan was 15, however, first her older brother and then her father died of brain cancer. The statistical improbability of their deaths remains unresolved -- Tan says doctors never determined whether genetics or environmental factors played a role. Nevertheless, the tragedy pushed Tan's mother back to the Buddhist and Taoist traditions with which she had been raised. Tan was introduced to ghosts, superstition and the practice of praying to ancestors.

She was, on the surface at least, unaffected by this turn to Eastern mysticism. But now, looking over her life, the 43-year-old writer noted that she and her husband, Lou, have always lived in houses with ``noise problems''; at one point, they both thought they were hearing the same thing, a badly whistled version of the theme song from the TV game show ``Jeopardy.''

And then, in the process of writing ``The Hundred Secret Senses,'' Tan says there were countless coincidences she can't explain, such as the time she was looking for a certain reference and the book she needed literally fell off the shelf and opened at the proper place.

Although Tan regards such experiences as less mystical than they are serendipitous, she acknowledges a greater sense of ambiguity about such matters than she felt in the past. She also sees a direct connection between love and hope, and between hope and the power to believe.

``Many of the things we believe have to do with. . . . whether we see a world beyond this one, and whether we think our relationships with people serve a larger purpose,'' she said. ``The questions are all quite open.''

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AMY TAN: PARENT'S DISAPPOINTMENT LED TO LITERARY SUCCESS

By Ron Cowan, Salem Statesman Journal, March 26, 1990

Amy Tan returned to her alma mater, Linfield College in McMinnville, Ore., recently, a successful novelist returning to the place where she gave her parents an enormous disappointment two decades ago:

She decided at Linfield in 1969 to change her major to English, destroying her Chinese parents' dream of having their daughter become a neurosurgeon.

But the theme of rebellious daughters, the divisions and links between generations, ultimately served her well in Tan's "The Joy Luck Club."

The 1989 novel about Chinese-American women and their families still is on best-seller lists and has been called an extraordinary book which mixes tenderness, irony, wit and sorrow.

The fiction and the writer are not inseparable, however, despite the links.

"It's a surprise because people assume it's my own life. It's a fiction," Tan said as she visited the campus for a lecture and an overnight stay.

A soft-spoken woman with an easy, unpretentious manner, she divorces herself from many of the book's details of Chinese-American life, especially the idea of unhappy marriages.

She is married to Lou DeMattei, the tax attorney she met at Linfield. They live in San Francisco.

Nor is the book, personal and intimate as it seems, a form of self- therapy for a troubled youth.

"Fiction doesn't necessarily look for resolution. Fiction looks to stir up conflicts.

"It's not therapy in that you understand all the connections. It's not as neat as that."

Tan's life, as the daughter of Chinese immigrants in a working class neighborhood of Oakland, Calif., was that of the only Chinese-American in school - an oddity.

She said it wasn't easy, not with the outsized ambitions of her parents - they wanted her to be a concert pianist as a hobby - and the death of her father and brother from brain tumors when she was 15.

After her mother took her to Switzerland, Tan rebelled by taking an obnoxious German boyfriend and getting herself arrested.

Ironically, at the time of her arrest she won a Baptist scholarship which she used for Linfield - the farthest she could get from home.

"It was a really mixed life and a really fortunate life for a writer in that it was so awful in so many ways."

Tan seems anything but a rebel, but in person and in her book she voices the strains that Chinese-American children feel with the ambitions of their parents.

"Since the book has been published, I have met so many Chinese concert pianists," she said with gentle humor.

"I think there were too many of us to experience that resentment."

Her parents and those in "The Joy Luck Club" came to America from China losing wealth and social standing. The burden was on the children.

"They are the ones who will make up for the losses that the parents had to undergo. The whole expectation is that you are only as much as your family thinks you are."

Tan's life has its contradictions, however.

Her family, once anguished by her choices, is now proud of her success and fame, and she now appreciates the discipline and demands that she once hated.

Tan and her husband, who accompanied her to Linfield to reminisce about old times, don't have children. But if they did, she would bring a new understanding to their upbringing.

"If there was anything I discovered writing the book, it's that I don't have to choose would I go the Chinese or the American way.

"The focus would be to instill some strong, important values in my children, as well as a healthy strain of independence."

Tan, who developed her book out of magazine stories, said she has been surprised by the success of "The Joy Luck Club."

"I'd have to be an egomaniac to expect what happened. I did not expect it to get published.

"I spent the first six months denying that it changed my life. I finally had to admit that it has."

Now she is scared.

"I feel tremendous expectations from my publisher, from myself."

She is due to turn in her next book, also with Chinese-American characters, on Thursday, but it isn't finished. In April, she leaves for a lengthy European tour.

Tan, who has used her own life to illuminate her fiction, had some advice for those who would be a successful novelist:

"Find your voice. So many writers become enamored with other writers and use their voices."

"The Joy Luck Club," published by G.P, Putnam's Sons, is available in a 288-page hardback for $18.95 at most bookstores.