Godwin 3rd Ordway

West Point, 1955

Be Thou At Peace

Posted by Chuck Ewing on November 13, 2007:

There were a few Air Force billets at HQ USAREUR, so I got to live the good life in old Heidelberg. An added bonus was serving with several Army classmates, Ski Ordway included. I was running in the hills around Campbell Barracks every day, and when a signal company that had a site at the top of the Konigstuhl organized a run from Campbell to the top of the hill I signed on with a couple hundred others. The run was a bit under 10K, but it was all uphill, 1850 feet. Near the start, the run went up a long, punishing series of stairs before it settled into the unrelenting uphill climb. Chugging up those stairs I passed Ski, and I had to look twice to be sure; I figured he'd be leading the pack, even though we were twenty years older than most of the competition. I wrote it off to a stitch, or the flu, and pressed on with my own agony. Three or four kilometers from the top, I was concentrating on just getting one foot in front of the other when I heard the pounding of a determined runner behind me. Big strides, closing fast, as if he was on level ground, and I knew who it was before he sailed around me. "Shake it up. There's beer up there," said Ski as he sprinted up the trail, passing several more runners before he disappeared from view. I have a lot of recollections of Ski Ordway, but this was the quintessential Ski, the ever-focused, never-quit, gut-it-out muckster who served as an inspiration for a football team and a generation of soldiers. His life was a seminar in second wind, and no one could have been a better model for Army teams that won so many games on conditioning. We will always hold him in our hearts because he showed us so much about how to . . keep . . . on . . . . going.

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