Someone said that finding Harry Magnus' long-lost trophy in the attic of a small shop was a miracle, but, then, he always did live a charmed life.
As a young child, he was pronounced dead -- shot clean in the face -- and lived anyway, albeit with a glass eye, a deaf ear and a bullet in his brain. A few years later he fell into a whirlpool of a river, and to this day he doesn't know how he got out, only that he felt someone lift him out of the water.Once he was walking on a set of railroad tracks, half-deaf and unaware, when someone unseen pushed him off the tracks a split second before the train roared by. As he lay on the ground, Harry peered under the cars and saw a pair of legs walking away from the scene.
And then there was the time he was carrying a bag of groceries across an intersection and was struck by a car. He was knocked into a hole in the road, allowing the car to drive over him without hitting him. They never would have found the car that hit him if somebody hadn't spotted the can of pork and beans in the grill.
So much for the first 10 years of his life. We won't even get into the blood clot that passed through his heart or the appendicitis that went undetected for two days.
Mangus went on to lead the kind of life that, when his children gather, as they did on Tuesday morning at the trophy shop, they urge him to tell stories. All they have to do is get him started -- "Remember the time your eye fell out . . . " -- and the old man is off and running with another remembrance. At 81, the body has seen better days -- he hasn't run a marathon in 11 years -- but the mind hasn't forgotten a thing.
Except where he left that darned trophy, which brings us back to our story. Mangus collected more than 60 trophies, not counting medals and ribbons, as a standout boxer, wrestler and distance runner. He collected them and placed them on a shelf in the family room of his home. All of them except one. His favorite trophy -- the first he ever won -- was missing. For 25 years, nobody could figure out what happened to it.
There's a story, that trophy. Mangus was a freshman at the University of Wyoming -- this was 1940 -- and one day he put his track shoes in his back pocket -- or so the story goes -- and hitchhiked from Laramie to Salt Lake City to run in the Deseret News Intermountain Cross Country Championships. Using a strong kick to overtake two rivals late in the race, he crossed the finish line first in the University of Utah stadium.
The trophy they presented to him was beautiful -- a block of sculpted, polished walnut, with a runner mounted at the top, lunging for the finish over a gold plate inscribed: DESERET NEWS TROPHY/INTERMOUNTAIN AAU CROSS COUNTRY CHAMPION/1940/HARRY MANGUS. After the race, Magnus put his shoes back in his pocket, walked out to the highway and hitchhiked back to Laramie, holding the trophy in one hand and an extended thumb in the other.
Mangus went on to become a superb college athlete between stints as an LDS Church missionary and a solider in the Army. He was a three-time conference wrestling champion. He also was the conference champion in the two-mile run and placed third in the national AAU championships.
(Running. Now there's another story. As a high school student, he ran two miles to and from school each day holding onto the tail of his horse, Cactus Kate, because there was no more room on the horse's back, what with his younger siblings getting priority seating.)
Mangus also was a fine boxer. He won the Wyoming-Nebraska Golden Gloves boxing championship and might have boxed in the national championships if they hadn't kicked him out of a qualifying tournament after learning that he had a fake eye.
(There are lots of stories about that glass eye. There were times when he was playing basketball that somebody knocked his eye out of the socket, and it rolled across the floor. The family's favorite story: Once he knocked the eye out in an accident at home and presented himself to the doctor with blood leaking out of the socket, holding the eye in his hand. "I think I've hurt myself," he said.)
If the eye was a handicap, Mangus never acknowledged it. Sometimes he used it to his advantage. In basketball, his rivals couldn't tell which way he was going because his eyes were going in different directions. The rest, he improvised. He memorized the eye test to get overseas duty in the army, although he was eventually caught.
After finishing his college athletic career, Mangus taught school and coached but was always active. At the age of 54, he ran his first marathon and continued to do so annually until he was 70, when he hurt himself playing church basketball. The doctor convinced him it was time to do something more suited to his age, such as bowling and golf, which was fine by Mangus. He had his memories, his stories and his trophies.
Except the one. The Deseret News trophy was still missing, and it had special value to the old man. For years, Mangus' wife Jessie would launch periodic searches to find it. "Every time I'd see his trophies, I'd wonder where it was," she says. The kids blamed each other for losing it. Jessie wondered if it had been sold in a yard sale.
But fate again intervened in Mangus' behalf. Last month Jessie and her daughter Coral were stuck for something to give an 81-year-old man for Christmas and decided to have a replica of the trophy made. "The only thing he really prizes are his trophies, and I remembered that his first trophy was missing," says Coral.
She took a yellowed Deseret News picture of Mangus receiving the trophy to Joe's Trophies in Salt Lake City and showed it to shopkeeper Mary Ferguson. She asked them to have the picture enlarged so she could get a better look at the trophy. Three weeks later they returned, and Ferguson took the enlarged photo to store owner Kerry Milkovich, who was working in the back shop.
Ferguson showed Milkovich the picture and asked if he could make a replica. He said no. Ferguson asked him to reconsider. "This is important to them," she said.
He looked at the picture closer. "I think I've seen this trophy before," he said. "Wait a minute." He climbed into the shop attic, thinking he might have an old trophy similar to the one in the picture. He found one that was close, then looked at the date inscribed on it: 1940. He looked closer and saw the name: Mangus. A few minutes later he returned with the trophy.
"Does this kind of look like it?" he asked.
Ferguson was amazed. Not only did this look like the trophy, it was the trophy. Milkovich hid it behind his back and they returned to the store to show Coral and Jessie. "Is this what you're looking for?" they asked, setting the trophy on the counter.
Coral and Jessie burst into tears. The figure of the runner was broken and the engraving was tarnished black, but it was the trophy, all right. The best guess is that Mangus brought the trophy to the shop to be repaired a couple of decades ago and forgot about it. Milkovich thought the trophy was such a beauty that he hadn't been able to throw it away.
Jessie and Coral presented the trophy to Mangus with a little ceremony on Tuesday. The trophy looked like new again. Milkovich had replaced the figurine with a new one, and Ferguson had polished the plate to a shiny gold. On some pretense, Jessie and Coral lured Mangus to the trophy shop, where four of his six children were hiding, along with other relatives. The old man was too sharp, though. He spotted them and knew something was up. Moments later, Milkovich emerged from the back room holding the trophy.
"This is something," said Mangus. "Especially to see everybody here. I was thinking of (the trophy) the other day. I thought, I'm not too long for this world, so I'm not going to worry about it anymore."
"It's a modern-day miracle, dad," said Coral.
Another one, in the amazing life of Harry Mangus.