The Best in Any Tank, by George!

From an article titled "The Best in Any Tank, By George!" by Coles Phinizy in "Sports Illustrated" 7/22/68

Summing up the merits of his old coach, George says: "Glenn Hummer was the kind of man who would cross a river of burning oil if one of his kids was in trouble. He was also the kind who, if you said a wrong word, would warn you once and the next time slap you across the face. I still have his hand print on my fanny." (Just why Hummer chose to whack Haines on a lower cheek rather than an upper is not clear. Let us leave it that way.)

When Haines first got in the swim Hummer used to cart his team to meets in a Model-T truck. They always put up at "The Cloverleaf Motel"--which is to say they camped out on the greensward. When it rained hard they moved under the overhang at the nearest filling station. Although Hummer's vehicles got better in time, his driving did not. One slick winter day, at the wheel of a secondhand bus, Hummer missed the T in a road, went through a fence and, without so much as a snort of dismay or a downshift, did a smart turn in a cornfield, emerged through the hole he had just made in the fence and proceeded in his intended direction. "Glenn Hummer is the only man I know," George insists, "who could leave Terre Haute for Indianapolis and end up in Lafayette, going in the opposite direction. When we drove at night I would sit beside him and keep nudging him. 'I've only got one eye closed,' Hummer would tell me. In 1961, or maybe '62, when I took a Santa Clara team back to the waterworks pool in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, the moment I drove to the place I knew where I was. I drove right past the pool and up a hill, and there, camping in a tent in the same spot, was Glenn Hummer and six or seven of his kids." (For those who feel history, however disjointed, should be brought up to date, Glenn Hummer is still at it, doing his best to keep his vehicles on the road and producing swimmers who are far better than Haines. (His Huntington team won the national YMCA championship this year.)

From an Obituary of George Haines by Cecil Colwin in "Swim News" 5/1/06:

Records at the Huntington YMCA show that a Haines has been a member of the "Y" since 1932, and this is where George and his brothers became interested in swimming under the spell of coach Glenn Hummer, coach-mentor at the local YMCA, who was also the high school biology teacher.

In the 1940s, George Haines was a member of the Huntington YMCA swim team that Hummer coached to two YMCA National Championships. Glen Hummer was to become the major factor in developing the young George Haines' interest in competitive swimming, and in the shaping of his character. Hummer's friendship and guidance continued as he assumed a mentor role for George when he began his competitive coaching career in the 1950's.

Even before he became a swimming coach, Haines learned the value of a good early distance background, because Glen Hummer first trained him to be a 1500 swimmer. (Haines was later to become the conference champion in the 50 freestyle at San Jose State College in California, a big drop from swimming the 1500!)

When Hummer died, Haines said.: "He was a great, great man, His techniques were ahead of the time. I felt his loss as if an arm had been cut off."