His Mom Saved His Life. He Has Filled His Life With Gratitude.

It’s hard to know if Jerry LeVasseur would have achieved superstar status in life and Masters track without the circus fire.

His daughter, Karen, feels his over-achievement has something to do with his core identity, which is a positive disposition and good genes, not just his catapult from disaster when he was six years old. Perhaps, Jerry was already destined to helm this extraordinary life of doing, succeeding, and giving before his ordeal, a real life trial by fire, which could have imprisoned him mentally and physically.

On the other hand, LeVasseur understands the fire gave him layers of resolve and gratitude because he had to overcome severe injuries to his hands and the trauma of the death of his mother, who shielded him from the inferno that took her life. Jerry received—big time—on July 6, 1944, and now he gives…and gives…and gives.

We can debate nature vs. nurture all day and come up with the same answer.

It’s both.

But does it matter if Jerry’s core identity, or his experience with catastrophe, put him on a trajectory for a remarkable life?

What matters is that LeVasseur, who lives in Brunswick, Maine, is one squared-away guy. He is still competing at 84 years old with plans to run in the National Senior Games in May in Ft. Lauderdale.

Goals at 84? You bet.

Jerry said he hopes to at least compete in the 4X100 relay with Jerry White, Roger Vergin, and Elmo Shropshire and set a national record in May. LeVasseur, Vergin, White, and Robert Lida set a 4x100 national record in the 2017 National Senior Games (1:12.37).

LeVasseur said Covid could hijack his plans, but his goal at the Senior Games in May is to enter the Triple Jump, 800, 1500, and the race walks. That is some quest. The man is 84 years old and has fought off three cancers. You half expect him to rip an old Boston phone book in half.

I asked him what he is thinking about when he puts his feet on the ground in the morning. “Having a good day, staying fit, which is a little harder with Covid, and staying positive.”

That attitude has done a lot for him in Masters track.

When he was 70, Jerry was part of a world record 4x800 relay team, a mark that stood for five years. He was also a leg of a 4x800 relay team in the Men’s 80-year old division in 2018 that set a national record that still stands.

In the 2021 USA Track & Field Masters national meet in Ames, Iowa, Jerry was on record-setting relay teams in the 4x400 and 4x800 with the New England 65 Plus Running Club.

Jerry’s ambition is more modest these days.

Now, instead of trying to win everything, he wants to win just a smidgen more than half of the events he enters. He has had to remap his competitive brain because age has pushed the Finish Line further away. LeVasseur was so slow one race, they turned the timing clocks off forgetting he was out there. He chuckles about it.

“I never used to finish in the back,” Jerry said, “but it’s all about what you are trying to do, which for me, is fun, fitness, and friends.”

I’ll get to the fire in a moment, but what is more relevant to Geezer Jocks is what Jerry says about staying on his feet and avoiding injury.

He used as an example a young runner at Bowdoin College in Brunswick where he has been a volunteer coach for 18 years.

“We had a runner who would stay after practice and continue running so he could get his minutes in,” Jerry said. You could almost see Jerry through the phone shaking his head side to side, feeling for the kid.

“He was injured most of his career here. You can’t try and do too much.”

This is a phenomenon the NBA’s medical director told me about two years ago when I was working on a story about the spike of injuries to some of the best athletes in the world. The dedication to one sport as youngsters was leading to repetitive-use injuries. These young basketball players were devoted to basketball year-round, instead of exercising different muscle groups in baseball, football, soccer, wrestling, golf, lacrosse, you name it.

If it can happen to younger athletes, you bet it can happen to older athletes.

So Jerry’s regimen is much more than running. When he is able he uses the Bowdoin workout facilities nearly every day. Jerry uses the Elliptical machine or Zero Runner to avoid the impact of the cement or track. He does that cardio for an hour and then 30 minutes on the array of weight machines.

Covid has hurt his workout schedule, but Jerry adapts at home with a mat and core exercises. A great resource, he says, are the videos on the National Senior Games Association web site.

LeVasseur lives just off a golf course in Brunswick, Maine, but he does not play golf. He uses the golf course for snow-shoe walking, or cross-country skiing. 

Leave it to a guy in Maine to have no chill when it comes to stomping on the anachronistic narratives on aging.

Jerry went to Lehigh University and became an accountant. He has four daughters and one, Linda, wrote a book about him. 

Arden, his wife, is 83 this year and she competes, too, winning medals in the last three World Masters Games. She wants you to know the competition is scarce at her age, or non-existent, but we all know the medals are earned because she is out there when most others are not. Arden won the Triple Jump at the last three World Masters Games she attended and is in the Maine Senior Games Hall of Fame.

So, about the fire.

Jerry was six years old and lived in Bristol, Conn., when his mother, Marion, took him to the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus in Hartford. It sticks with me how the tents were coated in oil and wax to waterproof them.

Something caught fire. The tents became a death trap as hundreds of people tried to escape a raging inferno. Jerry and his mother were caught in the stampede. He was in a pile of people, his mother on top of him. Just two people who were stacked at that exit survived. Jerry’s mother did not. She laid on top of him, shielding him.

In an emergency area, Jerry heard a nurse say, “He’s not going to make it.”

Instead of soul-crushing despair, Jerry, all of six years old, found his spine and said to himself, “Yes, I am.”

He has a bald spot where the top of his head was burned. His fingers were badly burned. Jerry played baseball one-handed as a kid. Yes, he did. There were surgeries and rehabilitation and ridicule.

And now you see the miracle of Jerry. The man competes on the Masters track circuit, as if his life depends on it, which it does.

He is an established Geezer Jock, through and through.

So is it nature or nurture?

It’s both, of course. LeVasseur has it and it is how you make your way through life’s ordeals, instead of curling up, or turning back. And as you make your way, you put gratitude ahead of grievance.