All Nancy Pride Raley need do is close her eyes – and her little brother is right there.
“I can still picture him,” she said. “He’s playing sandlot ball in Cassville. He’s laughing with his buddies. Everybody loved Duke.”
That was Ronald “Duke” Pride, perhaps the most noteworthy athlete in the history of University High School.
If you don’t know him, you soon will. Because it’s his name that’s set for the christening of a planned baseball and softball complex at his alma mater.
Nancy and her husband, John, also a UHS sports star, recently pledged $1 million to the project in memory of Duke, who died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism in 1970. He was just 25.
That puts the project even closer to its $4 million goal. Visit uhssportscomplex.com for more details about the complex and how you can donate to the cause. You can also learn more about a major fundraising dinner set for Aug. 28.
Meanwhile, Duke was Duke – because his dad, Wes, said he was. The guy had a penchant for nicknames. Nancy was “Duchess,” as a little girl.
“Sure was,” she said. “The Duke and the Duchess. My name never stuck, thank God. But Duke’s did.”
Barely out of toddlerhood and he was introducing himself in a very precise manner, his sister recalled.
“People would say, ‘What’s your name, little boy?’ And he’d say, ‘I’m Ronald Jacob ‘Dukie’ Pride.’ Pretty cute.”
The kid’s got game
After he began playing organized sports, he didn’t need an introduction.
“Well, he was a natural,” Raley said. “He just excelled. He got the athletic gene. Skipped over me.”
He got something else from his parents: An ease with people.
Their aforementioned dad was a genial guy and a rarity in his profession. He was a mining superintendent – whom the miners actually respected and liked.
Nancy knows why.
“It’s that classic ‘good manager’ thing. Dad didn’t ask anyone to do a job that he hadn’t already done himself.”
The Pride patriarch was a young man when he went into the mines.
He worked his way up from underground, as it were.
His first job was a back-breaker. He shoveled coal from the conveyor belt that was always moving, and always laden with West Virginia’s chief export.
He never turned down a shift or an assignment.
Their mom, Martha Ann Zlotnikoff Pride, was patient and kind.
She doted on her kids, Raley said, and she taught them to be humble and down-to-earth – especially since they had it better than most.
The Pride matriarch was the daughter of Russian immigrants, and she didn’t speak English until she went to elementary school. She remained fluent in the language of her parents’ homeland, her daughter said.
Nothing but net
At UHS, Nancy, who was a year-and-a-half older than her brother, was a cheerleader.
Duke was three-sport star in football, basketball and baseball for the Hawks.
Both siblings got good grades.
Like his dad, Duke was also a bit of an anomaly. He was that jock who was nice to everyone in the hallway – even the kids who weren’t traditionally cool.
With the passage of the years, Nancy can’t remember the team UHS played in the game that cemented Duke’s basketball legend.
“I was at WVU at the time,” said Raley, who earned an education degree there.
“It was an away game,” she said. “I happened to be home when he got back.”
So, she asked, did you guys win?
“Yeah, we did.”
“How many points did you score?”
“I don’t know. It might have been 54, maybe.”
“Duke, you did not score 54 points. You’re lying.”
Her little brother laughed.
“No, really I did. Honest.”
She didn’t fully believe him until she read the paper the next day.
He netted 48 points that next game.
Duke, who graduated in 1963, enrolled at WVU that fall as an education major. The school in Morgantown didn’t recruit him for sports.
“He decided to try out as a walk-on in basketball,” Raley remembered. “He was the last player cut.”
After that rare setback, he regrouped a bit.
He stepped away from school and joined the military. Vietnam was picking up steam, but Duke was spared a deployment to Southeast Asia.
He rode out his hitch in Germany, instead.
Home team
Heidi Metheny loves the story of the Pride family, just as much as she appreciates their gift for the sports complex proposal she and her husband, Gregg, helped launched a couple of years back.
After all, Metheny said, participating in sports can also enrich a kid’s academic life – or, the deal can at least be woven into the school experience of it all, letter or not.
“I get emotional just thinking about the Raleys and their gift,” she said.
“That family has such a generosity of resources and spirit. Because of them, we’re $800,000 away from our goal. This can be real.”
She also likes that it’s a real West Virginia family putting the finish line in such close site.
John Raley’s job in retail management took he and Nancy to locales from Ohio to Texas, but when it was time to really raise their kids, they came back home.
Duke did, too.
After the military, he enrolled as an education major at nearby Fairmont State University, with a goal to become a high school civics teacher.
Forever scorecard
It was the day before Thanksgivng, Nov. 25, 1970.
Duke, who was doing his student-teaching at tiny Fairview High in outlying Marion County, was looking forward to the holidays and the degree that would put him in the front of his own classroom.
Somebody broke out a football and sides were chosen for a game of touch.
Then, he was gone.
Just like that.
Besides Nancy and his parents, he left a wife, Sharon, and young daughter, Deena, both of whom still live in the University City.
And, something else, his sister said, which moves her to this day.
“His kids at Fairview wrote letters to us after he died. That was his legacy. He would have been a great teacher.”
