Pre 50: A half-century of speculation

This story has been updated for clarity.

A decade ago, on the 40^th anniversary of Steve Prefontaine’s death, I took my first dive into the mysteries that still swirl around the single-car crash on Eugene’s Skyline Boulevard that took the distance-running prodigy’s life at 24.

“You mean the two-car accident?” Karen Alvarado interjected earlier this week, a few minutes after I’d taken a seat on the couch in her 101-year-old English Tudor home 200 feet from where “Pre” died 50 years ago today.

If you’ve lived in Eugene-Springfield for any length of time, if you care anything about the former University of Oregon great, the man and the myth at the heart of TrackTown USA,  you’ve probably heard the two-car theory about what happened 39 minutes past midnight May 30, 1975, in the Judkins Point neighborhood north of Hendricks Park.

Two people I wished I’d spoken to for that story 10 years ago are Karen, now 87, and her 66-year-old middle son, Arne. There are others, including Karen’s late ex-husband, Bill Alvarado, and Dr. Richard Bylund, but, like Pre, they are no longer with us. 

Wilson and Bylund both died in 2018, and Bill Alvarado, a longtime ad salesman at The Register-Guard who opened the Quarterdeck restaurant in South Eugene in 1976, died in 2006.

And, of course, there’s Karl Bylund, the doctor’s son, who is 70 now and, as far as I know, still living in Seattle. But he’s never spoken publicly about it. Not then. Not now. And probably not ever.

“I got nothing back from him,” said Brendan O’Meara, someone else I chatted with a few days ago about all things Pre. “I think he wants to forget about it and take it to his grave with him.”

O’Meara is a former newspaper guy, the last opinion page editor at The Register-Guard, in fact, as well as a sports reporter at places like The Daily Dispatch in Henderson, North Carolina, and The Saratogian in Saratoga Springs, New York. 

He has a new book out about Prefontaine’s life, “The Front Runner,” timed for the 50^th anniversary, and he was talking about his attempt to get hold of Karl Bylund, even sending him a letter.

A paragraph on page 260 of O’Meara’s book immediately caught my attention, and maybe that’s as good a place as any to start before coming back to the Alvarados, a family that was forever changed by the crash.

“Coming toward him, more than likely in his lane, was another MGB roadster, headlights blinding, heading straight for Steve’s bumper,” O’Meara wrote. “His eyes widened and he panicked, cutting the wheel sharply to the left and into the opposite lane, still heading downhill on Skyline. His car’s left front wheel slammed into the curb, traveling about four feet in the earth before hitting a rock wall embankment of volcanic basalt. The car careened off the rock face with a distinct ‘thump,’ flipped, and landed upside down. There it came to a rest.”

Is that what happened? Was Pre really run off the road by the other MGB?

“I don’t know if that is exactly what happened, but it comes damn close,” Karen Alvarado said.

It’s what happens at the end of both feature films, 1997’s “Prefontaine,” and 1998’s “Without Limits,” made about Prefontaine’s life, if in slightly different versions.

The Alvarados have always believed the truth of the crash was ignored by the police and that maybe there was some sort of cover-up involved.

Me? I’m not sure what more could have been done, but I do feel for the Alvarados and how the events of that night forever altered their universe.

‘Madder than hell’

“All I know is that the next day when the newspaper said he died in a one-car, drunken accident, I was absolutely infuriated,” Arne Alvarado said over the phone from the 150-acre farm he leases to raise cattle and grow hay south of Camp Creek Road in Springfield, as I sat there with his mother. 

He was talking about The Register-Guard story published the same day Pre died, back when the R-G was still an afternoon paper.

“Pre’s death ‘the end of an era’,” was the front-page banner headline, just above that haunting, close-up photo taken at Hayward Field hours before his death by R-G’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Brian Lanker.

“Nation’s top distance runner killed in single-car accident,” read the subhed.

Frank Shorter, the 1972 Olympic marathon winner, who raced against Pre at Hayward Field just hours before the crash, told the newspaper that Pre had been drinking throughout the night “but I wasn’t afraid to drive with him.” 

Shorter would also tell the newspaper, however, that Pre had consumed “enough to affect his driving.”

The paper reported that Pre’s blood-alcohol level, based on a blood sample taken 3.5 hours after he died, was 0.16%, according to the Eugene Police Department. The legal limit of presumed impairment then was 0.10%.

After the track meet at Hayward Field, at which Prefontaine ran what was then the second-fastest (13:23.8) 5,000-meter race in American history (behind his own record of 13:22.8, set at the 1972 Olympic Trials in Eugene), Prefontaine and girlfriend Nancy Alleman had stopped at the Oregon track banquet at the Black Angus restaurant on Franklin Boulevard. They went for beers at the Paddock on East Amazon. Then they headed to a party with the Finnish athletes who were in town for the track meet on Dillard Road at the home of former UO runner and early Nike employee Geoff Hollister’s house. There, they met up with Shorter. 

