Doug Beene, 71, has officiated at the Kansas Relays for 40 years since he started as a volunteer in 1965. Beene attended the Relays for the first time at age 12, shortly after World War II ended, and will officiate for the 41st time this weekend at Memorial Stadium.

Doug Beene looked a little puzzled as he sat down at his kitchen table.

“Where did you get my name?” he asked.

He was wondering why someone would drive all the way out to his house, five miles south of town and another mile up a gravel road, just to talk to him.

Beene, 71, doesn’t view his 40 years of officiating at the Kansas Relays as anything special.

But it is special. Though the athletes have drawn the fans, people like Beene have kept the meet going through the decades.

Beene, a retired computer systems analyst for the Kansas Geological Survey at the University of Kansas, was born in Lawrence in 1934. He remembers attending his first Kansas Relays when he was about 12 years old, soon after World War II ended, with his friend Rod Kanehl, whose father, Ray, was the track and field coach at Kansas.

Coincidentally, Kanehl went on to make sports history of his own when he became a utility player for three years on one of the worst teams in Major League Baseball history, the 1962-64 New York Mets, and hit the franchise’s first-ever grand slam.

A generation later, Beene started taking his youngest of four children, Steve, to the Kansas Relays in the early 1970s.

Steve remembers attending the meet every year from age 6 until he finished high school. He remembers running scores from the finish line to the scorer’s table each year to help his dad.

And, of course, he remembers the races.

“I remember seeing Jim Ryun run, so that was cool,” Steve Beene, 40, said. “The steeplechase was always fun. And the meet always ended with the 4-by-100-meter relay, which was always the funnest race.”

The elder Beene started volunteering at the Kansas Relays in 1965, when he was 31 years old, during Bill Easton’s last year as coach at the University. He said he signed up to officiate after seeing an article in the paper that said the University was looking for volunteers.

Before a meet in one of his first years officiating, Beene recalled how unorganized it was. Officials had been working for hours to make sure the starting order was correct for the next day’s races, but coach Bob Timmons realized that the runners were all assigned to the wrong lanes after most of the officials had gone home.

“My wife says I got back real late that night,” he said, laughing a little.

As he sat at the kitchen table, with his wife Ginny’s old ornamental family plates lining the walls, each with a note on its back saying which of their 10 grandchildren would inherit it, he told another story.

One year, his job was to record results in meet headquarters, which was in a room under the Memorial Stadium stands.

A woman came into the room and asked to borrow a pair of shoes and for a place to sit while she waited for her event.

“I told her, ‘You can sit in here,’ and I went to the KU girls up in the stands and asked for shoes,” he said. “They asked who she was, and I told them her name: Madeline Manning. They said, ‘Madeline Manning?’ Turns out she was an Olympic medalist.”

Over the years, Beene has seen the meet go through several changes. When he started, women’s events were absent and fewer high-profile professional athletes made appearances.

This weekend, he will direct volunteer officials during the meet from the southeast corner of the stands. It’s a job he’s done for the last couple of years, after working several other jobs through the decades, including timing, placing runners at the finish line and recording results.

He said he was looking forward to this year’s meet, especially the new meet format, including the Gold Zone. In the new format, the premier events will take place from 2 to 5 p.m. on Saturday.

“In past years we had the prime events, but they were spread out,” he said. “Back in the days when Jim Ryun was going, we had 20 or 30 thousand people in the stands. I think they’re trying to get back to that, and this is the right way to do it.”

As he led his way out the door and stood with his hands in his pockets, Beene had one last prize to show off.

“Want to see something?” he asked with a booming grin.

He walked to the back of his house, which sits high on top of a hill, and pointed north.

There, framed perfectly by the clouds and a row of trees, was the University, sitting on the horizon on a sunny spring morning.

“That’s one of the main reasons we bought the house,” he said.

And staring at the University, he was smiling and looking forward to his 41st Kansas Relays.

— Edited by Ross Fitch