The Dapranos: Worth their weight in gold

Bill and Jeanne Daprano are not your average retired couple. The twosome, who moved into their home in Fayetteville, Georgia five years ago, are anything but average.

The Dapranos have each brought home over 100 gold medals in national and international competitions over the last 25 years, and there seems to be no end in sight for the two Master athletes. The pair have set American and World records and, what is quite possibly even more remarkable, is that they continue to compete at the top of the heap at each event in which they participate.

Bill’s youthful exuberance belies the 80 years of life he will celebrate on Friday, Feb. 2. Speaking with him, one becomes aware that Bill has in fact lived in one lifetime what many would need three to complete.

Born in the Grant Park area of south Atlanta in 1927, Bill participated in his first race when he was seven years old. Lined up by the nuns at his school, Bill competed in and won the all-school race for boys ages six to twelve. That taste of victory sparked a life-long desire to be the best at every thing he set his mind to doing.

Bill went to the University of Georgia for his freshman year where he lettered in varsity track. While Bill excelled in track, his true passion was for football. At 5’10” and 140 pounds, he realized his chances of ever playing as a Georgia Bulldog were unlikely and so he transferred to Livingston State College in Alabama. There he not only lettered but also led the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association in yards rushing.

After graduating from Livingston with B.A. in history, Bill moved back to Riverdale, Ga., where his family had moved when he was 16. He spent the next 15 years coaching and teaching in both public and private high schools in Georgia.

Bill has coached every sport from track to football to basketball to swimming over the years, although there is one particular coaching job he declares wasn’t for him, “I had a stint with girls basketball. That was a disaster!”

His drive to excel as an athlete carried over into his profession as a coach and it was that passionate diligence that lead him to coaching his Saint Joseph’s High School football team to three region football championship titles, a 25-game winning streak and a 10 year record of 59 wins, 31 losses and four ties. He was selected as a coach in the state’s annual High School All-Star football game and was named Georgia State “Coach of the Year” for both track and football.

After 15 years of coaching, Bill was married with three children and barely making ends meet. His teaching and coaching positions pulled in a mere $9,800 a year while pushing him to work upwards of 65 hours a week between practices, coaches meetings, film reviewing, scouting and the like.

After making the difficult decision to pursue a more lucrative career for the sake of his family, Bill started a property and casualty insurance agency and built it into one of the largest agencies in Greater Atlanta. From there he began a real estate development and home building business. His desire to be the best at every thing he set his mind to carried over into his businesses where he worked intensly to build his company into a successful and lucrative business.

After being advised by his doctor that his intense work style was unhealthy for him, Bill changed his diet and began training. The next year, at age 55, he entered and won, in his age group, the 200 and 400 meters at the National Masters Sports Festival in Philadelphia. The National Masters program is comprised of athletes over the age of 30 and annual competitions divide winners into five year age groups.

The next year, 1983, he followed these initial wins up with his first National Masters Pentathlon championship. “My greatest success has been in multi-events,” noted Bill. Since then he has won all but two of the pentathlons he has competed in at the national level. The pentathlon is comprised of five events completed in the course of a half a day of competition: the long jump, javelin, 200 meters, 1,500 meters and discus.

Tragedy struck just as Bill was ready to retire: his wife of 29 years, Judy, was diagnosed with lung cancer and a malignant brain tumor and passed away at the age of 51. “That was the low point of my life,” Bill has said. “Thank goodness for the National Masters program. It helped me get over my loss.”

In the last 25 years, Bill has competed in and won at the local, regional, national and international levels. He owns outdoor world marks in the pentathlon (age 73), 4x200 relays (ages 70-79), 4x400 relays (ages 60-69) and pentathlon (age 56). He also owns world indoor records in the 4x400 and 4x800 relays (ages 70-79).

In 2003, at the age of 76, Bill decided to expand his repertoire from the pentathlon to the decathlon. He built a pole vault pit in his backyard and began training. “You can choose not to compete in any one event, but you will lose the points for that event,” explained Bill. Of course, it wouldn’t be like Bill to sit out an event, so he began training. At the World Masters Athletics in Puerto Rico in 2003, Bill won the bronze medal among a field of 12 competitors in the decathlon. That same year he was the gold medalist in the pentathlon in the USA championships in Eugene, Oregon.

Bill’s adventurous nature also lead him to compete in one marathon (the only one he’ll ever try, he said) in Tallahassee. He completed the race in five hours and 31 minutes. Bill’s strengths aren’t limited to athletics or business, however. In the mid-’90s, Bill wrote a novel which he says sits unpublished in a desk drawer in his office.

Bill and Jeanne met in 1999 at the World Games in Gateshead, England. Although the pair had been at many of the same track meets over the years, they had never met before their encounter in England. Both were widowers: Jeanne’s husband also died of lung cancer after 26 years of marriage.