“The Finns were drinking vodka like water in the kitchen out of tall glasses,” O’Meara writes. 

Later, Prefontaine, driving his 1973 butterscotch convertible MGB, dropped Shorter off at the  Prospect Drive home of Kenny Moore, the former UO runner and then-Sports Illustrated writer, just above Skyline. 

At about 12:30 a.m. on May 30, Bill and Karen Alvarado — who had watched Prefontaine run the previous day — were getting ready for bed about 12:30 a.m. as Pre was coming down the very narrow Skyline Boulevard.

“He could hear (Pre’s car) coming down (Skyline); I could hear a sports car coming up (Birch Lane),” Karen said.

“Same goddamn car, you know. Identical cars, coming at each other. One coming up, and one going down.”

Bill and Karen then heard the squeal of tires and a loud “thump” that was Prefontaine’s car hitting the rock that has bore his name ever since, followed by the sound of the car rolling over and crashing onto the pavement below. Bill Alvarado left his house to check out the scene.

Karl Bylund, then a 20-year-old University of Oregon student, later told police that he had come upon Prefontaine’s upside-down car on Skyline shortly after the crash. Bylund told the police he got out to inspect the wreck and noticed the driver pinned underneath, but wasn’t sure if he was still alive. He got back in his car, he said, and raced home to tell his father, Dr. Bylund. 

As he drove away, toward the Alvarado home, Bylund saw Bill Alvarado waving him down and yelling at him to stop. But Bylund was headed home to tell his father and Alvarado didn’t recognize the car.

“Bill was madder than hell,” Karen recalled. “He was going to run them down, whoever it was. And we didn’t have a clue what happened to Pre. He just wanted to get the guy who had almost hit him with their car.”

‘Last living eyewitness’

Bill jumped into the family’s Jeep Wagoneer and raced up Skyline to try to locate the sports car that had passed him. He searched carports. Nothing. Then he drove all the way around, in a loop, through the park and back around on Birch to where it meets Skyline and came upon the wreck.

“I hate to say it,” Bill told the R-G later that day. “But I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t lift the car. My back still aches from trying. I had no idea who it was under the car, but I was hoping it wasn’t him.”

According to the police report, which I obtained from the Eugene Police Department in 2015, Bill hollered at Karen to call for an ambulance. 

Karl Bylund, meanwhile, had called the police from home. 

And here’s where things get most intriguing.

Arne Alvarado, who’s told his story to reporters before, including Oregonian columnist Steve Duin in 2008 and author Mary Pilon, a 2004 Churchill High School graduate, for ESPN’s former “Grantland” blog in 2015, claims to be “the last living eyewitness” to the crash.

Then a South Eugene High School sophomore, Arne, like older brother Bill Jr., then a South senior, and younger brother, Jeff, then a ninth-grader at Roosevelt Junior High School, where Pre was a beloved student teacher, was asleep in his second-floor bedroom that school night.

Needing to go to the bathroom, but not wanting to get out of bed, Arne said he suddenly heard the sound of a sports car racing up Birch Lane.

“I mean, you could hear him all the way up the hill, slamming through the gears, racing,” Arne told me in person after I left his mother’s house and ventured out to his farm.

Curious, he got out of bed and went to use the bathroom across the hall that faces Skyline. It had been in the upper 80s that Thursday in Eugene, and most of the 21-room home’s windows were wide open, including the one in the bathroom.

Arne says he saw Pre coming down Skyline, although he had no idea who it was. He was just “putzing” along, Arne said. 

He leaned out the window, looking east, and watched,  Arne said. 

“When you’re in the upstairs window, looking out at the crash scene, you see over the rise a lot further,” he said of where Skyline begins to rise slightly just to the east of the Alvarado home. “And right when he was just cresting it is when you could see headlights lighting stuff up. But it was sweeping headlights, like lighting up this bank and that bank and it was like, ‘What the hell?’”

‘You won’t believe us’

Could Arne have seen Pre swerve and the headlights from Bylund’s car coming toward him from that window? Karen took me up there, where I opened the window and leaned out, but I couldn’t see down the street. The dogwood trees and camellia bushes have grown too high.

“Not now you can’t, but you could then,” Karen said. “And you could hear everything from this area.”

Pre’s car, after swinging left, drove up the bank and stopped,” Arne said. “And it was … count one, count two — thump! And it fell. And crash! It was all slow motion. Very slow, slow wreck.”

