MARBLEHEAD — For someone who never played a down of football in his life, Swampscott’s Myron Stone looms large in the legend of the Big Blue.
Back in the early 1960s, Stone had bought, and moved his family into, a duplex in Swampscott and was looking for a tenant. Around the game time, Bob Jauron had come to the area, and was coaching the Lynn Lions, a football team that combined Lynn’s public high schools.
By the time the two men met, Jauron’s son, Richard, had already started turning heads as an athlete.
“He said he wanted to move his family from Lynn to Swampscott,” Stone recalled. “So, they moved into the other apartment and for almost 20 years, we all grew up as family.”
Richard “Dick” Jauron, of course grew up to be among the most renowned local high school athletes in the area as a star running back for the Big Blue, and for Yale as well. An all-pro defensive back for the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers, Jauron was the NFL’s Coach of the Year in 2001 while with the Chicago Bears.
There’s a kicker to this story. Years later, Stone was on the treadmill at the Jewish Community Center in Marblehead when John Toner, whose brother, Ed, played for the old Boston Patriots, got on the machine next to him.
Ed Toner played for Lynn English and the University of Massachusetts, but by the time his late brother, Tom, came along, the Toners, too, had moved to Swampscott.
Now, he says to me, ‘for someone who never played football, where’d you get that grandson of yours?'”
Alex Stone was a star at Swampscott High who, like his grandfather before him, enlisted in the U.S. Marines after his 2004 graduation.
“I told him that ever since Dick Jauron moved out, Alex slept in his bed,” said Stone.
Stories such as these are what make the Swampscott-Marblehead Old-Timers Dinner (at the Gerry Five in Marblehead) now in its 58th year, a unique take. The rivalry is in its 110th season. Stone has been involved in Big Blue football for more than half of those years in one way or another.
“I think it’s been somewhere between 30 and 40 years that I’ve been on the committee,” Stone said. “What’s funny is I never played football. I was in the band.
“I don’t think I was ever particularly athletic,” said the 1942 graduate of Swampscott High. “But I always loved football. And I always loved Big Blue football.”
So as an adult, he joined the boosters’ club — he’s still involved with it — and befriended one Stan Bondelevich, the colorful coach who led the Big Blue during those “glory years.”
“Stan, boy, he was quite a motivator,” said Stone. “He could take a kid and talk him into being a great football player, even if he didn’t think he could be.”
All these years later, Stone hasn’t lost his passion for the game, or the Swampscott-Marblehead rivalry. He goes to every game, home and away, rain or shine, freezing cold or unseasonably warm.
“Last year,” he said, “it was brutal. But I went.”
He’ll be going this year, too. And, as is always the case, for at least one year, Marblehead will be the enemy.
“You know it,” he says.
