Howell has seen it all at Wheaton North
Leap Year babies, rejoice. Next Wednesday, Feb. 29, you can celebrate your birthday on the actual date.
Perhaps that — timing! — is what has kept Laura Howell so young. Officially, she will be celebrating just her 20th birthday next week.
Us non-leaplings are not so forgiving. We would say she’s turning 80 years old, which for these purposes means that for 40 years Ms. Howell has served as Wheaton North’s first, and only, athletic secretary.
“I’ve enjoyed it,” she said. “It’s lots of fun. I enjoy the kids, I enjoy the people.”
They love her right back.
“I think the thing that stands out most for me is when Kent Graham, Steve Thonn, Chuck Long, Jim Juriga, when these guys come back to visit they’ll come see her, visit Laura,” said Wheaton North athletic director Matt Fisher of the Falcons’ football legends. “It just speaks volumes for what she’s about.”
Her charm can be as simple yet heartwarming as bringing in cookies every morning for the coaching staff because, as she says, “these coaches don’t eat breakfast.”
Howell’s motherly compassion isn’t surprising considering, well, she’s a mother. Her four children all went through Glenbard North. Her eldest child, Vicki, was a member of the Carol Stream high school’s second graduating class, in 1971.
Howell was of an era in which mature women were not fully entrenched in the workplace. Dual incomes weren’t usually required to support a household, as is often the case today; for the most part the husband was the breadwinner.
She and her late husband, David, who died of cancer in 1987, moved to Carol Stream from North Carolina in 1962, and she remains in that house to this day. Ms. Howell was, in parlance of the day, a “housewife,” an archaic term whose importance is much greater than it sounds.
Though she claims she had no intention of ever working despite attaining a psychology degree from the University of North Carolina, she volunteered five days a week, at Central DuPage Hospital, at what was then Jay Stream Junior High (making costumes for school plays) and at St. Andrew United Methodist Church, where she is a charter member.
Another church member, then-Wheaton North vice principal Harold Wright, was in a bind. Wheaton North was housing students who in 1973 would attend the old Wheaton Warrenville High School, the building that now holds WW South.
Wheaton North athletic director Dick Helm “didn’t have anybody to type for him,” Howell said. After all, the school did offer six varsity sports.
Wright asked her to help out in 1971-72, and she did.
“When school let out that year, I didn’t think I’d have a job, and I didn’t really want one anyway,” Howell said.
Jim Rexilius had other ideas. The legendary Falcons football coach was named athletic director in 1972, and he was allowed a secretary.
“He said, ‘Why don’t you try it for three weeks, and if you don’t like it we’ll find somebody,’” Howell recalled. “I said, ‘OK.’ I’ve been here 40 years now. I liked it very well.”
Eventually armed with the first computer at Wheaton North, an Apple IIe purchased by the booster club, Howell continued in her role for Rexilius, then the late Bill Neibch and now Fisher.
“It takes a special person to be an athletic director, because you have so much to work with and so many different personalities and people to work with,” Howell said.
She’s been the constant.
“Only four athletic directors and she’s outlasted all of them but me,” Fisher said. “And she’s winning that battle now.”
Fisher said Howell maintains she’s just 19 years old thanks to her Leap Year birthday, but she’s seen quite a lot.
She was at Wheaton North when the energy crisis of 1973-75 hastened Rexilius and the Falcons to form the DuPage Valley Conference in 1975 and abandon the old Tri-County Conference, which featured such faraway foes as — yikes! — Fenton and Lake Park.
Work piling up from the expansion to 24 varsity sports from six has kept her there since, through two school additions, a turf surface on Rexilius Field and the construction of a field house. Wheaton North English teacher and activities director Kevin Williams was a roommate of her son, Derek, at Western Illinois University.
Last fall she received a busload of hugs from members of the Falcons’ 1981 Class 4A championship football team, in for a 30th reunion.
Though she tires of brushing the snow off her car to go to work early on winter mornings, she has no concrete retirement plans. After all, once she’s at Wheaton North, the students scrape the snow off her car for her.
“They’re very good to me,” Ms. Howell said. “It’s probably why I stay.”
Splashdown
Following are the state records boys swimmers will be pulling for at the state finals this Friday and Saturday at Evanston High School.
50-yard freestyle: 19.83 seconds by Matt Devers of Lake Forest in the 2003 preliminaries;
100 free: 44.06, Kevin Overholt (Neuqua Valley), 2009 finals;
200 free: 1 minute, 37.24 seconds, Overholt, 2009 finals;
500 free: 4:21.04, Danny Thomson (Hinsdale Central), 2011 finals;
100 butterfly: 48.19, Mike Dominski (New Trier), 2009 prelims;
100 backstroke: 48.77, Grevers, 2003 prelims;
100 breaststroke: 53.80, Matt Elliott (Peoria Richwoods), 2011 finals;
200 individual medley: 1:48.15, Dan Trupin, Champaign Central, 2001 finals;
200 medley relay: 1:31.68, Naperville Central (Jeff Depew, Steven Van Deventer, Nate Weeks, Pat May), 2011 prelims;
200 free relay: 1:22.15, Glenbrook South (Dominik Cubelic, Ryan Bach, Ben Hengels, Chris DeLetto), 2009 finals;
400 free relay: 3:02.24, New Trier (Joe Jeffers, Sam Metz, Nick Kileen, Dominski), 2009 finals;
Diving: 537.72 points, Dave Boldebuck (Hinsdale Central), 1976.
Student-athletes
Nick Posegay of Glenbard West and Jacob Ruprecht of York have been named to the Illinois High School Association’s 2011-12 All-State Academic Team.
Both were among 26 students chosen from more than 450 nominees statewide. Each nominees had to have had a minimum 3.50 grade-point average through seven semesters, and participate in two or more IHSA activities each of the last two years. And be good citizens, of course.
More on their honor in a future edition ...
doberhelman@dailyherald.com