Charlie Bilton receives heart transplant

Justin Bilton remembers the spring of 1992, when he was 11 years old playing on the Saugus National Little League Mets. His father, Charlie Bilton, was the coach, but heart problems took the older Bilton out of the dugout and into the hospital, where he spent the better part of the summer.”I remember that some of the parents from the Mets would videotape the games and we (Justin and his teammates) would head to the hospital around 10:30 or 11 p.m., well after visiting hours were over, and he would run the tape and talk about the game,” Justin Bilton said.As it turned out, Bilton would “coach” a number of games from a hospital bed in the following years as he continued to battle a heart condition that in the last five or six years had gotten progressively worse. On July 22, after spending much of the spring in and out of the hospital, Bilton was put on the heart transplant list.”For 15 years, he worried he would have to wait three months, six months, a year or more for a heart, but he got one in three weeks,” the younger Bilton said.Charlie Bilton received his new heart at Massachusetts General Hospital in a surgery that started late Saturday night and continued into Sunday morning. He needed a second surgery on Monday to put in a ventricular assistive device to help pump blood to the right side of his heart, but according his son, the long-time Little League coach is doing well.Bilton, who will turn 64 on Sept. 11, coached Little League in Saugus for 41 years, most of them with Saugus National before a changing of the guard in that league forced him out and resulted in his move to Saugus American.Although he wasn’t eligible to be a bench coach with the Saugus American Little League All-Stars who went to the World Series in 2003 because he had stepped down from coaching the year before, Bilton helped out with the team throughout its run to the US Championship game in Williamsport.Justin Bilton said one of his father’s favorite teams was the 1990 Saugus National All-Star team that won the District 16 title and the bi-districts before losing to Stoneham in the sectionals. Jason Shipulski and Rob Streeter were among the players on that team.Bilton also coached 16-18 Babe Ruth All-Stars in Saugus, taking a team to the regional finals before losing to Connecticut in an “if necessary” game.When he wasn’t on the baseball field, Bilton was at a hockey rink. He was a goalie coach at Saugus High from 1996-2000 (the Sachems won a state title in 1999) and then at St. Mary’s, where he was the goalie coach for six years.Justin Bilton, now 30 years old, caught the coaching bug from his father. This past summer, he helped coach at Lynn Shore Little League. His hope is that once his father is feeling better, he’ll be with him on the sidelines.”We (him, Charlie’s wife, Betty, and daughter, Kelly) are just elated to have him finally get a heart,” Bilton said. “We can’t wait for him to finally get out of the hospital and do many of the things he used to do. I would love to have him come down and help me coach at Lynn Shore. I’d love to have him come out and ski with me in Colorado.”The younger Bilton said that when he was 19 years old, his father, who was in his 50s with a bad heart, was able to outlast him on the slopes.”I’d want to quit around two or three in the afternoon and he’d want to do a few more runs,” Bilton said, also recalling a time back in 2003 when the two went mountain climbing.Bilton said they had made it abut three-quarters of the way up the mountain, but he became concerned about his father. His father, however, wouldn’t turn back. Bilton said he’d also like to see his father get back to his other passion, riding horses.”He’s big into horses. He likes to go horseback riding in Montana, but he hasn’t been able to do that for several years because he hasn’t had the stamina to be in the saddle that long,” Bilton said.Although he has watched his father struggle with heart problems for the past 20 years or so, the experience has tau