USC’s oldest-living football player and his ‘magical’ 100th birthday – The Mercury News

Bruce Gelker can’t remember most things. But he always remembered George Tirebiter.

The origins of USC’s first mascot are notoriously ambiguous, but the 100-year-old Gelker would tell it to his grandsons Garrett and Garth as such: While a football player at USC in the 1940s, he’d see this random mutt that showed up on campus, hunting cars down the street and gnawing at their tires. Known, hereafter, as George Tirebiter, commemorated with a statue on campus.

The level of detail he was able to recall – down to knowing ol’ George liked to scratch his right ear and not his left – always stunned Garrett and Garth. Because Gelker’s short-term memory was all but gone, taking with it much of the vibrant man his grandsons called a father figure.

The onset of Gelker’s dementia was excruciating, and painful, as anyone with loved ones with aging minds can understand. Three years ago, worried for his safety, his wife, Lisa, moved Gelker to Silverado, an assisted-living and memory care facility for dementia patients. Breakfasts go unremembered five minutes after Gelker finishes his juice; great-grandchildren go unrecognized.

But by God, did the man love – and remember – his days at USC.

And so for a last ride through Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, a triumphant 100th-birthday gift to his past, Lisa, Garrett and Garth wheeled the oldest-living Trojan onto the sidelines for USC’s Pac-12 opener against Stanford on Sept. 9. And during a timeout late in the first quarter, the public address announcer introduced the former Trojans offensive lineman as USC’s “Hero of the Game,” the video board camera cutting to him and his family down on the field.

Tens of thousands rose to their feet, applauding, as a misty-eyed Gelker lifted a mottled hand in a thumbs-up. A blissful smile spread on his face.

And for a moment, in front of thousands, Gelker’s family saw his spark return. Saw him, truly, aware. Saw a glint twinkle in his eye.

They saw the man they loved, for a flash, come back.

“You have grandparents like that, and you go, ‘Man, if I could just talk to them for a minute,’” Lisa said. “And that’s kind of what it felt like – ‘Oh, God, he’s here today.’”

“He’s here, with us, today.”

‘Everybody knew Bruce Gelker’

Outside Gelker’s room at Silverado, a glass case enshrines a few of the many lives he’s lived.

Frames preserve a black-and-white rendition of the 1943 USC football roster. Preserve Gelker in his Marine uniform, training in the V-12 program at USC before serving in World War II and Korea. Preserve an older him, grinning, next to former football coach Pete Carroll.

To Lisa, Gelker was the charmer who won her heart three decades ago after meeting on a flight to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. To Gelker’s grandsons, he was the father figure who taught them to start every morning by tucking in their bedsheets so tight you could bounce a quarter off the mattress.

He was intertwined within Orange County’s history, the founder of the famed and now-defunct Saddleback Inn in Santa Ana, where Richard Nixon loved the enchiladas so much he’d order trays of them to take on the flight home.

“He was almost like a James Bond,” Garrett remembered. “Every guy wanted to be him, and every girl wanted to be with him.”

A generation later, at Silverado, that personality still lives, assistant Mayte Carranza said. Even as Gelker’s health has declined from a fall a couple of years back, he’s still social. Charming his nurses with old-timey catchphrases: ba-loney, he’ll mutter, or poppycock. Oh, the man’s a flirt, Carranza smiled. Sees how he got Lisa.

But even as the personality has remained, Gelker lives in a sort of alternate reality warped by the past, his memory in recent decades blinking in and out. He’ll kick around stories with other Silverado residents, reminiscing on growing up together – even though they didn’t. He’ll play with his cat that stays with him there, Benny, named just like the cat he grew up with – except this cat’s name is really Flora.

His tether to the now lives on his finger: the 1944 Rose Bowl ring he almost never takes off. It lives on his head, with the cardinal-red USC cap he almost never takes off. Through eight years of his memory deteriorating, it was always a go-to for conversation, when other means of communicating with Gelker slowly faded.

If he ever is stubborn taking his medication, said Gabriella Canez, the director of health services at Silverado, she’ll talk to Gelker about USC football.

“That is a rock in his memory that will never be removed,” Garth said.

‘Those are gifts sent from God’

For her husband’s 90th birthday, feeding into a love that once prompted Gelker to run shuttles from the Saddleback Inn to the Coliseum on game days, Lisa booked The Spirit of Troy and about five Song Girls to perform at a massive party.

“So this is what you did for the 90th – what are you going to do for the 100th?” Gelker quipped, as Lisa remembered.

“If you live to 100,” she responded, “we will have that party on the field of the Coliseum.”

So after hearing about USC’s “Hero of the Game” program, and with Gelker stable at Silverado, Lisa called and emailed members of USC’s marketing department every day for two months. When Gelker’s appearance at the Trojans’ Sept. 9 game was finally confirmed – exactly his 100th birthday, no less – Lisa went about setting up an evening shuttle for about 40 friends and family members from his Silverado facility to the Coliseum. Every day the week beforehand, she’d remind her husband: They’d get to go through the tunnel.

And every day, because he’d forget soon after, Gelker would meet her words with the same level of enthusiasm.

“I want to do it one more time,” Lisa remembered Gelker saying. “And you can tell ’em that I still have a year of eligibility.”

His routine at Silverado was usually the same. Breakfast, nap. Lunch, nap. Gelker didn’t nap on Sept. 9, through a joyous birthday party, through the shuttle ride to USC. A 100-year-old man, wired.

And when they wheeled him out on the Coliseum’s sidelines, recognition dawned on his face, Lisa remembered, as she told him where they were.

“Hot damn!” Gelker replied.