John Uelses

Two currents converged to make John Uelses an American hero in 1962. Mankind was venturing into outer space, and the sport of track and field was at a peak of popularity.

Pole-vaulters were the flying daredevils of track and field. They sought to find how high a human being can propel himself off the ground with nothing but a stick. It required a rare sum of athletic attributes — the speed of a sprinter, the upper-body strength of a wrestler, the agility of a gymnast, and a damn-the-torpedoes attitude.

Technology significantly entered the mix in the early ’60s. Vaulting poles had heretofore been composed of bamboo or steel. Using the latter, Don “Tarzan” Bragg had raised the world record to 15′9¼″ and won the gold medal at the Rome Olympics. But in their attempts to reach 16 feet, Bragg and his contemporaries were frustrated. Unlike the four-minute mile or the seven-foot-high jump, the pole-vaulters’ barrier remained elusive.

Uelses was a Florida high school pole vault champion. He received a track scholarship to Alabama, but he left the school because “all they cared about was football. I needed to go where the big competition was.” He joined the Marines and found his way to Quantico, Virginia, where a track-and-field team was assembled to promote the Marine Corps at meets around the country.

It was at Quantico that Uelses and his fellow vaulters began experimenting with a new kind of pole, made of fiberglass. “They just kept showing up,” Uelses said. “We’d take them and put them between two things. If they’d break, we wouldn’t mess with that company any more. Those that held up, we used.”

The new poles, lighter and more flexible than steel, triggered a revolution in the sport. “The big thing about fiberglass is you could hold the pole higher and still get liftoff,” said Santa Barbara resident Steve Morris, who has been pole-vaulting for decades. (His brother Ron Morris was the silver medalist behind Bragg.) “When you hit the box with a metal pole, it’s like hitting a brick wall.”

When the indoor track-and-field circuit got under way in 1962, Uelses was ready to ride fiberglass into history. He broke the 16-foot barrier on February 2 at Madison Square Garden in New York, clearing 16′¼″. The next night in Boston, he went 16′¾″. “The Quantico newspaper said I was the first Marine to go into space,” Uelses said. “Two weeks later, John Glenn did it.”

But to be recognized as the world record holder, Uelses had to do it in an outdoor meet. He decided to travel across the country and enter the 24th annual Santa Barbara Easter Relays, joining an array of Olympic and national champions in the first major outdoor meet of the year on March 31. The community turned out to see them; the crowd at La Playa Stadium was estimated at 9,000. The meet was covered by 13 Southern California daily newspapers, the Associated Press, United Press International, and CBS.

Uelses did not disappoint. After he clinched first place in the pole vault, the bar was raised to a barrier-busting 16′¾″. Uelses missed his first attempt, but on his second, he went over cleanly. He landed with a splash in the sawdust pit, and a tremendous cheer rolled out of the stands.

“It was loud and crazy,” recalled Lloyd Albright, a timer for the relay races. “How often do you see a world record? The thing I remember is that George Adams, one of the officials working the pole vault, stepped onto the track. We thought he was going to get run over.”

Uelses, a sleek and handsome dark-haired athlete, was the toast of the town. One man was unhappy with his success. “Don Bragg said it was the worst thing that ever happened to pole vaulting,” Uelses said. “I have a cartoon of me vaulting and Don Bragg sitting in the audience yelling at me: ‘You’re cheating!’” As far as Uelses is concerned, he was merely adapting to the latest technology. “Every sport has changes,” he said. “Look at swimming suits. Look at golf clubs.”

Uelses held the world record for a month before Dave Tork, another Marine, cleared 16′2″. From there, it kept going higher and higher until Sergey Bubka of Ukraine set the existing record of 20′1¾″ in 1994.

Now 74, Uelses is retired from a long military career first as a Marine then as a Navy fighter pilot and Pentagon strategist. He appropriately lives on the summit of a ridge near Escondido. “I look down to see the hawks,” he said. The pole he used to set his world record hangs in the garage. He has a collection of tools to fix things and engage in his hobby of woodworking.

He will return to La Playa Stadium as a guest of the 74th Easter Relays, held Saturday, March 24, at noon. A ceremony will take place to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the pole vault that put Santa Barbara in the news around the world.