Who's the guy with the mustache? His name was Dominic Vadini, and he was the owner of the varsity-style speedskating jacket that I recently wrote about. The photos were provided to me by Dominic's son, Steve Vadini, who I was able to track down thanks to some sensational research by Permanent Record reader Barbara Zimmer.
As you can see, the jacket Dominic was wearing in the top two photos isn't quite the same as the one I ended up buying on eBay, but it's similar -- same color scheme, similar chest patch. Apparently he had a lot of these jackets. (But he sure liked that one hat!)
As you can also see, Dominic was a middle-aged man when these photos were taken. That's one of the surprises that have emerged from this story -- I had assumed that the jacket had belonged to a high school or college student. The trajectory of Dominic's athletic career turns out to have been much more unusual than that of the typical student athlete. I'll have more to say about all of this soon, hopefully in the form of a big feature-length article (maybe with accompanying video). Stay tuned.
Slate update: The next full-length PermaRec article on Slate, which I had expected to run this week, has been delayed due to logistical logjams on Slate's part (grrrr). Should run next week.
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