WATERVILLE — The Maine Sports Legends Hall of Honors will have three inductees from the northern region this fall, all representing different parts of Aroostook County.
Murray Putnam of Oakfield, Kathleen Mazzuchelli of Caribou and Ben Paradis of Fort Kent are this year’s honorees who will be honored Oct. 13 at the Alfond Girls and Boys Club in Waterville. The event begins at 12:30 p.m.
Murray Putnam established himself as an outstanding athlete, educator, coach, assistant principal and athletic director over a period of four decades in the southern Aroostook area. He grew up on a potato and dairy farm 10 miles south of Houlton, with a family of 11 children. Putnam and several of his siblings became educators following in the footsteps of their mother, a teacher for 35 years.
Putnam played basketball and baseball in high school at Ricker Classical Institute. He graduated from Ricker College in 1968 and the University of Southern Maine in 1990 with a master’s degree in administration. He didn’t compete in athletics while he was in college.
Putnam became an elite coach on the baseball diamond for 44 years with an outstanding record of 481 wins and 131 losses.
Sterling Lawrence, the pastor of Bethel Church in Oakfield, remembers his years in the late 1960s playing for Putnam.
“We all learned from wins and losses that good enough isn’t good enough,” Lawrence said. “Excellence was something to go after, especially in the mental game of baseball. Coach helped us through the process of hard work on the playing field to become mature men by having qualities that would serve society well in our future.”
David Gordon, the president of Katahdin Cedar Log Homes, has hired many of Putnam’s players in his business.
“When hiring summer help for my mill, I always felt good about hiring these kids as Murray taught them the skills they needed in real life, not some fantasy world where everyone wins and there is no hard work,” Gordon said.
Putnam’s Southern Aroostook baseball teams captured 10 Eastern Maine championships, five state championships, one state Babe Ruth championship and 11 more in the North Eastern Maine League, which was abolished in 1985.
Putnam began teaching and coaching in 1968 at Oakfield, which was a big baseball community. He started a Pony League for young players. Success soon happened at the high school level and in 1970 Oakfield won the Katahadin Valley League title, its first in 16 years. Schools around consolidated, Southern Aroostook was formed and opened in 1976 with a growing school population as well as a baseball program.
A new diamond was built at the school and Southern Arooostook baseball had a permanent home. A large sign was standing at the complex, the Murray W. Putnam Baseball Field, which was build entirely with local help and named in 1979.
In Ernie Clark’s 2008 article in the Bangor Daily News on Putnam, former Presque Isle boys’ varsity basketball coach Tim Prescott said he played for Putnam in the mid-1970s and noted “the biggest thing I learned from Murray was discipline. I always think he looked at discipline as a positive. I don’t think he thought about what discipline does to kids, but what it does for kids.”
Jason Tarr played on two of Putnam’s state championship teams in the 1980s. “He was strict, and held high expectations, but we knew he was going to be fair if we did what he expected of us and we probably were going to be playing for championships.”
Putnam has received many honors throughout his career, including the Maine Baseball Coaches Association Coach of the Year in 1989. He was inducted into the Maine Baseball Hall of Fame in 2002 and earned a plaque from the National Baseball Coaches Association in 2008 for 40 years of coaching baseball. He was the recipient of the Award of Merit in 2006 from the Maine Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association.
Putnam is a past member of Ricker College board of trustees scholarship committee, is a member of Houlton Lodge of Elks No. 835, where he was former treasurer and served on the Soccer Shoot committee.
In his spare time, Putnam watches sports, rides an ATV and reads books of historical nature.
