Story Photos
 Wallace points through the fence during a game early in his career with the Tigers. Wallace coached the Tigers from 1978 to 1999. Photo courtesy of Les Wallace
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Longtime Tiger Wallace headed to state Hall of Fame
Friday, October 3, 2008 7:06 PM PDT
By Rick S. Alvord
Printable version
E-mail this articleCLATSKANIE — Les Wallace arrived in Clatskanie with a new bride, a $7,716 annual salary with the school district and a genuine American dream worth millions.
It was 1973. And all he wanted to do was coach.
Coach what? Coach anything.
“I remember pulling into town with Billie (his wife of 36 years) and stopping by Herb Clifford’s real estate office, and he didn’t have anything except this old rental house out by the creamery,” Wallace recalled. “When we got there, Billie started to cry. She didn’t think we could live there. I told her, ‘Oh, it’ll be fine.’ Heck, it was the only dang thing available.”
Wallace and his wife didn’t expect to be there long. The same could be said for his stay in Clatskanie, which was a mere blip on the mental radar of a young man in his early 20s who grew up in the Portland area.
But just like he and Billie did with that old house, Wallace settled in.
As soon as his coaching career took form, there was no reason to leave the tiny town on Highway 30.
Clatskanie needed him as much as he needed Clatskanie.
“When I first moved here, I remember telling my dad that I’d only be staying for a couple of years and then I’d try to move on somewhere else. He said, ‘Why? It’s a nice place. If you like it, you ought to stay.’ He was right,” said Wallace, who retired in 2003.
The Linfield College graduate spent his entire teaching and coaching life in Clatskanie, and is best known in the athletic arena for the 22 years he spent as the head coach of the Tigers’ varsity baseball team.
On Nov. 1, he will be inducted into the Oregon High School Baseball Coaches Hall of Fame, an honor is understandably humbled by.
“The fact that this is something that was picked by my peers makes it even more special,” said Wallace, 59, who was named Oregon’s Class 3A Athletic Director of the Year in 2001. “When you’ve devoted your life to something, it’s always an honor when somebody recognizes that. This is a pretty awesome thing.”
Wallace isn’t entering the Hall of Fame because of his win-loss record. Coaching primarily against larger schools in the Cowapa League — including St. Helens and Tillamook, which were nearly twice as large — he compiled a 252-316-2 record in his 22 seasons.
Wallace never won a league title and his teams never advanced to the state playoffs, although there were some close calls back when it was more difficult to qualify than it is now.
But sometimes numbers don’t tell the Hall of Fame story.
“Les Wallace was a role model, an example, a gentleman and one of the best fundamental coaches I’ve been around,” said Tillamook School District Superintendent Randy Schild, who coached baseball against Wallace when he was a teacher at Tillamook.
“Of all the teams that I enjoyed playing, Clatskanie was at the top of the list,” Schild added. “The summer tournaments helped our teams create relationships that made every game fun, even though they were always competitive. These joys can all be attributed to Les and his style of coaching, which reminded us that it was a game and we were working with high school kids who were trying to do the best they could.”
The coaching bug
Wallace and his twin brother, Leslie, volunteered for the Navy in 1968 during the Vietnam war. It was a two-year program with full benefits. The way Wallace figured it, he could easily begin his coaching quest after his enlistment ended.
“I qualified for nuclear submarine school, but I had this rash on my arm — something like eczema — and I failed my physical based on that,” said Wallace, a teenager at the time. “My brother had hay fever and asthma real bad, but they took him.”
Leslie Wallace had already committed to coaching a youth baseball team that year, but couldn’t do it because of his enlistment. So he asked his brother if he was interested.
“I definitely wanted to do it. These kids were 7-8 years old. When I got there for the draft, this little guy comes up to me and says, ‘Mr. Lester, I wanna be on your team.’ I was hooked,” Wallace said. “When it came time for me to pick, he was my first choice.”
Wallace ended up coaching that same team with his brother two years later, and also picked up a coaching gig with a top-notch American Legion program in Portland. He was starting to make connections in the coaching circles.
After ending a successful baseball career at Linfield, Wallace went in search of his first teaching/coaching job. He and Billie were married during their junior year at Linfield and wanted to remain relatively close to Portland.
“Clatskanie had an opening at the grade school for a physical education teacher, so I took it. There was an opportunity to coach, so that was good enough for me,” Wallace said. “The teaching salary they offered me was $7,716 a year and the coaching salary was $434. I couldn’t wait to get started.”
Wallace became the football and basketball coach at the middle school. He immediately made an impact with his natural attention to detail.
“When I got there, I thought it was important for our athletes to have their own identification. The nickname at the school was Eagles, so by golly we needed to be Eagles,” he said.
Wallace ordered uniforms with Eagle logos on the jerseys. He hand-painted square wooden boards with the names and logos of the teams the Eagles competed against, and hung them in the gymnasium.
“I wanted everything to be just so,” he said. “I wanted there to be a sense of pride that kids would take with them into high school.
“It wasn’t really about wins and losses,” Wallace added. “You wanted to prepare kids and try to get everybody involved. You wanted them to have good experiences. You wanted them to remember what it was like to have fun and compete.”
Promoted to the Tigers
Several years after arriving in Clatskanie, Wallace — in addition to coaching at the middle school — became an unpaid assistant for new high school varsity baseball coach Kevin Moen.
Actually, he appointed himself — with Moen’s blessing.
“I was the JV coach my third year as an assistant, and when Coach Moen left after that season, I took over the varsity,” Wallace said. “That was pretty much my goal — to be the head baseball coach for a high school program.”
In 1979, Wallace’s second year, the Tigers pushed St. Helens and Seaside for the Cowapa League crown. Seaside, which beat Clatskanie 2-1 and 1-0 during the regular season, went on to win the state title. Wallace was named the Cowapa’s Coach of the Year.
Ten years later in 1989, Clatskanie and St. Helens finished tied for first place in the Cowapa, but only one team moved on to the state playoffs. The Tigers, despite beating St. Helens three times during the season, lost a one-game playoff for the state berth.
St. Helens went on to capture the state championship.
“That one hurt,” Wallace said.
In 1999, after 22 seasons at the helm, Wallace stepped down as head coach to devote more time to his athletic director duties at the high school.
“We had so many good kids come through here, kids who grew up to be good young men and good parents,” he said. “And a lot of the coaching relationships I developed back then, those people remain good friends today.”
Wallace said the best career decision he ever made was never leaving Clatskanie — even if the old house near the creamery took some getting used to.
“We had to nail the back door shut and put something over it so the wind wouldn’t whistle through the house. Even then, if it was windy out, the curtains would sway back and forth,” Wallace said with a laugh. “Later on, we asked the owner if we could paint the house in exchange for some free rent, and he asked us if we wanted to buy it. By then we were kind of attached to it. So we bought it.”
The Wallaces lived there for 25 years. They remodeled the house three times and raised two sons there (David, 33, and Steven, 32).
“We built a new home on the Clatskanie River — one level, too,” Wallace said. “But that old house out by the creamery will always have a soft spot in our hearts, the same way Clatskanie always will. It’ll always be home.”
The Wallace file
• Compiled 252-316-2 record as head coach of the Clatskanie baseball team from 1978 to 1999.
• Named Cowapa League Coach of the Year in 1979 and 1989.
• Named Oregon Class 3A Athletic Director of the Year in 2001.
• Volunteer for Oregon 3A All-Star Baseball Series (1988-2000) and assistant director of the 3A All-Star Baseball Series (2001-present).
• Noteworthy: Will be inducted into the Oregon High School Baseball Coaches Hall of Fame on Nov. 1.
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