A Fever in the Heart: And Other True Cases Read Online Free PDF Page A

But that hardly mattered. It was his personality that shone through. An alumna remembered that, as a teacher of driver's training, Gabby was so calm so patient. "I had Gabby for driver's training," recalled the woman, who worked in the Yakima County District Attorney's Office, twenty years after graduation. "I liked him. We all did. l remember he always told us to Look for a way out' to expect trouble, and be ready to get out of the way. He wasn't temperamental. He wasn't mean. He was a great guy. .. I still can't understand what happened...." For most of his years of teaching and coaching, Gabby Moore was a dynamic, charismatic man who could make anyone believe anything. And if he believed, his listeners believed. If he said a kid from Yakima could make it to the Olympics and bring home a gold medal, then, by golly, the kid would go for it. He would not listen to excuses. "If you got a problem," Gabby would say, "you eliminate the problem and you win."
    While Gabby was known to have a short fuse on occasion, it didn't affect his job or his status at Davis High School. Gay Myers Moore was a beautiful woman and, unlike Gabby, she grew more attractive as she approached middle age. Gay was teaching girls' physical ed at Lewis &
    Clark Junior High. Both Moores were busy with their teaching schedules and raising three youngsters, but they made a great couple. Their marriage seemed as solid as Gibraltar. No one really knows how things are in a marriage, though, not from the outside looking in. Maybe Gabby focused too much on his wrestling squads and forgot that his family needed him too. He not only had after-school practice, he usually brought some of his wrestlers home for practice-after-practice. There weren't enough hours in the day for him to have had much time to spend with his wife at least during wrestling season. In 1965, just after Morris and Jerilee got married, he and Gabby Moore had no closer a relationship than Gabby did with any of his ex-athletes from Davis. They sometimes saw one another in Yakima when Morris and Jerilee came home to visit their relatives on holidays or during the summer, but that was about it. Morris had precious little free time. The curriculum at Pacific Lutheran University was far more demanding than the classes he had taken at Washington State. PLU attracted students with the highest academic records. And Pacific Lutheran is a private university where the tuition is a lot higher than a state school. This time, Morris had no football scholarship he didn't have time to play football. Both he and Jerilee had to work so that they could make it financially. Jerilee might have looked like a fragile, dependent girl who needed a man to look after her, and, yes, maybe she had played that role a time or two because boys seemed to like it. Inside, though, she was strong and smart, she just wasn't used to letting it show. She was the kind of woman who combined a kittenish quality with profound sensuality a Brigitte Bardot or a Claudine Longet kind of woman. Physically, Jerilee resembled Longet a great deal. Jerilee Blankenbaker was highly intelligent. She and Morris needed the money she could bring in, and she was determined to get a job. She applied at a bank in Tacoma even though they hadn't advertised for new employees. She simply strode in and said, "I want a job." The bank manager drew up a chair and asked her to sit down.
    "The bank had a test they gave to everyone," Olive Blankenbaker recalled. "They handed Jerilee this great big stack of checks, and they said, There's one forgery in there. See if you can find it." And do you know, she found it and nobody ever had before. She is really bright.
    You've got to give her credit." Jerilee was hired at once. Not only was her appearance an asset to the bank, but she was obviously smart. They hadn't guessed wrong on her. Although she had no training and was fresh out of high school, she was a quick study and she proved to be a very valuable employee. She