After hearing the other car start back up, Arne made his way downstairs and onto the street, where his father told him to stay in the house before driving away.

Arne says he disobeyed that order and sneaked down to the crash scene.

Prefontaine was still alive, upside-down in the driver’s seat and choking to death, when Arne said he got there. 

“I told him, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help,” he said. He did try to move the car but there was no way, Arne said. “He had puke on his face, because he’d thrown up.”

“He was not pinned,” he said. “He was in his seat, twisted all the way to the left,” as if he’d tried to climb out as the car was tipping over.

“I watched him die,” Arne said. “It was terrifying. It was a scary thing. I’d never seen somebody underneath a car before.”

When he saw the headlights of his father’s Jeep coming around the corner on Birch, he ran around the corner for about 30 seconds, not wanting to endure his dad’s wrath for disobeying an order, before running up to the scene as if he’d just arrived, Arne said.

By now, Bill Alvarado was yelling toward the house, telling Karen to call for an ambulance before trying to upright the car, according to the police report.

Arne does not appear in the police report or any news stories the next day. He told me that every time he tried to speak up about what he’d seen, the police told him to keep quiet.

“Tell that boy to be quiet,” he said the police told his father when they came to the house later. “That’s the one statement I will remember for the rest of my life.”

Arne also said that when Sgt. Richard Loveall, the first officer to arrive at the scene, showed up, he refused to let anyone lift the car off Pre because it was too late.

Loveall, who died of a heart attack in Creswell at age 65 in 2007, told the Los Angeles Times in 1985 that what remained with him most 10 years after the crash was the pungent smell of alcohol, although no containers of any kind were found in the car or at the scene.

Arne claims there was no smell of alcohol when he was there. 

Karen Alvarado remembers the police, which would have been Loveall and officer Rex Ballenger, according to the police report, coming into their living room to gather more information.

“All these cops were sitting right where you’re sitting,” she said, asking about the other car. She remembers it being “nerve-racking” because of the reflection of the police lights flashing on the high ceiling. 

She remembers either she or Bill asking if they knew who was in the car, and one officer saying, “You won’t believe us if we tell you.”

“And the minute they said it, I knew it was Pre,” Karen said. “He ran by here every day. He knew this hill like the back of his hand, and he was always around.

All three Alvarado boys knew Pre from Roosevelt, and like most kids in Eugene back then, including me, they loved him.

Arne said there were skid marks from where the other MGB came around the corner that he and his high school buddies saw the next day, marks leading all the way to where Pre’s car came to a rest.

“We went out and measured them,” Karen said.

The police said the only marks found were “scuff marks” from Pre’s MGB, leading to the point of impact that appeared to have been left “by a forward rotating tire which was sliding sideways.”

‘A testament to his life’

“Regardless of who was driving the other vehicle, if they had stopped at our house, Steve would be alive today,” Arne said. “And that alone pisses me off.”

When asked by former Register-Guard sports reporter Cathy Henkel in 1985 about his son, who willingly took, and passed, a polygraph test given by the Eugene Police Department a week after the crash, Dr. Bylund said:

“He was innocent of any wrongdoing. It was happenstance. It was a very bad experience for him, and he was pretty well put through the wringer. He doesn’t want to talk about it because he was treated rather roughly by reporters.”

Loveall and Ballenger had their own take:

“He was a drunk driver … who wasn’t wearing his seat belt,” Ballenger, who left the department in 1976 and went into real estate, told me in 2015, adding that he drove that stretch of Skyline at different speeds in his patrol car in the days after the crash. 

“You couldn’t make that corner at 40 mph. Given his blood-alcohol level, it would have been easy to miss that corner.”

Loveall told The Register-Guard in 1985: “There are always those who will hold out for that 1 percent chance that something else happened that night. For those people who worshipped him or loved him, I say fine. But to young people, I would hope they would learn what that accident says about drinking and driving.”

David Sonnichsen, who lived two houses down from the Alvarados on Skyline for more than 20 years, and now lives up the hill, in the late Moore’s house on Prospect Drive, of all places, walks down to Pre’s Rock “to stand and listen and reflect” on every anniversary.

Sonnichsen, 78, and a 1969 UO graduate whose last term at the school was Prefontaine’s first, has spent decades looking into the circumstances around the crash. He has his theories, but none he wants to share publicly. He’s working on a novel about it all, he told me.

 But Sonnichsen will say this:

“Steve Prefontaine’s legacy is set. There’s that James Dean kind of caricature that a lot of people, understandably, want to saddle him with, but he’s transcended that. By touching so many people he’s created communities of runners, and all these things in the 50 years since his death, are a testament to his life.”