“They had changed my roommate for the third time for that tour. I ended up rooming with Peter Mundel, who was from California,” Bill explained. “Hotels always have good breakfasts in England, and I was going down the buffet and I was loading up on all the good meats and everything. When I got down to the fruit section I saw a woman with a mason jar full of grains, and she was telling the chef how to prepare it.”

Bill found it intriguing that the woman had obviously brought her own food from home and went to sit down at a table with his roommate. All of a sudden he saw Jeanne walking toward his table; it turned out Pete and Jeanne were friends from California, where Jeanne was living at the time. The pair got to talking and spent the rest of the event in each other’s company whenever they weren’t competing. They each won gold in Gateshead, with Bill taking home three gold medals and Jeanne taking home four.

To say that 70 year old Jeanne doesn’t look a day over 60 is an understatement. Born and raised an Iowa farmer’s daughter, Jeanne is no stranger to an active lifestyle. Growing up, she acted as ‘gopher’ around the farm and played basketball in high school and college. She attended Concordia Teachers College in Seward, Nebraska and then began a teaching career at 19 in Lutheran schools. After teaching for several years, Jeanne went to the University of Nebraska in Lincoln where she earned her bachelor of arts.

After teaching in Lincoln for a few years, she was persuaded by her brother, who was stationed in Oceanside, California to move to California to teach. There Jeanne continued her career as an elementary school teacher in Long Beach which transformed into a career as an English as a second language (ESL) teacher for the large Cambodian population in Long Beach.

“I probably had the first student to come to Long Beach from Cambodia,” said Jeanne. “I was willing to try it. The other teachers didn’t really feel they could.”

After that first student, Jeanne began receiving all the Cambodian students in her second and third grade classrooms. Jeanne eventually put a stop to that, ending up with a more balanced two-third Cami-speaking and one-third English-speaking students, she said. She felt it was better for the students trying to integrate into the United States to have a class that wasn’t solely Cambodian students. Jeanne did that for the remaining 15 years of her career.

“The Cambodian students would go home with me for the weekend and would be split up among the homes of the members of my church,” Jeanne stated. “On Monday mornings they would come back to school with me.” The Cambodian students quickly learned what a typical American home looked like.

“I saw such growth in the children,” Jeanne explained of her unique method of instruction. “I saw exceptional growth in and out of the classroom.”

Her program wasn’t popular with the Long Beach educational system, but the parents loved what their children’s teacher was doing for them. “I was their American mother, and that was a compliment,” she said. “The parents loved it! I could take them anywhere.”

Even now, Jeanne receives phone calls and letters from her former students who were so greatly impacted by the love she shared with them. One former student calls weekly to chat with Jeanne, and whenever Jeanne goes back to Long Beach for a visit she usually stays with someone from the Cambodian community.

During her time as a teacher in Long Beach, Jeanne spent many weekends playing sports with her students or taking them to local track meets. “That’s how I integrated them into fitness,” said Jeanne. “I was the running teacher. If you didn’t want to run, you didn’t want to be in my class.”

Because fitness had always been such an important aspect of Jeanne’s life, she led a fitness program before school which she integrated throughout the day in her classes. The students loved participating in her class and only once in all her years of teaching did she have a complaint. Not by a student, mind you, but by a mother. The mother felt that her twin girls might not be able to participate in the activities in the way Jeanne would like and considered removing them from Jeanne's class. After seeing how much the girls enjoyed the class, she changed her mind and let them stay. “Both girls became very good athletes,” Jeanne proudly stated.

“I always wanted the wild, white children in my class,” Jeanne commented. She didn’t want the smart children, she said, because she felt she could help the ones who were less successful in academics to excel in athletics. One of her male students even verged on playing professional soccer.

Jeanne, a mid-distance runner, participated in her first competition in the 1980s in 5K and 10K races. Her speed has marked her with setting many world and U.S. records over the years, many of which still stand. Nationally, Jeanne has won 19 U.S. Championships from the 200 meter to the 5,000 meter and 13 National Senior Games titles. In 2003, Jeanne was inducted into the Hall of Fame for Master Athletes and was chosen female track athlete of the year.

Jeanne, whose modesty flows freely, has established herself in the Fayette community since marrying Bill and moving to Georgia a year and a half after meeting each other. She works part time as a volunteer in the special education department of East Fayette Elementary and has invested time at Landmark Christian School, speaking with the students about nutrition and working with the cross country team.

The Dapranos are members of the Atlanta Track Club and are also affiliated with the Peachree City Running Club.

In September the winning pair will travel to Italy for the biennial World Games where they will likely add a few more pieces of gold to their already immense collection. Last year the national competition saw its oldest American competitor at 101.

With the intensity and determination both Bill and Jeanne focus on their passions, it will be no surprise to see them surpass that record at a future World Games.

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