The first call for the senior relay was announced and four teenage boys in Deering High track uniforms began to stretch leg muscles and loosen nerves. That they would run into the record books that February day in 1962 was the furthest thing from their minds.

Their race was the last event of a Saturday indoor track meet at the Portland Expo. Two points in the team score separated them from rival South Portland. Win the relay race, win the meet.

At the sound of the starter’s gun, Mort Soule took off, determined to be the first into the tight first turn on the Expo’s banked wooden track. After two laps around the track – a distance of 280 yards – he handed the baton off to Bill O’Flynn, who ran his two laps and handed off to Paul Gray.

Tom Allen, the future U.S. congressman, ran the last leg. He was considered the fastest runner at 600 yards in the area and maybe in all of Maine. When he crossed the finish line first, Deering’s legendary and beloved track coach John Casavola looked at his stop watch and saw an extraordinary, record time.

Standing nearby, Soule never forgot Casavola’s comment: That record will never be broken. And it hasn’t.

Other track and field records may be surpassed today. Dozens of Maine’s best athletes will come together for the state indoor Class A and Class B meets at the University of Southern Maine and Bates College.

A Portland Expo 50-year-old relay record will still stand alone.

Soule and Allen meet infrequently but regularly for breakfast at Becky’s Diner on Portland’s waterfront. They grew up across the street from each other in a Portland neighborhood and remain lifelong friends. Juniors when that relay record was set, both headed to Bowdoin College.

O’Flynn and Gray were seniors. Late that summer, O’Flynn left Portland to attend Boston University. Gray went to the University of Maine. After graduation, both men later found careers in Massachusetts and Connecticut and eventually lost touch with each other and Soule and Allen.

That a relay race and a 50-year-old record still connect them is, in a small way, remarkable. They are amused, proud and touched by the lasting emotions from an event in their lives that took 2 minutes and 9.8 seconds to complete.

“I still have a fair bit of pride in it,” said Allen, who represented Maine’s 1st Congressional District for six terms, beginning in 1996. “It ranks behind things I’ve done with close friends and family but (the relay race) was fun. I’ve always believed everyone needs to do something well. It’s something we can always say we did and gives you confidence to move on to something else.”

That the venerable Portland Expo no longer is the site for indoor track meets adds a touch of poignancy. Generations of track athletes competed in its cozy confines. The noisy atmosphere could turn any meet into a big-time event.

Last year, high school athletic directors voted to move indoor meets from the Expo to the much newer indoor track on the University of Southern Maine’s campus in Gorham. The cost to repair or replace the portable indoor track was one reason. Sharing the arena schedule with the Maine Red Claws basketball team was another.

An era had ended. The world in 1962 was, of course, much different. An American astronaut orbited the earth for the first time. The trade embargo of Cuba was initiated. One out of every 10 American households didn’t have a television and on the radio the Beatles were singing “Love Me Do.” Marilyn Monroe died from an overdose of prescription drugs and movie audiences were watching “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Deering High didn’t have wrestling or hockey teams in 1962. Next to basketball, indoor track was the popular winter sport.

“I really haven’t thought about it in years,” said Gray, a senior vice president with the Emcor Group, which touts itself as the world’s leading provider of mechanical and electrical construction services. Gray was in his office at the company’s headquarters in Vernon, Conn., when a cold call made him scramble to recall a 50-year-old event.

Gray was an exceptionally fast runner at 600 yards but always ran second to Allen, which pushed his teammate to run even faster. He assumed the relay record had been broken years ago.

“My mother had the (Maine Sunday Telegram) story with the headline in a scrapbook. I have that scrapbook somewhere in my home. I’d have to look for it.

“Mort was the sprinter and always led off because he ran out of wind first,” Gray laughed. “He always got the lead in that first turn and no one was getting by him. Remember, he was a football player.”

Actually, Soule, O’Flynn and Allen were football teammates. All three played in Deering’s backfield.

“We just went from one sport to another,” Allen said. “By the time we hit the track we were all in shape.”

Soule, a Latin teacher now at Cape Elizabeth High, wonders if there was a full moon that day. “Every one of us ran our fastest times. How do you figure that?”

Soule is the romantic of the four and the third of four brothers who all gained notoriety as exceptional athletes, including brother Paul who was the team’s top sprinter, hurdler and weight man the year before.

Allen, who is writing a book about Congress, visited Cape Elizabeth High School recently to speak in class. He kiddingly asked if Soule ever talked about the senior relay record set in 1962.

Every day, piped a voice, looking for a laugh. Every day.

Soule and Allen are 66. O’Flynn and Gray are 67. They don’t live in the past, but don’t deny that the past is part of their lives.

O’Flynn now lives in Florida and was meeting a friend for a round of golf after we spoke. Like Gray, he had no reason to remember the record race. He may have a newspaper clipping somewhere but no medal, no trophy, no plaque.

“I’ve got the memory,” O’Flynn said. “That’s all I need.”

O’Flynn and Gray expect to run to Portland this summer for their 50th high school reunion. Soule is aware.

“Do you think the four of us could get in shape to run that relay again? I think we’d have a good time.”

One way or the other. 

Staff Writer Steve Solloway can be contacted at 791-6412 or at:

ssolloway@pressherald.com