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Accident forever changed Medford star athlete Durkee's life Ken Durkee, wearing No. 20, was a star on three state champion teams, in baseball, basketball and football. Saturday Apr 29, 2017 at 2:00 AM Apr 29, 2017 at 7:12 PM Greg Stiles Mail Tribune @GregMTBusiness With two state championships secured and a third in sight, it was the best of times for Medford High School's class of 1960. Medford topped Jefferson of Portland, which featured future Heisman Trophy winner Terry Baker and NFL Hall-of-Famer Mel Renfro, for the state football title, 7-6. The Black Tornado then defeated Marshfield, who had 7-foot Olympian Mel Counts, 63-56, in the state basketball final. Ken Durkee was riding the euphoric wave to the hilt. A multiple-sport standout, he had returned a punt for a touchdown to put his team in position to win the football championship. He was the point guard for the basketball team. The triple crown was in sight as the Tornado swept into baseball season, and Durkee anchored the infield at third base. On a frosty April Sunday morning, all that changed. Durkee was one of six young men on Foothill Road en route to a pear orchard off Vilas Road, where they were to fire up smudge pots. Durkee and Reg Breeze, pals since their junior high days at McLoughlin, were in the back seat. "We had been asked to go smudging," Breeze recalls. "It wasn't something we did on a regular basis, but some of the regulars didn't show." Parts of Foothill Road have changed some over the years, but it remains tortuous as it was in 1960. "The kid driving the car was driving way too fast," Breeze says. "We went off the road and rolled over an embankment and the car dropped 20 feet." In an instant, dreams of playing college football or baseball were crushed. Durkee and a passenger in the front seat sustained crippling injuries, becoming quadriplegics. "A lot of people are canonized when they die," Breeze says. "But Ken was one in 100,000, he was an exceptional person in every way — smart, first string on three state championship teams, had a terrific personality, and he had that twinkle in his eye. One minute he was trying to figure out what college to go to and the next thing he wakes up in the hospital (on life support). His life ended, for all practical purposes, at 17, in a split second. I guess that's how fragile life is." The baseball team, which had come up short of a championship a year earlier, dedicated its season to Durkee and went on to secure the triple crown with a 3-1 victory over Parkrose in June. During the next 43 years, Durkee dealt with what-ifs and pain, ups and downs. "I haven't been on the playing field for a long time, but you never forget what it's like to be a competitor," he told the Mail Tribune in a 2000 interview. "I've been knocked down quite a few times, but I'm going to keep fighting until I hear that 10 count." A Mail Tribune clipping from the day of the state football final had Durkee pegged at 145 pounds. "He was probably all of 5-8, but he was the kind of player that everyone did better with him on the team," Breeze says. Durkee provided a memorable moment for all of Medford in the championship game at Portland's Multnomah Stadium the Friday night after Thanksgiving. Dick Ragsdale fielded a Jefferson punt at the Tornado's own 23-yard line and quickly handed the ball to his swifter teammate. "It wasn't a planned handoff,"  Breeze recalls. "We weren't that sophisticated." Durkee cut right and was momentarily hemmed in before Lowell Dean took out three Democrats with one block, then Durkee dashed to the end zone on a 77-yard return. Skip Bennett's conversion run (worth one point in those days) provided the winning margin. "There's no doubt in my mind with his quickness he could have been a defensive back in college," says teammate Jerry Anderson, who had a hand in all three championships. Durkee, who kept his Medford High School letter framed on his wall, went on to earn a degree from the University of Oregon with a 3.78 GPA. For many years, Durkee was a regular on the sidelines at Medford football games, sometimes getting knocked around when the action spilled off the field. He was credited with giving the annual football game between North Medford and South Medford high schools the "Black and Blue Bowl" moniker. Teammates and neighbors dropped by his house a few blocks from Spiegelberg Stadium on Holly Street to encourage their old friend. Breeze recalls the memorial gathering for Durkee, who died Feb. 25, 2003, of pneumonia, at Howard Prairie the following summer. "Forty-three years later, people who knew Ken came from all over the country," he says. "That was incredible. I've never run into anybody like him, and I don't think I ever will." Reach reporter Greg Stiles at 541-776-4463 or by email at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/GregMTBusiness, on Facebook at www.facebook.com/greg.stiles.31.